We were saying goodbye at my door. We’d had one of our arguments- not the more serious kind that bores a trench so deep between us that I don’t even try to reach over it, and he can’t for he is too occupied with the pain he later describes to me that he feels in my absence, the inability to grasp my words and enter my thoughts (‘i just love you’ he says, ‘i miss you’) causes him to hurt all over, and no matter how many drugs he takes and new friends he makes for one night alone, never a fling or romantic dalliance but only a drunk and desperate attempt to make a connection and feel liked, feel loved. I understand it all, everything he does, even if it’s harmful or exceeds the breadth of my imagination, in which case I usually find myself in a storm of tears until he reassures me there will be no harm done. I understand and even though my visceral responses to some of his anecdotes from the past or contemplations of the present suggest that my morals stand so strongly against them; despite the fact that I feel such actions, negotiations, schemes and pure means of survival are reprehensible, I understand why he has done what he has done. I don’t know the extent to which he is involved in that world of violence and cold blood, all in pursuit of money and for every individual involved, perhaps, something else such as an ongoing need for vengeance that can’t be vanquished because the object of their revenge is someone they cannot reach, leaving them only to try and satisfy their need for it through exacting it on strangers; or some other need, for respect, for power, for the thrill of it, for the desire to live on the very edge of being human and being another thing entirely. That other thing is either dead to the world without anything to show it love and therefore no way of feeling love at all, or it is a monster who stands above humanity because it has no capacity to love. The parts of its brain implicated in loving of any kind, and the network that allows people to see and feel the pain of others, to experience guilt, to struggle with conscience, to refrain from inflicting pain- that part, long deteriorated, and at this level of damage, the monster can feel no connection to a human, though it was probably human once.
No, he is no monster. Even in his monstrous past, he was human, feeling pain almost perpetually. Drinking his guilt into oblivion. Suffering behind bars. Traumatised by the ways the world he grew up hating threw hatred back at him, even threw evil- abuse, lies that confused and misdirected him, or forms of terrorism- the cellmate who woke him at night with a razor blade to his throat. He still has dreams about that cell. His old girlfriend told me he would wake up violent and yelling at her and with threats meant for this someone else. I have seen him cry in his sleep.
I understand because of what the world turned him into. I understand that parts of him are still steeped in what he came to embody. I also feel from him the deep-seated hatred of the world and everything in it, rotting at his core. But I feel it is unravelling as he is surprised by acts of kindness, when he realise people will accept and not turn away from him, when he finds to his immense shock that he can trust somebody, for that’s one thing he’d never been able to do. He trusts me, he says, nobody else, and that is why our arguments can be so painful for him I won’t ever leave him behind, and there’s a resolution after every argument, but he believes in those times he can’t reach out for me and find me there for him with a smile and open door that I must be harbouring hate or I shall never be his friend again.
But we’d resolved this argument almost as rapidly as it had fired up, and it’s usually me who ignites the match. In something he says, or a repeated discrimination I disagree with, or due to the contradictions in his convictions that I shouldn’t get angry about but confuse me, and I am upset when he tells me to put it to rest immediately (a sort of shut up) or when he won’t explain the truth behind what he says. Because he tries to forge an armour around him that reflects the importance of truth. He is impenetrable because he speaks the truth, he hates lies, he only knows the truth. This is of course an illusory armour and he is, of course, not protected when he gets caught in his own lies, lies to himself, or tells them, as we all do. As I said before, he is human, he is not a monster. But with his ideals of how he wants the world to see him breaking down when he blunders over matters of honesty, I feel myself sparked to challenge him for the truth. The arguments often start there. We haven’t had many, we’ve had about three quite big ones that were less argumentative and more silence and distance. He explains this is torture. I tell him he makes me feel guilty by implying I torture him in this way, for I never would want to hurt him. I am just for some reason— since I was about 21 I think I have been— strongly averse to being witness to, bing asked to entertain, or personal experiences of self-deception. The ways we delude ourselves are ingenious. They are also dangerous. If I see it in him, I feel close enough now to point it out, which often ends in conflict, which often ends in his slow contemplation and realisation of what I’d alerted him to. Though I hate arguments, especially with him because he finds it hard to let go of the memories they seem to leave him with, the invisible scars (but the kind that fade, unlike the others that criss-cross every inch of his body that will never go away), these conflicts have somehow changed something about his way of thinking. He challenges himself, he doubts his own convictions, and he said to me fairly recently that due to my presence in his life his view of humankind had actually been altered, and I believed him, and it was a moment I can’t describe because it existed only between us- two very different people who are connected in so many ways that cannot be made with other people.
So we stood at my doorway, and James waved goodbye from the sofa, and I said goodbye, come back soon, and he put his arm around my shoulders, squeezed me tightly and kissed the top of my head.
I can’t put into words what happened next. It wasn’t a vision or a memory. It wasn’t anything tangible either like a pain or a somatic marker. All I can offer is a metaphor, or a picture i’ve constructed in my mind to somehow communicate what I experienced as I closed the door behind him after that hug and immediately began to cry. Imagine a big empty space, the kind that exists in a person, an absence of something that can be filled up with other things, but will always feel something like that cup that was a touch too empty. Imagine a chasm in the ground. The word ‘Daddy’ echoing from inside the place where it’s dark.
His reassuring shoulder squeeze, his paternal loving kiss where my hair parts at the crown of my head, the tears in his eyes, and the gentle knowing that everything was going to be okay between us even when it wasn’t. I felt my father there. The stranger I never liked and certainly never loved. Who had never given me a hug with a squeeze that was reassuring. Who never gave an impromptu kiss because his affections were calculations, or impulses. The ones I was given in that moment of goodbye were heartfelt in their entirety, they were honest, they were what he did when the meaning was love, and protectiveness, and the tenderness felt towards something or someone precious, irreplaceable, someone or something you have come to need and love, in equal measures or not, but that isn’t important.
I climbed into James’ lap and I cried on his t-shirt for a while and I didn’t understand it or rather, I didn’t know how to vocalise it, or if I could vocalise it, or if I even wanted to. Because my father isn’t a part of my life and that has been a blessing not a loss. Eventually I said that I’d felt my father. I realise in retrospect that I hadn’t felt my father in my friend, but I’d been reminded of everything I had never had from a father, and to have it then, for one moment, was too overwhelming for me to explain. Even this explanation falls far from being a clarified, comprehensible explanation.
But how can you explain a feeling you have for a moment that you have never had before, and cannot compare to any other feeling or thought or event; something that is so new that you don’t have the language to give it an explanation, as you’ve never needed to use that language before.
How does one describe a feeling like that? Poetry can’t even do it for me and I can’t write the words that make sense of it because they never make sense. I will give up trying to explain it. I just will always remember it, and try to keep reassuring myself I am not damaged by this chasm being there, that I have and always have had enough. Because I do believe that. I just for a moment saw the other side of that.
I’m going to call my friend today to ask him to be my counter-signatory for my passport application. He’d be very happy to do that, I think, and when I get my passport he’s taking me to Ireland where my family live. He says that I put his family back together. Though his mother is still distant, I found her and was there during their first conversation in years. I communicate with her through emails and ask about her life. He is afraid, I think, and has every reason to be. I will protect him from any more disappointments as far as I can. He says that among his family in Ireland I am famous. I tell him often that to be famous is my worst nightmare (or one of my many terrible nightmares), but I know he needs me there to reunite with them, and I am happy to be there for him when it happens.
