I forget.

I forget things very easily these days. I forget meetings, I forget birthdays and I forget to call my relatives to ask them how they have been. All these memory lapses make me feel like a lesser being, surviving at the edge of functionality. I will go ahead and admit it – I’m ashamed. Every day, I wake up at exactly 7:25, I get dressed and head towards the bus stop. On my way there, I hope that nobody will be waiting for the bus. I feel anxious about the random, unplanned human encounters, particularly if they occur before breakfast. I get there, not a soul in sight. Phew! I put my big headphones on and I listen to songs in the hope that they will get me through the day. Sometimes, or to be totally fair, most days these days, I need to put in a lot of effort to cheer myself up. The bus is late, but the infrequency is a frequent occurrence. The bad thoughts start pouring in my head and all the girl-power Beyonce songs cannot stop them. Here we go again, the anxiety starts growing and taking over my body like an invisible layer. I’ve become better in dealing with it. I rewind. Breathe deeply. ‘There is nothing to worry about, nothing at all’. It worked.  I successfully avoided a panic attack. I have to look around me to keep the momentum of my victory going. It seems like the street, the trees, the sun all agree with me. It is a glorious day outside. I hadn’t noticed how many trees are in bloom, I hadn’t heard so many birds chirping at once and I hadn’t even smelt the beginning of the spring.  It was so beautiful I almost forgot about my issues for a moment. The bus is still nowhere in sight. I look at my phone to check the time for the tenth time and then I see the date. The 17^th of April. Today, my dad would have been 60 years old. Now everything makes sense – the sun, the birds, the blossoming trees. I whisper a ‘happy birthday’ as my bus comes. I wish I didn’t forget birthdays. ‘I forget things very easily these days.’ 

Inward

Anxiety and loneliness walked beside me like two faithful rabid dogs that every once in a while would bite my hand just to remind me that they are there. People ignorant enough to think that they were not alone and that they had friends that cared about them made me green with envy. I also envied people who were always surprised by the bad things that happened in their lives, like that moment was some unexpected, unwanted twist in their otherwise sunny, flower-clad path in life. It seemed that I was not meant for the odd bad surprise in life, or for being caught unaware; instead I was destined for the more sophisticated torture of always expecting bad things to happen. But still, on the whole, anxiety probably helps more than it hinders; it makes you so insecure and remote and guilty that ultimately you end up putting that much more effort into whatever it is that you do. At least that's how my mind worked. And because it is usually the case that anxious people think they are doing much worse than they actually are, the extra guilt-ridden effort seemed to make them even better.

Loneliness, on the other hand, was a far more overbearing companion. I never felt antisocial, or difficult. I just found it very difficult to find people that I respected rather than just liked. I was sick of just liking people; I would have probably even told you at that point in my life that liking someone is a more dull kind of affinity than indifference. Ultimately I understood why he had to go. I also was honest enough to see why I should stay behind. To abandon my research would have been abandoning not the thing I'm necessarily best at, but more so the thing that I had done for the longest time, the one constant in my life. Seen as in my theory I was so committed to self-respect and authenticity, to follow somebody to Vietnam would have been like cutting an arm. So, instead I trained my mind to travel there. I hanged a map of the world right beside my bed so that it would be the first thing I saw in the morning and the last one when I fell asleep. I would make my eyes go from London to Saigon, back and forth, crossing Europe and Asia and measuring the length of that imaginary line. At the peak of my insomnia, I would stare so hard at the water exposed contour of the country that, when I finally closed my eyes, a Vietnam-shaped colorful spot would be indented on my retina.

Spleen.

A very ignorant, angsty part of me wanted it to be depression. Because at least then I would know for sure that I was malfunctioning in determinate and conformist way. But it often seemed that what I was suffering from was a lot more subtle, imperceptible to others than it was to me. I would walk around with a  heart as heavy as a boulder for months and people would think that everything was dandy in my life. But I knew that it wasn't depression or bipolarity or any of the other illnesses; that would have made things too easy for me. It was this sort of spleen that symbolist poets would spend their lives writing about, a boredom so deep and monotonous that it consumed me relentlessly but ever so slightly, so that only the diseased would ever know of its presence. And whenever I would tell my friends or parents I was bored, they would start telling me of all the things that I could do with my time; I could work, or read, or go see a movie. Others would just say that intelligent people are never bored or alone but everybody knows that is bullshit reverse pop psychology. What was more worrying is that it was starting to become ever so clear that I had dragged that boredom after me for my entire life and that I couldn't actually remember a moment when it had felt differently. Don't get me wrong, sure I felt what you might call happiness, or joy or excitement, but always superimposed upon the uninterrupted, monotonous humming of my boredom. And then I started to wonder whether I was ever happy at all; was there a time, before what I can remember, before I was even conscious when this plague did not exist? Even more importantly, does everybody feel the same but some of us are just better at ignoring it or have too many distractions and not enough self-reflection? I would feel really fucking special if it was just me and the symbolist poets; so damn special and somber that, in my dreams, I would chat about how bored I am to Baudelaire over shots of absinthe. But after a very short-lived adolescence, I knew for sure I wasn't. There is absolutely nothing special about me, and I find it totally nauseating that I have to pretend there is, that I have to compete and be praised for my work and celebrate my victories. I was, to my mind, failing at being somebody, and not being brave enough to be a nobody. So, in the end I felt, more than anything, that I was trapped between my boredom and my cowardice.

Moments part 1

We used to spend those summer nights in Soho, in small, obscure Thai restaurants, lit solely by straw coloured candles, drinking rice wine and eating coconut ice cream. Then there were the nights we would go in less populated areas of London, walk down poorly lit alleyways to get to this Turkish place, something in between a den and a beer garden, increasingly often to the excitement of the large moustache-wearing owner. He would take us to his rooftop terrace, which was dimly lit by a few colourful glass lamps, and contained the most curious, but aesthetically pleasing assortment of objects. There were about seven large bean bags, circled around a tall shisha which was already being prepared, many chests made of dark wood, piles of newspapers from the 70s and a reasonably impressive collection of books. As soon as we sat down, always on the same spots, the Turk would rush down, as much as his weight would allow him, only to come back with a tray of steaming hot Turkish coffee served in these impossibly delicate little cups. I always had found it amusing how that tiny white ceramic object looked in the large hairy hands of the Turk. I think the first time he ever handed me one of those delicate cups he looked at me and said my eyes had the color of the coffee.