I live here too. That’s a fact. However, a look around my surroundings fills me with discomfort, quite literally as I find not a single space to perch and do some work either in my room which overflows with beaded jewellery bought in Mexico but never worn (I may lose one of these earrings, and then I’d be left with just one, you know, and then…what?), stacks of vintage clothes in too small a size, piles and piles of books ranging from French classics which I would have the luxury to read in the language of Baudelaire but will get around to do, someday I’m sure….and paper, paper, paper everywhere: receipts, bank statements, identity documents, attempts a journaling over dozens of otherwise blank notebooks where I’d attacked a few pages in the frenzied delirium of wanting to spill the beans there and then and reflect upon my life. In this chaos coated in cat hair, I cannot hear myself think and sometimes ‘get tough’ on myself, clearing a cabinet or corner, only to feel overwhelmed by the minuscule dent I have made in the mountain of things towering over me. I have sometimes been able to ignore my surrounding hoard and decided to sit down on my bed, pushing away the many meditation and recovery books and other inspirational materials aimed at lifting me out of the electrifying daily terrors I wake up to.
Then I remember that experts tell you never to do any work in your room when you struggle with sleep, as I do. Your bed should be reserved for sleep, light reading before sleep or sex (you said what???)
I take myself to the lounge where I imagine I could settle down at either the big dinner table or on the sofa, but then, I am caught up in an inferno of housewifey guilt as I can see from the corner of my eye, washing that needs folding (or worse: hanging), dirty plates from pasta and sauce 3 days ago and piles and piles of boxes containing mountains of papers: bills from 2003, my daughters’ school reports from 12 years ago, clothes, games we’ll never play and deceased computers still held onto for the treasured photos and files they may still contain. There are craft projects never started, musical instruments never played, as the concept of time and space has always been rather painful to me. I’m not going to blame where I am for my upbringing in an overcrowded one bed flat in Paris but it certainly didn’t help me in feeling that time and space where mine to take as I wish. I have become painfully aware, looking around my living room in the sober light of reality that I have lived in survival for years, not processing anything, just dumping issues in a corner and putting out wild fires all around me. It’s like waking up to the identity of a bag lady who’s been on a pilgrimage of shame and loneliness for years. I pray and meditate before opening a bag, like a museum piece, it contains a various assortment of clues as to what kind of a day this had been, a scrunched up receipt from Iceland, an old travel card, a drawing from my now 23 year old daughter then in reception, crumbs, a few pennies, a misplaced lipstick, an old (unused of course-what are you like….) tampon. These relics testify to the effective living of a life but I have no recollection of such a life. All I remember is holding my breath and waking up years later, older, fatter, with young ladies as daughters instead of the little girls I once had. I suspect that I had been existing rather than living and that would explain the absence of a good chair.
