Friendship – Page 3 – EDEN by FREI

{Contentment}

If everything were perfect, as it is, how much would we crave disturbance?

The variants that made matter congeal. The idiom that expresses just what needs to be said. The waves within waveforms that ripple through time.

There are connections that never make sense, but they make me feel that I am a part of something. No one knows what. The friend of my nephew who is so gentle, so unassuming and yet so lovely. His exquisite taste. His mild and agreeable manner. His beautiful face. His warm and unfussy friendship. His ease that isn’t untroubled but that knows how to hold on to the core. His generous smile. His diligent gestures as he cooks us a meal that tastes like a dish for the gods. The faintly-haired legs that end in two so shapely feet. I could be here. This presence is one I could glow in forever. I’m sure.

Will ever I be able to find this and know that I have found it?

< 4 Maxl (Still Here) 5 Surrender >

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4 Maxl (Still Here)

I wake up to a horrible dream. It’s so horrible I don’t want to think about it, it could well be the second most horrible dream I’ve ever had, and I take issue with horribleness, so I go back to sleep once again and I don’t continue to dream, which I’m glad on.

Maxl knocks on the door and wakes me up; I’m already half awake but that means I’m also half asleep and I’m hugging a pillow for comfort. He asks if I’m all right; I am puzzled: he’s never been this concerned about me before. He says he’s concerned about me.

Maybe I made horrible noises in my horrible dream, it’s possible. I blink at him and say, ‘yes,’ and I’m about to go back to sleep once again; he says ‘it’s nearly half two,’ which in German means half one but means nothing to me at the moment because they’ve put the clocks forward last night and I don’t do mornings at the best of times.

Maxl rustles about in my room while I drift back off to sleep. He keeps much of his stuff in my room, so it’s a bit like having a live-in partner, without the partner, it’s a bit like a lose-lose situation: the worst of both worlds. The good thing I suppose: we don’t argue. Though he moans at me.

Maxl moans at me about England. For England: every day he comes back from college or from the bank or from the tube or from the post office or from the supermarket or from the park or from the cafe or from the pub or from the pavement, moaning at me. Every day.

He is German, so he’s used to hyper-efficiency; he also lives in Berlin when he’s not here, so he’s used to an agreeable level of anarchic socialism. Objectively, I agree with most of what he complains about, but the complaining itself bugs me, every day, about everything.

That and the fact that he moans at me in German: he makes it sound as if I were responsible. Maybe I am responsible. Maybe my quiet acquiescence to all things British, to all things English, to all things London, has made me complicit in bringing about a college that charges an arm and a leg but that has embarrassingly poor facilities and a bunch of students who, instead of standing up for their ideas and their rights and their freedoms, do everything they’re told, as they’re told, and a bank that charges an arm and a leg in fees and makes opening a bank account as much of a deal as if you were asking the Emperor of China for a slice of Tibet, and a tube that charges you an arm and a leg but shuts down for weekends at a time and that runs late because one of their drivers has a bout of the sniffles and that goes on strike at the whiff of a comma in a staff manual being changed and that stops running at midnight when half the population is still about town enjoying themselves, and a post office that I can’t think of what they might be doing wrong off the top of my head but I can easily imagine that in Germany they run their post offices in a way that is altogether more, well, German, and a supermarket that installs machines that talk at you instead of employing people who serve you, and a park that is actually pretty much perfect if you ask me but that if you’re German you’ll probably nevertheless find something to moan about, and the cafe that I can’t I’m losing my will to live…

The pubs close too early, I know, and the trains are a nightmare, get over it, it’s London, this, innit.

I can’t be doing with this much moaning, and I realise that much as I love him, if Maxl were my husband I would have to ask him for a divorce now. That would be terrible. Fortunately he’s only a very good friend, and I can love him even though he moans at me because I know I don’t have to own any of this beyond the level to which I just have to own my share of this culture that so irks him. Better still, much as I love Berlin—and I love Berlin, and I always, always still keep a metaphorical suitcase there—I don’t have to move to Berlin with him just because he doesn’t like London. I actually think he quite likes London, which also makes me think that maybe moaning is just a default state of his, and so he maybe also moans about Berlin! At his girlfriend! (Phew!)

I don’t know, and I don’t want to speculate because I’m troubled by my horrible dream, which I don’t want to think about, and I also don’t want to seem ungrateful or ungracious or ungenerous. I don’t want to seem or to feel un-anything. I love Maxl (I’ve changed his name here, by the way, because I don’t want to get him into trouble, nor do I want him to think that I don’t love him just because he moaned at me), and I am grateful to him for being a good, loyal friend, and I graciously accept the gift of insight that even someone you love can get on your nerves to the point where you are quite prepared to wrestle them to the ground and slap them with a very wet fish, and I want to retain and hold on to the generosity of spirit that says live and let live, love and let love, be and let be. And I realise I am actually moaning about somebody moaning at me. Which is a little ironic. And I like little ironies. Though I still don’t like moaning. Which I suppose makes it doubly ironic… And the whole experience reminds me acutely why I so much enjoy being single.

I feel tempted to tell George about this, but obviously I don’t because I don’t want to prejudice him against Maxl or against me. And I certainly don’t want to tell him about the horrible dream, which he’d be bound to want to know more about, the way I know George…

< 3 Chaos {Contentment} >

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2 Memories of the Present: Hangover

There is a connection; the connection may well be the pattern. I did this back then, I do this right now; I will be doing this in two years’ time, most likely in ten, maybe even in twenty. I understand it, I can put reason to it, but I can’t make any sense of it, because reason doesn’t really come into it.

I have to sometimes save myself from myself, but more often than not the universe protects me from what I want. If the universe and my subconscious were in tune with each other, then that would explain a lot, even if my conscious still struggles. And it still struggles. I think. And I think sometimes I am my own worst enemy, because I think matters through; I most likely overthink them.

My sitting here now may well be a case in point: I should probably just get drunk with myself on cocktails and not care one jot why I am here now reminding myself of my incapacity to fruitfully fall in love.

Even the idea of fruitfully falling in love sounds like a great misunderstanding. Of myself, by myself. Of other people. Namely the people I somehow find myself falling ‘in love’ with. I wouldn’t know the first thing about what that would actually entail. But I know more or less what it wouldn’t.

I’m reminded of something that is happening simultaneously, even as I’m talking to George, right now; although of course it isn’t, it will have happened either just before or just after, or a little earlier or a little later, but at this moment it might as well be happening right now for the presence it has, the way it imposes itself: I wake up surrounded by paint pots – pots of paint small and large, some tin, some plastic, plus white spirit.

My head aches like Alaska, I open my eyes and close them again and open them once more and then close them again. I hear the voice of my friend who is staying with me talk to his girlfriend on Skype. His side of the conversation goes, ‘uhm… yah… – … – …yoah… – … – …hmmmyoh.’ He’s German, more specifically, Bavarian. He may be the first Bavarian I have ever fancied. I used to go much more for lean, lanky tall men, and while I still have a residual primal propensity towards tall people quite generally, I was here for the first time smitten with somebody of a more stoically solid build.

I listen with my eyes closed, though I try not to hear. I used to think that his girlfriend was the most boring person alive, but that may well have been just the tint of jealousy. I don’t like the idea of being jealous any more than I like the idea of being angry or ungenerous, but since he’s been staying with me, I’ve realised that my friend—whom I used to have a very soft spot for and whom I continue to hold in a great deal of affection and high professional admiration—when he feels like it (my in this moment murky mind wants to say: when he’s under her spell), can be almost as boring as her, even though his name doesn’t suggest it; his name suggests mischief and a boyish irreverence and a sense of adventure and a laugh and a roll in the hay and an ice cream too many and a drink on top, and calling on Freddie at two in the morning quite tipsy, and an eagerness to discover. None of which is currently much on display, but we did once call on Freddie at two in the morning after a party, as Freddie happened to live on the way home, in Berlin. That was fun. (The girlfriend wasn’t amused…)

Maxl. He sleeps a hell of a lot. Maybe he’s depressed. Or maybe his girlfriend tires him out. She is very hard work, I realise. He sleeps more than I think he’s awake, and sometimes he’s asleep when awake, and even when he’s awake he often might as well be asleep. He’s been here for five months now and he still doesn’t speak English. That puzzles me. I must be hungry and hungover. Hence, surely, my state of mind which, to my own baffled unease, seems to signal malfunction: I’ve never known myself so discomfited by a person I love.

My brain hurts.

One of the paint pots has leaked pinkish paint onto my pillow, it looks oddly svelte. There is no better cure for an infatuation with someone than to have them stay at your flat for a while. I used to think he was the one, and I came close to telling him so. I certainly told him his girlfriend was boring. I don’t regret that, it was true. Right now I wish myself buried under twelve thousand pebbles. Not dead, just buried. The pebbles would soothe me and ward off the ‘yahem… – … – och – … – nyah’ litany of… what exactly? I keep my eyes closed and try to drift off. It’s not easy…

< 1 Juice {Petals} >

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6 Descending, Temporarily, Into the Unrequired Sludge of Unrequited (at Least to Reciprocal Level) Affection, Again

This happens so regularly, so predictably, I should be inured to it.

I am not.

As if he’d read my mind, the man who doesn’t need to shave, on our second meeting, wears the tiniest hint of stubble. He has spent the night in Peckham, but does not volunteer any more details about why or with whom. My impression is that it was a simple case of crashing at a mate’s house, but that impression may just be wrong. I don’t feel I know him well enough to enquire about this, or the number of days he hasn’t shaved, so I can’t tell whether this is just the result of one night’s morning’s not shaving, or whether it is in fact the protrusion of several days. Faint though it is, it nevertheless intrigues me because it comes up so different to the soft light blond tuft that sits off the lower side of his jaw bone and the two or three long hairs that sprout from his little mole near the back of his cheek. The ‘stubble’, such as it is, shows up in short little thick pins, which compared to the rest of his head appear black.

We sit opposite each other, discussing comedy, I believe, though my mind is only half on it. The other half of my mind—my conscious mind, we’re always talking about, I have far less of a hold, if any, on my subconscious mind, if that isn’t plainly stating the obvious, which plainly it is—is divided into roughly four areas of attention, each approximately equal in measure: one quarter takes in the astonishing, familiar, but nevertheless new-from-this-angle scenery, on The Dove’s terrace in Hammersmith, with Turner clouds in the sky and rowers already back on the river; another quarter takes in the mild tea taste of the light ale my fellow drinker has bought for our second round and that he’d described, after the first sip, as “undeniably unusual but not altogether unpleasant;” a third quarter has registered that the Turner clouds have now once more wholly obscured the sun and I can take off my sunglasses again which I do think is kinder on the person sitting opposite; and the fourth quarter is taking in the person sitting opposite, thinking: you are exactly the kind I would fall in love with, but I won’t, except that I will, and if truth be told—and it be!—I already am. Falling. ‘Falling’ is perhaps not the right word: sinking, more like. Slowly, as into quicksand. A calamitous, and thrilling, degrounding, inexorably (or is that just a cliché), into… love?

Maybe not, maybe that would be not only insane—as well as a further profound misapprehension of the heart and the mind and the soul—but most inexcusably a distortion of the truth; and truth, we have already exclaimed, be told! What then, if not love? A glow of untenable, unsustainable, inexplicable, unwarranted, but oh in life indispensable warmth that says: I like you. More than makes any sense. It will pass. It will solidify, the ground. Mush will turn into dependable clay, on which to build.

There will be friendship and love there will be friendship and love, and the two will and will not be the same.

Far be it from me to claim that I can’t say I’m not entirely impartial to the occasional quadruple negative…

< 5 Youth {Meander} >

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Jupiter

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EDEN was originally published in random order. Starting 1st August 2018 it is being reposted in sequence. To follow it, choose from the subscribe options in the lefthand panel (from a laptop) or in the drop-down menu (from a mobile device).