Withholding

The person I've been closest to for the best part of my life happens to be my cousin. We've gone through varying degrees of closeness since we we up and right now we seem to be inching our way back towards something like it was when we were still at uni and in constant contact with each other. It's a funny relationship in many ways, though. The politics of the family mean that there are some things we just don't talk about. Largely our own fault, of course. The best way to deflect quests about your own life is to volunteer information about the life of someone else, and who else's life did we know so intimately growing up? The number of times the family grape vine worked against the pair of us and our tattling ways is beyond counting. The upshot is that while we are close and consider each other almost as sisters, there are enormous gaping holes in our knowledge of each other now. I've been trying to bridge this lately, feeling the need of a confidant who knows the whole back story, who I can use short hand to fill in. Someone that I know will be a sympathetic ear for all that we are hugely different people. But I'm stuck with the knowledge that there's a good chance anything I tell her will go to her mother, our grandmother, and then my mother, by which stage it will have been garbled and blown out of all proportn. But I need to talk to someone, some girl friend, and right now L is caught up in her own world of longing so she's off the list, and I don't have that many others who can offer the same support. The penalty for letting go of all of my university friends almost as soon as I left uni, I guess, having already jettisoned all bar one of my school friends. But I want to talk to someone about my life, and where it is headed. About hopes, dreams, longings, and unfulfilled planning. I want to vent the frustrations of being stubbornly single, to have a shoulder to lean on, someone who has seen me emotional, and someone who brings a different perspective to the table. As a married mother, Cuz certainly does that. We are very different, the pair of us, but there is a strong bond there all the same. We seem to have switched roles over the years. Where once I was the loud, confident one, she now plays that part while I'm the quieter of the two. We can stil make each other cry with laughter, though, can raise a giggle with just a look, and have a long list of short hand jokes, triggered by anything from a nod, to a phrase, to a raised eyebrow. I admit I let the friendship drift when she got married and had a baby. I was insanely jealous of her for having the things that I always wanted, always felt entitled to. Ad I want to talk to her now at I'm starting to consider the idea that I might have neither in my future. It's a selfish need, I know, but I also know that she needs adult company, stuck at home all day with a baby not yet one and a husband who works all hours and comes home exhausted. Right now, we need each other as much as ever. If only we knew that we could trust the silence of the other...

Story of my life

Somehow today I've come to be thinking about speeches at birthday parties and weddings. Perhaps because of the movie that was on when I got home from dinner out. At the end of The Wedding Date, Debra Messing gives a singularly uninspired speech. "There's nobody who knows how to love my baby sister like you do. Be good to each other." Or words to that effect, at any rate. It made me tank back to the last time there was any chance of someone making a speech about me. Someone who at least should have known me really well. It was probably my 21st. There have been occasional speechifying moments since then, but nothing nearly as major. I avoided the massive party that usually goes with that birthday. I was the last of my friends to reach the milestone and the thought of combining hard drinking friends with my teetotal family was something I was not prepared to confront. But I was also concerned about the speeches. I was secretly glad that there weren't too many stories to be told about me that could in any way embarrass me. I loved the idea that my life was so private it was known to only me. Of course, my ideas on this have changed now. I think of the lack of friends able to tell stories about me and wonder why I've spent a lifetime keeping people at bay, what I did with my friends that they would have no stories about me. One of my oldest friends was trying to come up with stories about me not that long ago, someone I've known for almost 20 years now, and she came up blank. Or she claimed to. And we've shared a lot in that time. I have countless stories about her. So is it that I haven't lived? That I've spent my entire life on the fringes? That I'm simply not memorable? To tell the truth, if any of these theories are true, I'm horrified. I know my life hasn't exactly been the stuff that dreams are made of. But I don't want it to be so unremarkable that even the people who have shared it with me don't remember my part in it. There is another theory for why people don't tell stories about me, though. And I think I'm going to stick with this one. As CC Bloom tells Hilary in Beaches, "My memory is long, very long." I remember all of their stories, even the ones they would rather I didn't share. And I have a better capacity for alcohol than most of them, which only helps the memories. I still hold out hope that my memory bank of retaliatory ammunition is all that keeps the stories back, not that there are none to tell. Dear god, let that be the reason...

The road more travelled

It's been hard to avoid a sense of being left behind lately. Everyone seems to be sorted out, whether it's in relation to their careers, their finances, their relationships, or their families. Everyone, that is, except me, stuck in a place where I feel that I've never completely grown up.

Of course, there are advantages to not growing up. You can get away with star fishing in a massive bed, because you're not sharing it with anyone. You can spend your time however you want to; if there's a TV show you want to watch, the only thing that might stop you is another equally appealing show being on at the same time. Your sleep is undisturbed, and you never have to fight for the bathroom. You owe nothing to anybody, unless of course you've borrowed it first. If you want to take off to the other side of the world, the only thing stopping you is your bank balance. Yes, there are definite good points.

But the bad seems to be out weighing the good recently. In my family, I still feel like the little kid. I'm the only one left who is not partnered up, one of the only two without children and a marriage. Even my younger cousins are now all married. My younger sister-in-law is due to pop out her second child sometime in the next couple of weeks; the cousin a year younger than me is not far behind her with her first. My boss earns twice the cash that I do, owns two houses and has a partner that she is planning a family with; she's three years older than me. My closest friends either own homes or are looking to buy. They are in jobs that they enjoy, and they're well paid. Many of them are also in relationships.

And then there's me.

I'm single, with no prospects on the horizon. I am extremely badly paid in a job that, on a good day, I tolerate but never love. I have no idea what to do with my life, and have been drifting along without hope of improvement for years now, dabbling around the edges of the problems but too chicken to actually do something that will decide one way or another for me. I tried living on my own, and found that I could barely keep my nose above the financial waters, so had to go back to sharing a house. Although I am older than at least half of my female relatives, I do not have a family of my own; wanting does not bring anything into effect in that area, and my existence is too precarious to risk a solo effort. While everybody else seems to have progressed in at least one area of their life, I have comprehensively wallowed.

It's tough being alone in this world, too. Everything is geared towards couples, from travel to restaurants, to advertising, to radio competitions. Couples and families. The assumption was always that I would have been married and settled by now, a couple of kids in tow. It hasn't happened - not just for me, but for many women I know. Failing that, I was going to have dazzled literary circles with my writing, designed award winning houses, done something to have an impact on the world, rather than becoming the person who holds up people's dream homes because their design is 10cm too close to a boundary. I was supposed to at least make enough cash that I would be able to afford my own place, somewhere to hide my miserable self. It seems that I have failed comprehensively.

I usually try not to get down about things beyond my control; if I did, I'd be in a permanent state of misery. But today, for some reason, I have succumbed to the temptations of chocolate and junk food, to misery, fear, and loneliness. Tonight, it seems too hard to keep up the smiling face of the fat person, the cliche of crying within is ringing a little too true. Tonight, I feel that everybody else is moving forwards, and I'm going backwards. About the only signs of increasing maturity are the soft laughter lines around my eyes, and what I'm starting to believe are silver, rather than golden, strands that occasionally reveal themselves in the thick mass of my hair. I'm tired of pretending that I don't care, that it doesn't hurt to see someone with the life I pictured for myself.

Tonight, of not on other nights, the walls can come down a little, and I can say, with complete honesty, that family functions are a bitter pill to swallow. I may gripe about them a little at other times, but the reason never really comes out. The truth is, that when my outspoken, bitter and twisted grandmother comes out with her barbed comments about weight, about the idea that I have ruined my life by travelling instead of settling down, there are times when I almost believe that she's right. There are times when I look at the life of my cousin, my oldest and probably closest friend, and, whatever I think of her husband, I wonder why that never comes to me. When I look around the table of coupled up people, and find myself seated opposite Nana, as the only other single around the table, and I wonder if this is what life will be like for always, the sense that everybody else is happy, and I alone am not. And you have to wonder, where did it all go wrong? Was it in wanting things that were never meant for me? Or was it in trying too hard to do everything, to be everything? Perhaps it was in wanting it all, and not narrowing my focus. Or maybe it was just never the right thing for me and I'm pining for things that would never make me any happier than I am right now.

Or maybe it was in disappearing down a worm hole of 'What if?'

Only the Lonely

The universe is conspiring against me at the moment. My study reading has me looking into the concept of emotional intelligence, the pressures to conform to societal norms. I'm tired, I'm emotional. And I'm listening to 'Gotta be Somebody' by Nickelback and feeling the urge to hit the repeat button and get a little teary at the thought that perhaps there may not be somebody out there for me. All of this follows a conversation with a friend on the way home from my birthday drinks about what would happen if I never found 'The One'. What if I stay single? What if Nana was right when she was telling my mother - at my birthday dinner with my family, no less; now I remember why I usually spend them overseas - that the four years I spent overseas had ruined my life. I was going to be just like a woman she had known when she was younger, who had left behind a fiance to go travelling for two years on the grand tour, only to return and find her fiance had found someone else, and she would remain a spinster for the rest of her life.

I never set much store by that story. I've heard it before, and it's only ever made me angry, that Nana was so narrow minded she thought it would be better to be married to a man who was obviously not in love with her enough to wait than to have had the wonderful, amazing, enriching experiences Mabel had while she was travelling. Nana never mentions if Mabel regrets missing 'her chance'. For all I know she led a perfectly happy and fulfilling life. The only part of it that I ever hear about is that she never married and ruined her life by travelling for so long. Just like I have done. Mind you, earlier that same night, she had only just held back from insulting me to my face. "You don't eat much, do you. You shouldn't be so --" Happy birthday to me.

And to top off the emotional fiesta that is my night, I had an email from the Talker today, just wanting clarification on what I meant by saying we should 'cool things' and offering to be friends in whatever way I was up for, whether that was just hanging out, or dating or whatever. And the mood I'm in right now, I'm tempted by it. Because even Chatty McStepford seems more appealing than spending another day, week, year, eternity sitting on this bloody couch alone.

Uh Oh

I seem to have developed a dilemma that I'm kind of forced by circumstances to write out here. See, I made the mistake of doing Friday night drinks after work. Normally, not a problem there. In fact, quite the reverse. It's always a giggle to stand around in a pub and take my time over pints while the guys entertain me with whatever comes into their heads to talk about.



It seemed to be heading that way tonight. The guys were in rare form, discussing far ranging subjects that touched on a whole load of my interests. And then it happened. The friend of one of the guys turned up and I found myself tumbling headlong into the biggest crush I've had in a long time. The timing is a little odd, given that L woke me up during the week to tell me that she'd seen the last of my enormous crushes at the tennis in Melbourne. Maybe that set the scene. But whatever the cause, I spent most of the time trying to subtly engage him in conversation - he came in when I was about a pint down after a lunch of healthy, but definitely not stomach lining soup, so I was up for the chatty approach - but at the same time hoping that none of the guys caught onto the fact that I was head over heels with the Irishman in the white t-shirt.



I was thinking for a bit there that I didn't know much about him and, in some respects, I still don't. But at the same time, it doesn't matter. I know that he likes plays, and movies, that he's from Belfast and close to his family. He's tall and good looking and has an accent that means he says things like "fill-um" when he means film. He lives not too far from me, loves a good pub, and has been to Australia some time in the not too distant past. He ventures to Camden and doesn't like the "Primrose Hill set". He doesn't know the meaning of the word insipid, but he likes the sound of it. He didn't seem to be against engaging me in conversation, but at the same time spoke to pretty much everyone there. And he had something about him that made me look as soon as he walked in the door.



So now I will spend days thinking about him, wondering if I should say something to the guy from work whose mate he is. Thinking I should have taken the detour to walk with them to the Northern line tube instead of going with the much closer and generally more practical Victoria line and the less interesting conversational stylings of the one who was going that way. And I'll spend tonight longing for someone to be close enough for me to sit down and analyse the night, to tell me that of course he likes me - regardless of their real opinion. But instead, I'm here all but alone tonight, still slightly tipsy from beer, with a flatmate locked away in her room skyping her boyfriend on the other side of the world, and another flatmate home in Australia and incommunicado for the moment, completely unaware of my revery. So I'm blogging, and hoping that somewhere, someway, I'll get to know more about him, get to talk to him again. But figuring that it's never going to happen, because that's the way my crushes run.

Dial M for...

I was away from my desk when my mobile rang. I didn't hear it - nobody would, since it's switched to silent during work hours. The only sign of any activity, when I got back to my desk - was the flashing light at the centre of the keypad and a little arrow showing on the screen. There's something about a missed call. Until the caller details come up on the screen, it could be anybody. It's a frisson of excitement in an otherwise mundane and boring day. But not today. Today, the caller details simply say 'Private'. There is no symbol in the top right of the screen to suggest that they, whoever they may have been, left a message. Excitement turns quickly to frustration, annoyance.

Why call at all, if they will not leave a message?

I assume it is a friend whose office number always comes up as private, then go back to work as I wait for a reply to my email asking what she wanted. But when it comes half an hour later, 30 minutes of distraction and futile attempts to keep working, to not pick up my phone and play with the buttons in hopes of finding out who it was, it is a denial; she didn't call me.

I log into various webmail accounts, hoping against hope that whoever it was has simply decided to email me instead. But no. There is no email waiting in either gmail account, nor is hotmail showing any news. Whoever it is, they have not left me a message anywhere.

Which means that it is not the publishing company I applied to for a job last week. It is not somebody wanting my services as a seamstress, giving me the cash to survive this month in a little more comfort. Nobody was actually desperate to contact me. And suddenly, I feel unloved instead of anxious. Melancholy.

It's cold and grey outside today. Meteorologists are forecasting fog overnight. And I'm surrounded by the over-warm fug of central heating, struggling to stay awake. I wish the call had come a few minutes earlier, a few minutes later, when I was sitting beside the phone. Anything to relieve the dull routine, the frustration of unsatisfied curiosity.

Update: I have identified my mystery caller. It was no mystery. It was the mobile phone carrier that I left earlier this year, attempting to win my custom back. They called again this afternoon, having called twice yesterday as well. I almost wish I'd never found out.