I don’t go around trying to unravel the mysteries of life. I’m no philosopher pondering the complexities of the world around us. I’m just a regular dude who feels things and wonders what they mean. As it happens, while I’m deeply, instinctively rational, I also feel a lot. They are qualities that work in concert: I feel, I wonder, I seek to understand.
Last night I lay in my bed feeling full of stuff I had yet to process. I felt it, literally, in my body, while my mind started off on its journey of understanding. I fell into a deep sleep. It was like all the lights went out in me. I was dead to the world, a log that barely stirred I’m sure, through the night. I dreamt again.
I dreamt I was away somewhere working, somewhere in Asia, Taiwan perhaps, somewhere like that, surrounded by Asians keen to work with me, the consultant from outside, the only westerner in the room. They were deferential, polite, as is so often the case. Amongst them was a girl I knew many years ago. She was from Hong Kong, black hair in a bob, dark framed glasses, slightly plump, quite cute. Back in the day I remember she liked me, expected and hoped of things to be with me. I was different. As always it seems, I was much more ambivalent than that, knowing that nothing serious would eventuate. And in fact I had forgotten all about her till this dream – even now I can’t remember her name, nor even how we met.
She was there in the dream nonetheless, knowing me, which came as a surprise. I felt very much in a foreign environment, though not in any confronting away. By turns I felt supremely competent, which became, at times, confused disinterest. Nothing happened with the girl. The scene changed randomly again and again. I go for a run as if it is ritual, and I wake with that image in my mind.
The curtains are open as they ever are. The early morning sun is out. It beams in at me, bright and splintered through the shifting cloud. I lay there without moving, aware of the dream, aware of how deeply I have slept, and recalling the feelings of the night before, absent now. The dog snuggles into me, keen for my attention now that I am awake. I lay there and search through myself and find something I have become use to is gone, if only momentarily.
So much has happened in the last 18 months, and particularly the last 6 months. It has been very testing, and occasionally quite ugly. I’ve been mired in it, working through it the best I can. It’s not over, but perhaps it is nearing the end. I lay there and it was as if in my sleep I had transitioned to another stage. I was not looking ahead, but there was an understanding in me that there would be a time different beyond this. There is no reason to expect anything much of that, except that it will be different from now. What I felt lying there was a kind of surety: it will work out. It was as if I knew it somehow, as if someone from the future had bent the rules and whispered in my ear as I slept, “you’ll be right H.”
While I thought this there was little feeling attached to it. It felt like an accepted fact, good, but uncontroversial. Somewhere in that I had a vision of myself. I have fought so fiercely these last few months that it came as a welcome surprise that the me I saw as myself then had a kind of stillness to him. There was something harder, more compact, more matter of fact about how I went about things. There was an innate confidence that went with it.
Stay in bed I thought. Bed seemed a charmed environment. Outside of bed there was the world outside; this was my sanctuary. And so I lay there and let my thoughts run their course.
A few days ago I finished reading The Caine Mutiny, a classic story of course, and better written than you might expect of such an iconic tale. I’ve always been dismissive of the myths about the so-called ‘greatest generation’. I believe mostly that people will rise to the occasion, even the Gen Y I pillory so often. All the same, reading the book I was made to appreciate how much these callow 18, 19, 20 year olds had to deal with. Their problems were more serious than those we grapple with day by day. The world they were a part of, their lives, was violent, they did their part believing they fought, and sometimes died, for a just cause. That was the world and their life every day of it through WW2. It puts our petty problems into some perspective.
Having lived through that it’s hard not be changed, and potentially – though not always – for the better. Maybe that was what I saw or felt lying in bed. The future I ‘felt’ was the result of the change in me because of the journey I had made, different to theirs, not nearly as violent, perhaps not life threatening – though tumultuous all the same, and dangerous to good health. Having survived this tumult you’d have to hope that I come out of it a wiser, stronger, better person. And that’s exactly what it felt like, the rubbish stuff finally, belatedly, burnt off.
At that point I returned to the feelings that had plagued me heading into sleep. It comes under the label of intimacy. As I wrote the other day, I miss it. I felt that absence keenly last night. I lay there wishing there was beside me a body familiar from touch and feel and use. I felt regret at the stupid things I have done, which are many. I cut myself some slack – I’ve had a lot to deal with. Still, I knew, I was not aware enough, not ‘present’ enough to properly appreciate what was there to be had. Perhaps that HK girl was a symbol of that, I don’t know.
I had felt that yearning before I slept last night. This morning I woke, wishing perhaps I had that body there, but ready to move forward (not ‘move on’). As I said the other day, I don’t think I’ve ever been better prepared or more receptive to a meaningful relationship. In those moments I felt truly adult. Once more it felt like an established fact. Ok, not now, but soon enough, the world will turn, you’ll be ready.
And then I got out of bed.