I'm terrible for mixing metaphors. To read draft one of this essay (no, I'm not becoming more organised and doing multiple drafts on purpose, I just can't be bothered with going upstairs to get the tablet with draft one on it) with too literal a mind, would have led you to think that I have the power of photosynthesis; it was all about the hunger I feel for a certain light. Corny, hacky, bullshit as usual, but I'm coming to see that it has its place. I'm not averse to the odd bit of hacky corn and anyway, I'm seeking to express myself. I'm very corny, so should any expression of me be otherwise? No, it would be dishonest (not to mention too much effort) to over-edit these missives to try and make me look better than I am. It does annoy me that I'm not more original; the affected nature of people these days is one of my pet peeves but I'm the worst for it: one of the most ungenuine, unoriginal people you could have the misfortune to meet. It's genuine ungenuineness, though; not what I would call disingenuousness, which I think is a deliberate affectedness. Anyway, I digress.
This light I hunger for, then. It lights the basement I work in at odd times of the week, not as though the six floors above have been peeled back to allow the sun to shine in, as I may have said at another time. No, it's more like the sun has actually strolled in, hands in pockets, half smiling in a way that adds a photon or two to even the sun's brightness. The rest of the world could only be darkened by my having the sun practically to myself in a basement in Leeds but - in a display of selfishness that is both out of character and at the same time sooo me - I cease to care the second the light hits my face and I can feast again on the wonder that such a thing as this could be, my soul nourished by my brief loan of our brightest star.
As the sun brightens the otherwise dark basement which I call my life, the metaphor mixes again. Though still too bright to really be contained in such a space, the sun, having for some reason consented to this confinement, now becomes a spotlight - under which I can see nothing but the stage I walk and the light that shines upon me - and an x-ray - under whose influence I become as transparent as a raindrop. Spotlight and x-ray combine to display to the unseen audience (and worst of all to the light) my every flaw and total lack of redeeming features. This pollution means that no rainbow is projected as the sunlight hits me. For brief moments I can angle myself so that the grease and dirt within me catch the light and make my surface shine with the mutli-coloured iridescence you get on an oil slick, mimicking the miraculous sky-colours I wish I could cast, but it is a poor imitation. Nonetheless, I am under that spotlight and there is only one thing to do under a spotlight. The song and dance routines that ensue in trying to make my rainbow happen are the most genuinely ungenuine things you could wish to see, though why you would I can't fathom.
Enough of this swamp of metaphor, let us make for the dry land of fact. Those facts are these: it once again took me about five minutes to know that here was a person who was going to dominate my life for the foreseeable, it took me about a month to realise that here at last was someone for whom it might not be unwise to feel such things and another twenty seconds to ascertain that while no-one could be more deserving in my eyes of the blessings of all the tender feeling in the world, no-one could have done less to deserve the curse of receiving them from me. I fought against the inevitable, I made certain rules about how I will address these feelings and I smashed nearly all of those rules pretty much immediately. I've done very little of my own volition in the last two months that doesn't involve enjoying art with a strong romantic bent, I've written endless reams of crap in my mind and a (thankfully) little bit here on blogger and there in my notebooks. I've tried to take my mind off it, I've damn near cried a couple of times, I've teetered on the edge of breakdown over a future which seems to promise only separation, I've made innumerable unoriginal, corny observations about the nature of this feeling and I've felt more like me than I have in a long while.
The natural tide of my life seems to be one that drowns me in emotions or leaves me alone and bereft on a pebble beach that stretches for ever, there's no time when either one feels good, exactly, but fighting the rising waves is the better of the two. It tells me I am alive because a) these emotions could not overwhelm me so otherwise and b) because I choose life when I continue to wrestle with them and try to stay afloat, rather than strike out for the bereft landscape of the pebble beach where I could shed those emotions, which might not kill me but would certainly take my life from me. The pain of nearly drowning is a v-sign to the universe, it is the pain of vitality, of balancing the need to feel your emotions with the need to not let them take you.
I'd like to say that I'm not as dramatic as all this sounds but it's just another example of my corny, affected nature. The sunlight shines on me still, even here and now, and I'm just angling myself to show you my iridescence, to try to fool enough people into believing I'm making rainbows that maybe I can start to believe it myself.
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