You’d think that Yes and No would be the easiest, wouldn’t you? Not a bit of it. For I have just discovered that what comes out of my mouth bears no relation to the gestures I have used to accompany both words my entire life.
Category: That’s Life
I am wont to quote (often) Rainer Maria Rilke and his line from his poem Go to the Limits of Your Longing – ‘No feeling is final.’
It isn’t.
Until it is.
Or, at the very least, feels as if it is.
While the adage ‘Time is a great healer’ is true, I prefer to think of time as a great changer. I don’t think pain is ever healed; it just shifts its focus.
‘There is only one solitude, and it is vast, heavy, difficult to bear, and almost everyone has hours when he would gladly exchange it for any kind of sociability, however trivial or cheap, for the tiniest outward agreement with the first person who comes along.’ Rainer Maria Rilke
I confess to crying when I see the Lindt bunnies in shops, warm in their gold foil and red ribbon scarves. Mum bought be one every year when she stopped buying me eggs, as I was never a huge chocolate fan once childhood passed. These days, I can make a Kit Kat last a month.
What sex is on my birth certificate, the man patiently explained. Look, mate, I have a goddamned whacking great hole between my legs that small creatures the size of water melons can emerge if ever I’d managed to hang on to a bloke long enough to shag me senseless.
I’ve felt like throwing up almost every day, my stomach a labyrinth of fear about what fresh hell the forthcoming day might bring.
There is one ad that brings me out in a sweat, I hate it so much, and if I can’t find the remote quickly enough to mute it, I have to run to my bathroom and shout very loudly to drown out the sound. Yes, you know who you are, Audi!
When we next met – for dinner – he greeted me with a kiss so hard, it severed my lower lip. When I tried to eat my fish and chips, it was hard to see where the ketchup began and the blood ended.
Alex Comfort’s The Joy of Sex looked like one long advert for a ‘past sell by date’ Greggs sausage roll.