The Incredible Knowingness of Nothing

To be honest, I don’t really know who I am. If this is my origin story, maybe this is just the beginning.

Maybe none of us really know. I doubt my mother does. Or my sister. My boyfriend definitely doesn’t. And why should he? He still has time. But me? What’s my excuse? Forty-six years old, married once, depressed always: I’ve spent enough time thinking about it after all.

I probably thought I knew who I was when I was twenty-five and married, listening to Radio 2 on Sunday mornings and cooking Chinese food from a jar. I had a husband, two bedrooms and a cat, and that was pretty much that. What else was there to know except for the powder blue walls, the cracked tiles and the dust between the floorboards. I knew it all well. The hours, days and months spent staring at them, waiting for him to come home, and waiting for something to happen. After fifteen years, it didn’t. Fifteen years of stroking the cat, watching the ashes rise and waiting for the wind to change. Silent days of sadness paying off the honeymoon, takeaway comas and holidays at home, watching him move his socks around.

It wasn’t until I was 42 when I’d had enough of my nothingness that I gave myself permission to be free. For twelve months I stopped the lonely train of life, and I forced myself to fly. I was free to be whoever I wanted to be: mostly, I was me, but that didn’t matter so much anymore. I was free, and he was not. For a year, I was alone in the world and I moved around the map like a slug on sertraline. I went to Paris, more often than I should have, walked with strangers and got to know the dead. I struggled with Sartre, cried with Kafka and had breakfast with Jim Morrison.

Was the secret of the universe really 42? Not quite, but I was getting closer.

Closer to life and closer to death and by cleaning the graves of lost Victorian loves, I slowly, imperfectly, wiped away the sadness of life. With only weeping walls, lonely letters and piles of pennies between us, the veil lifted, and the difference between us wasn’t so great after all. I got closer, until eventually it was time to come home.

I came home, went back to work and fell in love until I found someone that loved me back. I found love with a caramel face and smiling eyes that wanted to know the things that I knew: we had good hair together, loved our way out of lockdown and crawled through the corridor of life, laughing. He moved walls for me, and I held them open for him when the weight was too much to bear.

It took me forty-five years to get dumped. Forty-five years of spinning slowly like a broken record, hoping for a better B side. Forty-five years waiting for the one who will love you, and then leave you.

It took me forty-five years to realise that love is not for the faint-hearted. Love is that inexorable happy sadness that exists in us all, if only we knew how to find it. He found it, and he showed me the way. But all I saw was myself, waiting for more.

It took just seven hours and three minutes, 100 songs and a Nick Cave prayer card with the words “trust love” to convince him. Somewhere in between the sleeve of a Belle & Sebastian record he found the answer, and it brought him back to me like a kitten with butter on his paws. Now, we share the same floorboards, and I can breathe again in the silence of the changeable skies.

We are we, and I am still with him.

And yet, somehow, I’m still waiting.

My mum once told me that she loved me. I was 43 years old at the time, and I wondered why it had taken her so long. I hadn’t realised what was missing until she pointed it out, but by then, it was too late. I was already beyond loving.

Sometimes the clouds are so full and low, I feel like they’re screaming at me to move towards them. Other times, I can barely leave the house. I am flawed, and I know it.

Over forty million wasted hours have taunted, not taught, me. The minutes have poked me as I lay in the silence of the day, and yet still I would not wake up. My thoughts twist inside me like a thirsty desert tree, but, sometimes, they tell me I am just fine.

I’m still trying to find out why, but I know that the answer exists: it hides somewhere in the wrinkled fabric of life, between the pages and beyond the sun. It lies on the road screaming for adventure, singing songs of freedom and is always hungry for more. Instead of calling my mother, I listen to Patti Smith. Instead of waiting for the man, I step into the air alone. Occasionally, instead of dreaming, I do.

I thought I was unloveable, but I’m not. I am loved deeply, like oceans of clouds underwater.

I thought I could not love, but I do. I love like a child, until the whites of my knuckles show.

I am confused and I am confusing. But, within these unbreakable walls of skin I have found a way to comfort and be comforted. I have taught myself what love is, and what it is not.

I also know who made me who I am today:

I did.