November 2013
Crisis, age 53, Paris
November 9, 2013
In the cafe I used to come to on Boulevard de Sebastopol. Unfortunately the croissants are finished, but I have coffee anyway. Oh, god, but it’s good. Why do I feel so sad? So full of affect? I carry loneliness, despair and extreme self hatred around with me. I carry a huge sack of failure and uselessness. I feel like such an abject failure, that I am not a success at the things I want to be a success at (no, that’s not true, that’s my fucked up mind spinning me lies, I have just been the “internationally acclaimed etc” in Oz). I feel so lonely. I was desperate for a bit of time, now I have it and I am desperate in it. Even though I have much work to do this weekend, I am scared of the time alone. But I need this time, to do my work, to learn two songs, to sort things out and yet I despair of being here, once again alone, in Paris, and there is nobody who knows or cares and nobody to invite me anywhere. Christine is away, Haim is away, Heather I see on Tuesday, Julia is away. I just contacted Vincent. And this is inside me. It does not matter where I am, I carry this deep aloneness-no, loneliness-within me. I had it in London, I have it in America. Yet I guard so fiercely my space. I wonder how it is that I don’t have a partner, a lover, a musical partner, a work partner? Yet I have had all these things, all of them, sometimes all at the same time. And next weekend I do not see the point of my being here, now there is no performance to do on Saturday. There is no performance, C is away, H still, and so I will have an entire weekend waiting to leave. If I could bear or afford it, I could go home to Manchester and be with my family, be with dad. Maybe I should look for a flight. But I have no spare cash to play with and a long journey home on the Monday, and plans to return to the UK only 3 and a 1/2 weeks after that. Hmm, already I feel a little better. I need to know I’m making choices rather than being powerless and caught. E keeps telling me I should write my autobiography. How can I when I am still living it and have not yet achieved the things I want to achieve? Maybe I should just eat, buy food and go home and attend to some of the many things I need to attend to before I go out this afternoon. Au revoir. With glee, I find myself in an Indian restaurant for a veggie thali, down in the covered corridor passage way that I neglected to re-discover only last week. It rains. It’s cold. I am fine. I must stop listening to the nagging insistence of my misery and focus instead on reality and gratitude in those times because, to be honest, life’s pretty amazing: dad’s still alive (in hospital), I am in Paris staying with my nice friend, I have friends in Paris, I have just been to many places (I’ve been on the road for three months already), I have enough money to have lunch out, every day if I wish, I have just had my 2nd osteopathic appointment which has sorted out my back and neck, I have many good things happening, I can take an extended time in Manchester over Christmas. On Thursday I went to the theatre with E, then we went for a drink after; that was nice. God, that food was bloody good. Fantastique! I think the spices have lifted my mood somewhat. Maybe I will walk home in the rain after all.
Crisis, age 53, Paris
November 10, 2013
11am Somewhere inside I am a nun, also. I am in some dark place internally, the bells chime and they chime as I fall further into the place from which it seems I will never be able to emerge again. I breathe and I am lost. I am so lost, trapped in silent sobs and sounds, my throat aching with that it will not have or express. Those shards sear into my soul and demolish me. I am beset with devils, home to hosts of bacteria multiplying, and less and less of me with each breath. I writhe in agony. I feel the powerlessness of that child as she stole in order to try and feed herself what she thought she lacked and would never get in any other way. I’m still her. She’s still me. I am sick with grief and edibles fed to me in haste in order to shut up my wailing. I am sick with what was stuffed into me. In ordinary time, I am lost. In god’s time, I am found. In ordinary time, I dream it all away, hoping that enough time will pass to make it better, to let me be loved.