Sudden Rush

of affection for this time, this place. Engulfing. The grist for nostalgia. In my mind I am rearranging the memories to give them that wonderful retrospective goldenness. Its late. No sleep. Must sleep. Want to. No dinner. A banana and chocolate in the evening.

I have now attended two surprise birthday parties for two friends. Both planned by people I know. With zero participation on my part. I have had zero suprise birthday parties thrown for me. I haven’t had a birthday party thing for the last four years. I cannot recall the joy I might have felt in all the preceding ones. Which isn’t that alarming. I can’t recall much. Memory is indistinct. The last four years, yes, the other unconnected thing about them: unrelenting unhappiness. I don’t know how it is. Are people generally happy and become unhappy by disrupting the order of things? Or is it the other way around. Solid blocks of what seems to be insurmountable unhappiness and rare flashes of joy? This latter thing is me. Which is odd, because I remember most of everything before five years ago as one prelapsarian solid block of happiness. Okay, a solid block with features of cheese, then. Ever since then, I’ve been analysing and reanalysing in a bid to correct wherever I went wrong. But five years is a long time to not have found out. And considering the tricks my wonderful memory plays on me, its not unreasonable to think that there really wasn’t any definitive going wrong, that its just another case of retrospective rearrangement of memory. A truly despairing thought. All that analysing in vain. It would have always been like this. Periodic rewiring: after every sufficient number of years, preceding events would remodel themselves into something approaching perfection in my mind, and the subsequent years would be spent in seeking to regain this ‘lost’ secret. Dreary.

I should be happy.

But at least I’d think I was happy now, five, maybe ten years from now. We cannot be getting unhappier in relation to the preceding years of our lives all our lives until we die. Or maybe thats it. We determine when we die by that measure. Debilitating unhappiness. We die when we cannot get any unhappier.

This is too grim, or too depressing.

I want to have friends. This is why. I have never been a good friend to have. Too aloof. Uninterested. Or something. I don’t know. You are with friends, you forget, you think about them, you have perspective. Or you are forced to pretend. I don’t know. There is something about friends.

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