My protective bubble

There is a misconception that there is the perfect anything and everything. In my dream I see myself coming home, I don’t know where I’ve been, I collapse on my bed and find myself wanting the perfect collapse, to fall into such comfort with such ease. In my dream I know that this doesn’t exist. You can get close to perfection but usually it gets interrupted and it’s only fleeting perfection and looking back much later you wonder if it really was so perfect anyway. I lie on my bed and slowly surface from coffee induced deep sleep. There is no light in my dream. I seem to be dreaming of darkness but at the end of a cavern of blackness there is an opening and on the other side of it, through this hole in my dream I can hear music from my stereo that’s been playing all night.

I wake as though I never fell asleep.  For the whole day I will have no idea why, but nothing feels real at any point. Before too long, I’m on my way out the door, listening to my personal stereo, with my pockets full of music. I’m going nowhere and for no reason. It feels a little worrying, but I follow the impulse. I follow it to the point that I think I may be possessed. I have no clue where I’m going but the impulses seem to know and I want to follow them, keen to know what they think they have in store for me. I turn right out of my road and I realise that I must be heading towards the bus stop to take me into town. I sit at the stop for five minutes waiting for the bus. The music in my ears is grungy, angsty, loud. I have the volume turned up loud enough to block out all outside noises that I don’t care for. I drown out the sound of the traffic, the people, the bleeping of the lights at the pedestrian crossing. I block out the air around me, to create my perfect protective bubble.

I’m twitchy. The idea flashes through my head and the notion of sitting still for long periods of time seems absurd and improbable. How the hell could I ever let myself get on the next bus? I get up and I start walking. I have no idea how far I can walk, maybe I can walk from here to town, maybe I’ll walk until it seems like a bad idea. I’ll walk until I don’t want to and then maybe I’ll still keep going, but I can’t sit still.

A minute further down the road the bus that I would have caught flies by and I can imagine myself sitting there feeling irritable, with a desire to be walking at pace away from everything. I see myself on the bus, itching to get off, wanting to be walking and I feel that my impulse-driven choice to walk is somewhat vindicated. I walk for twenty minutes, my head is racing at the pace of the grunge music and the pace of my walk almost matches. Caught in this mood, I can only keep going until I feel tired, or until an impulse pushes me in another direction. I come to crowded streets, and I cut through, dart around and dodge onward plodding pedestrians. I must look like I’m in a rush to be somewhere but I’m probably the only person in this whole city in such a rush to be nowhere in particular. I find that if I stare at the ground I can utterly avoid everyone. They appear as blobs and blurs coming towards me and I simply avoid any of these blurry shapes that come into my line of vision.

After I’ve made it through the crowds and at the end of a particularly noisy track I slow down. It feels like a dead stop but it isn’t. I’m still moving. Maybe it’s my head that had come to a halt. Maybe my head had crashed. Momentarily deserted of impulses it felt strangely still and rational. As if everything was breaking down, as though I’d run myself into the ground, I came to a full stop, body, head, everything, perfectly still. I could go home now. I could turn around and march back the way I came. I look back at where I’ve been, only to see a city-bound bus almost right on top of me. I get in. The timing is too perfect. I don’t even need mad impulses to guide me, it seems instinctively right. I need to rest but I also need to keep moving and it only makes sense to let the bus sweep me away. I pay my way and I take a seat.

On the bus I need to turn my volume up a notch because I can hear voices and I don’t welcome the intrusion. There’s nothing malicious in it, I just don’t want to hear what anyone else has to say. A couple of people do look my way, at the noise that I’m making, the distorted grunge coming from my ears. My reply is to stare out the window and carry on in my own little world. I can’t hear anything, but I know that people are talking, that if I looked I could see lips moving, heads bobbing in response. I know that the traffic around me, as I stare at it flying and sometimes crawling by, is making noise but I can’t hear any of it. I sit still for as long as I can, but the bus keeps getting stuck in traffic and I can’t move at this rate much longer. The next time the doors open I get off, even if it is miles from where I want to be.

Five minutes later I’m on the move again but I need to jack the volume up even more as everything seems louder now. The cars scream by, even the slow-moving ones. I’m walking in between and around people again but somehow I can hear them and I don’t know how that’s possible. I can hear the footsteps that are all around me. I’m failing to shut them out, however much I turn the volume up and I’m absolutely freaked by it. I walk as fast as I can, resisting the urge to run. Running would be so stupid, I couldn’t justify it and retain any credibility as a sane member of the pedestrian public. Then again, who would know? I could have legitimate reasons to be sprinting through town.

I need to get somewhere quiet and to that end I head for the nearest park. I carry on walking at a hectic pace right the way through my chosen park. I walk until I think I’m alone and then I slow down. It’s only then that I notice that I can’t even hear myself breathing and I feel like I’m suffocating, that I’ve been holding my breath for hours. In the rush of it all, had I forgotten to breathe? I rip the earphones out of my ears and I gasp for air. Almost immediately, everything seems muted, like someone turned the volume of the world right down. I slump down on the bench. Civilisation is at a safe distance. I can see the park and the people doing park life things but I’m so far away from it all, it may as well be on TV.

I’m watching nothing in particular, maybe still catching my breath, when I hear someone ask me, “Are you okay? You seem…” I answer before she finishes. “I’m fine. I was just…” I tail off because I’m not sure how I can describe what I was just doing. I manage to click back to the real world with typical ease. I’m fine, nothing is wrong, everything is as normal as it’s likely to be. I turn to see a young teenage girl. Young and freckly, a step or two away from being grown up but still desperately far away, in a way that every teenager is. She seems to be waiting on an answer, staring at me in an impossible nonchalant way, waiting as though I could tell her what was going on in my head. Maybe, normally this would be an awkward situation. I don’t have anything to say. She isn’t going away but I’m content with my empty lazy desires. I shrug and the only thing I can think to tell her is, “I don’t know what I’m doing.”

And it seems to be a good enough answer for her, as she sits on the bench and joins me and we both play at staring into the distance. She sits, slumped, at one end of the bench and I on the other. Her denim skirt stops at her knees, her skinny-sized T-shirt advertises Coke and her feet covered by her running shoes stretch out in front of her. She could only look younger, more girly, if she put her straight black hair in bunches.

Not to make conversation but because she seemed genuinely inquisitive, she asks, “Do you have asthma?” The question catches me off guard and I try not to look confused. “No, no I don’t have asthma,” I tell her. “You seemed to be having trouble breathing. I thought you might be asthmatic.” She had in her hands an inhaler, I don’t know where it came from or if she had been sitting with it in her hands all the time, but she shook it and took two long sucks on it and then offered it to me. “Wanna go?” I looked at her thinking that this was the weirdest notion I’d come across all day.      “No, I’m fine, I’m trying not to take any medication that isn’t mine.”

“It’s not mine either. My Dad, he’s got asthma.” 

I say nothing in reply because nothing original comes to mind. She puts the inhaler away and pulls from a pocket a crushed pack of Marlboro Reds.

“Want one?”

I barely look at her as I reach to her end of the bench and grab one from the pack. She hands me her lighter and I light up. Then I hand it back and then she lights up too. We both sit there staring and smoking into the park. “They’re not mine. They’re my mother’s,” she tells me absently, like it doesn’t matter.

“Fuck,” she sighs. “Is your life a maelstrom?” 

The question comes out of the middle of nowhere and I want to be caught unawares. But I can’t help feeling that reality has left the building, that in this unreal state nothing is so strange. I can’t think of an answer and I tell her nothing. She takes a long drag on her Marlboro and begins again.

“Why is everyone’s life so headfuckingly fast?”

We both watched people bustling their way through the park. I thought the question over and then looked across at the girl, half dangling off the bench, her feet scraping in the dirt. Deeply philosophical answers seemed dangerous here. Any answer I could think up felt tantamount to giving a kid an emotional A-bomb to drop in the playground.

I tell her the most gentle truth I can think up.

“Nobody wants to stop to think about what they’re doing because they’re scared they might realise how silly it all sounds.”

“All I want to do is take time to look at all the silly things. Do you think this makes me fucked up?”

“It’s all silly, life is pretty fucking silly.”

I pause, trying to think if this justifies anything.

“Based on knowing you for all of five minutes, I’m going to say no. No, I don’t think you’re fucked up.”

“All I really want to do is slow everything down. Sometimes I come here and I feel about as removed from everyone on the planet as I possibly can.”

I don’t know what expression I’m carrying on my face because I don’t really know how to feel about all of this, but because I’m willing to believe that this is unreal, because I’m not sure this is all happening, I’m willing to play along.

“Sometimes I can see the world blurring whilst I move really impossibly slowly. You need to remove yourself from everyone to really be able to see this best.”

Really?

“It’s the only way to really see how still you are, you need to see everything moving at a frantic pace all around you. If you’re moving slowly, if you live at an introspective crawl and everyone else is doing likewise, then you hardly notice. Why would you?”

“Uh-Huh.”

“Sometimes I’m removed enough to see everything but not feel a thing. I’m so aware but so dead to it all. Once, I was talking and I realised that what I was saying all seemed horribly and deeply contrived. I was aware of how trite I sounded, I could hear every word, and I wanted to cringe at all of them, but I couldn’t feel a thing. It was like someone else was saying them. I thought I’d died and was having an out of body experience.”

There’s no way at an estimated 15 years of age she can know all this, think all this. Is there?

“One morning I was eating breakfast before going to school. I was eating cereal and I started spooning the Corn Flakes out into my bowl, one spoonful at a time. And midway through I stopped to think about it. I was actually counting how many spoonfuls make up my average bowl of cereal and I stopped to think how many times I had done this, through inane force of habit. I walked to school and I counted the number of steps it takes to get to school. I counted every step.”

She paused and then, as though to justify her actions, added, “I live fairly near to my school. It’s not that far. But it was so fucking depressing to realise that you can break life down into little spoonfuls and little steps. Breakfast meant nothing, there was no anticipation of how tasty or filling it might be. It was nothing, no feelings attached. On the upside, walking to school no longer had any fear and dread attached to it. It was broken down into a set amount of steps that I took every day.”

She stared intently my way before looking away and asking in no particular direction, “Am I talking shit?”

It never even crossed my mind that this might all be shit and I was surprised that she could have her own doubts. She seemed sure of all she was saying, like a teenager, like things were more black and white.

“I always wanted to talk like people do in movies.”

I thought she did. 

“I’m still a teenager but I’m old enough to know that things don’t happen like they do in the movies.”

“Maybe. Maybe you’re just a cynic.”

As soon as I say it I know I’m lying. I know that she knows that I’m lying. It’s the most beautiful lie I’ve ever told. There is a Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny does exist. I never had a younger brother or sister. I never had to tell such silly lies, so I never really knew how this was supposed to work. All this girl can do in response is look at me like we both know that I’m lying, like we both know that life is nothing like any movie we’ve ever seen.

We both sink back into the park bench. It seems the right place for the whole pointless day. I feel enlightened by all we’ve said and I’m not sure why. I know that the feeling will pass. She takes one long drag to kill off the Marlboro in her hand and then she spits on the ground, and we watch the flob spin, arc and fall and then bounce on the pathway ahead of us when it lands. It’s the most explosive thing to happen all day.

We sit for a while and say nothing until she begins to shuffle closer to me. I hardly notice that she’s staring intently at me. I hardly notice that she shuffles along the bench to be within touching distance. I don’t notice her until, from the corner of my eye, I see her hand stretch out to touch my face. The instinctive tendency would be to shirk away but I don’t move at all. She touches my face, her fingers prodding at the side of my jaw. I glance her way to see what she’s up to and I can make out the inquisitive look on her face, her head tilted to get a better view, examining a spot that she’s drawn to. She places her finger slightly below my right ear, I feel her fingers brush past my lobe and press against my skin. She pulls her fingers away and looks down at them. I turn to look at what she’s discovered, half expecting to see a tiny insect or a speck of mud that she’s removed, but I know before I look at her that it’s something troubling. She looks at her fingers as though horrified. She has that look on her face that people carry in dreams at the moment that they realise the horror is really happening. You tell yourself that this can’t be happening, that it’s only a dream, but you know that the look on your face and the wrenching feeling in your belly says different.

I put my own fingers to my right ear in a less delicate fashion and I dab the ends of my fingers all around the ear, until I hit the same spot that the girl did. I know it’s the same spot, right below the ear, because I seem to have discovered the same wet trickle. I look down at my hand and I see blood. I quickly reach around to my other ear, and I feel the same thing. It’s not a lot of blood but I look at it in distinctive confusion. In my head I know this shouldn’t be happening. I look at her and she looks horrified and somehow I know she shouldn’t. I know that nothing is this bad.

She is the first to acknowledge what is happening, the first to say it, and in saying it she seems to make it true, as though if neither of us said a thing it wouldn’t be happening.

“My God your ears are bleeding. What have you been doing to yourself?”

I almost feel guilty when she says it. I sit still, examining the blood on my fingers. I look at her, as if she could help. She’s standing a little distance from me, trying to think of what she should do next. She looks off into the park and then turns to me as though she had an answer. She started to run towards all the people in the distance.      

“Stay here, I’ll…..”

I didn’t hear the last bit, the words were lost in the opposite direction, trailing off into the park. But I could swear she said, I’ll get some ice cream. Stay here, I’ll get some ice cream. I never saw her again.

Where next?

→ If you want to step further inside a mind where the world is becoming increasingly difficult to make sense of, Life is not a pop video

→ If you want to step back and ask who gets to decide what a piece of writing means, The beauty and power of words part 6: Who the hell am I to be writing any of this?

→ If you want another piece of fiction, this time a childhood story about friendship, memory and a very special Kinder Egg, An Ode to Mark Wilson

If the writing resonates, stay with it.