Setting Off All Your Alarms

I lie too easily. Too glibly. I feed information to people; information I think they want to hear.

“Are you happy?" they ask me, and I tell them, yes, I’m happy. I’m fine. Everything is fine.

Fine is like the weather. Fine is a grade of wire, a grade of cotton. Fine is a higher plane of art, better than your average art. Everything is fine, and I am happy.

I lost my page because I told someone the truth and it fell onto deaf ears. Call and response. His call, my response. Even filtered through hours of holding back, I still responded, in a fashion. I told him the truth and it fell into silence.

Silence is like a vacuum. It sucks everything else into it at the speed of light. That’s faster than the speed of sound. You open up the box where silence is hiding, and it sucks everything in.

Silence is as wide and unending as space, sometimes. Silence is critical. It’s a critical mass; the minimum requirement to set off the chain reaction that constitutes my personal nuclear explosion.

You bore me, I told him. This bores me. I wrote it down on the virgin white page, unmarked, unblemished. I wrote it down for him to read later, knowing he wouldn’t care.

I love you, I told him, but it isn’t enough. False sentiment. Lying too glibly again. Because, what is love but a different nuclear reaction requiring a different critical mass? My reaction is anger and hatred, not love. But I love you is what I said, because that’s what you always say when you’re about to leave.

I sit here now on the train and watch as we speed past the towns and the countryside that I have never known, beyond their role as View From Train Window in the film of my life. I left that white page, marked by my ballpoint indentations, filled with the bic black ink, lying flat on the dining room table, in full view, for him to see as he came in through the door, all briefcase and heavy overcoat. I left it, knowing he will not care when he reads it. He will never care, and that’s why I will only ever lie to him. Have only ever lied.

And now I am on my way to the one who called, whose deaf ears I let my truth fall upon. I am taking a risk. I am travelling the country on a whim. I am leaving behind my carefully constructed lie, the life I have built and shored up and sustained for so long now that it feels like a second skin. I am shedding that skin like a snake. Slithering away over grains of sand made up of the disintegrating, eroding lies of the past.

I am not fine, I told him. I am not happy. I am crazed and wired and wild and raving. I am everything that is beyond the reach of fine. I am everything that won’t be constrained by happy.

I am Virginia Woolf, trapped in her madness, trapped in the countryside. I am Virginia Woolf filling her pockets with stones wading out into the river because nobody will let her thrive. I begin to hear voices, I should have written. I know that I am spoiling your life. Words that would have been lost on him, in his suit and his striped shirt and his tasteful sombre blue tie, in his disinterest and soullessness.

I answered his call and it fell into silence, and now I am on a train, travelling quickly, too quickly, to an ending I can’t predict. An ending I hardly know that I have begun.

I did not speak; I did not ring; I could not bear to hear his voice. I could not bear to hear that hesitance, the knowledge that this was not what should be done, even though it could be done, imbuing each word with no, and stop, and please. I did not answer with my own voice. I answered with words that had no meaning, that gave no clue, that did not hint that Virginia had strode out into the river and everything that had been before was over.

And the madness? The madness. The falling, echoing, tumult of voices. The sticky heat of summer’s finally falling night and darkness and humidity. The drift of consciousness. The trivial, self-centred introspection of my being.

The madness pushes out. The web, the tissue, the cotton wool ball of lies, soaked in formaldehyde, that will numb and seduce his brain into slumber. The lies I have delivered as truths, because I did not know him any more than he knew me. You bore me, I said. This bores me. I love you, but it isn’t enough.

Virginia Woolf. Skirt pockets, coat pockets, life pockets filled with stones and wading out into the river. I will drown myself in his indifference. I will throw myself under the waters of his panic and confusion. He will open his door to me, to the unexpected appearance of me, and I will know then that I am drowning and a lung’s gasp of water away from death.

But better a death at my own hand, of my own volition, than a death that eats away slowly, in a suburban bell jar.

Better that my words fall on deaf ears, than that I utter another lie.

© J R Hargreaves June 2006