Another room. We still have these in common at least: the so very many rooms. Not exactly empty, hardly full, and the small unbalanced weight of us soft inside them while we look at the distance between the window and the wardrobe, the bathroom and the table, the nightstand and the necessary bed – if they give us nothing else, there always is a bed. The cities outside, they don’t matter. I am in my rooms and you are in yours and the distance between us too deep to see.
And the travelling. We both know about that – one loneliness pursuing while we hide in the rush of another – our type of flight.
The way to Norwich, I remember, was very cold. Trains stammered and wandered and stopped in the damp, flat country and the sleet kept coming, nothing to stop it, and my coat still smelt of holding you, which is to say of that goodbye which seemed hardly final at all and also like tumbling over into nothing, no one.
Although I am an adult, we are both of us adults, and quite aware that we can live without anybody, anything. There are very few losses we won’t survive after our fashion: keeping ourselves from the thoughts we would rather not have and breathing and blinking and swallowing as we should. We look very much like other adults, are credible.
Such a bad journey, though, to Norwich and I wanted to call you and say how many hours longer it lasted than it ought to have done, how many baths I took to try and warm my hands, my body, rinse away what won’t be shifted.
Little Formica unit in that room, bible and a hairless carpet, television bolted to the wall, fawn kettle, three custard creams I didn’t eat and this space I could almost touch, could have occupied a month before, a week before: the shape of myself on the bed and calling you, feeling better, understood.
Like being in London and back in that place I can’t go to any more – where the rooms have good, thick walls and little kitchens, proper sheets – and meeting the way we did then: on the run and gently, perfectly unhinged. Dinner when I couldn’t find the restaurant, doped up and stitches in my mouth, and you came out looking for me when I phoned and then I circled round, holding your voice in the receiver, and watched until I saw you walking up towards me, talking me in.
Talking the way I hadn’t, didn’t, don’t – about penguins’ eggs, dentistry, lamp oil, cruelty, theft, forgiveness, coming quietly, the possibility of losing everything, the possibility of writing on the dark. And we said we were glad that we were alive: more precisely, that we were glad of each other’s lives, if not our own. Which is the way that joy comes in – quietly and written on the dark.
The rooms always come with their different shapes of darkness: lintels and blades of shadow where we stumble in the small hours and cannot find the glass, the switch, the door-knob, whatever it is we are reaching for and think we need. Sitting perhaps in that room in Cologne and beyond the generous window and the sense of expensive confinement is a streetlamp and the cemetery wall, a view on to old graves, and I think I need to try and make you laugh – nicely hard and always worth it – and I think I need to do that and I think I need to see the black flame of your hair – suggesting the black flame in your head – and I think I need to see the way your beard grows when you leave it – as if it would like you to seem ridiculous – and I think I need to feel the way your stomach flinches under touch – that nice shyness – and I think I need to see you smile and I need the way you smell when you haven’t washed and I need to see you smile. I need to see you smile.
But I’m wrong, of course: I don’t need it. What I have must be enough. No one survives without having enough. I have the light from the smoke alarm in the ceiling, the pinprick of red ticking on and off, and I have this tiredness and this fear that all there is left will be waiting by myself while dying comes closer, travels. You said you were afraid all of the time. Now that’s how I am, too, but I can’t tell you.
And I did nothing to help you when, from the first time, you helped me. Dying in a plane crash, never finishing another sentence, being ugly, being selfish, being useless, being hurt – the stupid fears a stupid person has – you lifted them very precisely away, as if you knew what you were doing and knew me. The good I found in you I never showed you properly. I was not convincing.
Now I’m in this room, in New York – thick rain clattering down the skylight and it’s my late evening in the middle of your night: even our days separated, staggered apart. My luggage has gone missing and this would be funny if I could make it a story for you – another disastrous journey that wouldn’t much matter, because we’re all right and care that we’re all right. Only I have no story, because you don’t want one.
I have this which you won’t read. Whatever form of words I find, it will make no difference – there’s nothing more you’ll let me say to you. I work in invisible ink, unsay myself in rooms I don’t want and don’t know and I keep on the road to stay ahead of so much silence, to be beside you in this one way, travelling as I know you’re travelling, running.
I never was sure what we believed in, except each other, but since I am helpless and you may be too, I make us a prayer every night which asks if you could be happy, if you could be safe. Then I would have almost enough.
My love never was any better than that.