Remembering Losing You

When I was seven my parents took me and my two brothers on a round the world trip for the best part of a year. This was 1987. As I age my memories of this trip fade, mostly what sticks with me are emotional memories, feelings, like sensing magic prickling on my skin in the lime green light of Sherwood forest.

On this trip we went to Singapore and to a busy market there. The market sold foods of every kind, and none that I had seen before. The stone paved floor laquered with a crust of hardened sweat, dirt and fallen food crumbs that could not be swept from the spaces between stones. A cacophony of market noises pressing up against the skin thick in the soup of humidity, the smells of foreign asian foods, pungent, salty, rotten and sweet. Up to that point in my life I don't think I would have ever even have seen an Asian person. Singpore was a world of strange. When I see this market in my mind, I am waist height. Remember when it was easier to see peoples knee's, shins and feet than their faces? It was back then.

Dad was in charge of me and he was holding my hand. Remember the days when when you went out, someone was in charge of holding your hand and making sure you didn't get lost? I miss those days, i'd have that back in a heartbeat.

Mum had put dad in charge of me that day, dad is usually quite conscientious about his children... but then something caught my eye, asking for closer inspection. It was a tank of water containing several large, live crayfish cramped in a small freshwater tank, inert in their orange spiked armor except for the slight opening of a claw, a small movement in one black eye. The tank and it's inhabitants drew me closer, I leaned in, as my confidence grew I placed my palms on the side of the tank and my eyes poured over their encrusted bodies with curiosity and strange sadness.

After sating my curiosity I remembered my family, and turned around and looked into the market. The market was an ant hill of activity, and everyone of those people were short, singaporean people, in shorts and tshirts with black hair and skinny legs.
And everyone of those people, was not my family.
My eyes scanned and scanned the throng of people, sweat prickled on my palms now dangling at myside on limp arms, a thud of my heart picking up pace in it's chest.
Gone.
I'm seven years old and three billion light years from home and everything I know and my whole family is gone. I am saturated for the first but not last time in my life, in the sensation of being entirely alone in the world.

I imagine I took a large volume of air into my lungs first because then I began to bellow and cry and after not too long a voluptuously overweight American woman came over, swept me up onto her hip, and took me the few paces to her table where she was eating a large volume of oily food. Oil was everywhere, on my skin, on her hands. I reeled with the texture of this experience, her fat cushiony sweaty lap.

She sat me on her lap like a handbag dog or a doll, and said 'there, there', and 'have something to eat', 'it'll be alright'. This stupid fat lady with NO idea of the intensity of my situation. Or perhaps at seven, lost for the first time, I had no idea what she knew, which was that my parents would come find me. To me, this was it, and 'it' was me, lost, alone forever.
Not like when you run away from home with a bandana full of sandwiches, properly lost, and no way back to all that you love.

I couldn't regard her with anything but that sick contempt you have for people who are NOT your mum or dad, and who are trying to tell you what to do or how to feel when they clearly have no authority in the matter.

Finally - and it can't have been long, but being lost is too long - my dad appeared out of the crowd. And with hot wet tears on my cheeks, and a stirring of resentment in my chest, I went back to being found.

When I sense a relationships end, now, as an adult (sort of)the feeling of being lost in the market that day returns to me. Sticky and sick.

Our family have funny 'sleep things'. We walk, talk, sing, shout, and fight off imaginery attackers in our sleep. It's not all that funny. My eldest brother has it the worst and can't share a bed with his partner's. Once he woke in a violent defense against an attacker about to throw his clothes horse through a large glass window. He's taken the skin off his shins down to the bone fighting people in his sleep. I have slept in the room adjacent to him and heard him yelling and batting away flying bat/spiders. When you call out to wake him, his voice goes from yells of rage, to the docile, sedated sleepy voice of someone who has just woken. It is strange.

As a child I used to wake up standing up out of bed getting clothes out to get ready for school. I talk alot in my sleep and have woken myself up singing. That is when I'm happy. When i'm not happy, I come to consciousness with my heart pounding so hard in my chest that it aches for the entire day afterwards, gasping for air, stricken with panic, running my hands feverishly along the walls looking for a window, a door, or any way out, eyes wide open and unseeing in the dark, straining to see, straining to see and seeing only black. Blind and terrified.

I don't know if you've heard of this happening, but twice I've woken up paralysed, genuinely awake, but totally paralysed. You have to relax and go back to sleep and then you'll wake up able to move again. There's no describing this feeling. Films like My Left Foot fill me with terror.

Twice I've woken up without my memories.
It might only last a few seconds, maybe six or ten, but for those seconds you are staring at a world that has no names. Chair, window, bed, all those words are gone.
Earth, home, house, your address, the date. All gone.
I have no name, and the first question you ask yourself is: who am I?! That is the first thing you want to know. And the realisation that you don't know...it is a heavy one. What is my name? Who am I?!! But asking doesn't make it come.

This loss of memory means you have no childhood, no memories to make you happy, you have no parents, no friends, no siblings and nobody that loves you. There is just a piercing, unbearable nothingness.

When a relationship ends, this feeling returns to me. It is phasic, on and off throughout the days that follow that final conversation. I feel suddenly that I'm going to throw up.

Once, I had a dream, that when i woke up there had been an apocolyptic earth wide disaster that had wiped out the entire human race, every. single. human. being. Except me. I stood and stared over the devestation and I knew that I could carry on, find a way to carry on with my life, that there was almost a responsibility to carry on, but that in the absence of every other person, the loneliness was so extreme and acute, and I knew that I didn't want to go on. That it was other people that made life worth living.

Funny how it can seem so the opposite as we rush about our busy lives, must eat, must work, must sleep, get out of my way, must drive, must work, must have my hobbies, accomplish tasks so that i can feel worthy of this life I have, so that I can sleep tonight and not be kept awake by an internal itch that says I am not good enough I am not good enough. And all the while bush whacking people aside, especially those we love, because they are the closest, and so can seem the most in the way.

But the truth is if you woke up tomorrow and they were gone, you would not eat, sleep, work, drive or do anything.
You would fall to the ground with solace only in the hope that there will be grace in death, the only saviour from this terrible loneliness.

When you look at the end of a relationship, take it in your hands, shake it like a snow globe and watch the white gently fall, trying to decide whether to stay put or go forward, out of the snow globe into the unknown, I am reminded of this choice I ace in the dream, knowing you should go on but wanting to fall to it's knee's and be taken by grace.

When I had my car accident the windows on the passenger side of the car shattered. Much later that day after everything was said and done, I looked into the mirror and my face had a sparkling sheen to it like sea with the sun on it seen from far away.

I reached up to brush my face and there was a coarseness to my cheek. I peered into the mirror and realised the glass had shattered into such fine particles it had landed on my face like a dust that was invisible unless it caught the right light, and even though it was that small in size it was still sharp.

I think this is what happens to the feelings inside a relationship, the interest, curiousity, attraction, affection, desire... those feelings don't die, they are obliterated, by the words you say in the heat of anger, by the pushing away you do when you're steeped in fear of rejection.. those feelings are exploded into miniscule pieces that cover you, and yet it is not possible to pick up a single piece, to turn over in your hands for joy or press to your lips for comfort.

And even then you do not want to wash the abrasive, glittering sheen from your face.