My 2009 part two

Picking up where I left off....

I've got a house now, too, just like real grown ups do. It's rented, I admit, but it's the sort of space I'd be happy to own and live in perhaps, if I lived alone or even more, could just truly make it mine. One room could be a recording studio/practice space (theres that money issue again), one bedroom could be a guest room, or just a place to relax in, and in the garden I'd have friends over in the summer, and we'd have barbeques and talk and joke and laugh. My bedroom would stay more or less the same, I think, with all the little things that have a story behind them on display, aching to be talked about. The house on the whole would be tidy and clean, the decorations on the walls would have character, but also taste.
As it is though, I don't think I'll be staying here when the contract expires. My housemates, let it be said, are starting to change and get more pro-active, which in the last few weeks has been both a surprise and a relief, but I've got this nagging feeling they'll soon fall back into their old routine of laziness, messiness, and perpetually being high, sometimes too much so to pay the bills and rent, both in terms of effort and having spent their money on fucking drugs. All the contracts are in my name, so constantly recieving threatening letters from various companies and authorities, which should really be addressed to them, is not something I am very happy with. I need to have things under my control when it comes to situations like this, and when I was living on my own, I didn't have to worry about that sort of thing because I was the only person concerned and so I knew where the cash was coming from, and going to.
I get all the hippie stoner bullshit too, about how it fights the system, man, and it should be decriminalised to further society, but fuck, they're the worst examples to support that argument. If they're anything to go by, it would only produce apathy, selfishness, and a lack of ambition in mass amounts. There is no glamour or rebellion in lying on a couch playing Grand Theft Auto, too stoned to be trusted to understand, remember or even hold a conversation about why I might have to go to court for tax evasion and it's their fault. And if they try to get me to smoke one more fucking time, I'll lose my shit completely. I've never smoked, not even a single cigarette. I hate smoking. I battled with my dad for years to get him to stop (and this year he did, which made me happier than he knows), and they know that, so how fucking low are you stooping when you literally tell someone, your friend and housemate nonetheless "Before the year is out, I'm going to get you smoking."
So I don't think I'll be staying here when the contract expires, unless they move out. I might ask them to, but then I'm stuck with the hassle of finding two new housemates, putting two new names on contracts etc, and I can't be bothered, this whole thing is constantly tiring me as it is and besides, I think I'm at the point where I'd quite like a change of scenery anyway, even in just a minimal amount. This might mean a different house, this might mean a different town. I've got an escape plan to Brighton all set up in my head, but I need time, money (that bastard) and the confidence to start over somewhere. And I need to be sure that this confidence is not in fact ill considered abandon in a smiling mask.

It might sound a bit weird, or obvious, but in this first post-university year, people have been a big part of my life. They usually are, for everyone I suppose, but this year I feel they've had more of an impact and mattered more than in previous years, with new wonderful people arriving, and old, wonderful people leaving. Just as my story is undergoing a twist, the cast has all changed as well.
There was just the one death in my family this year; an elderly family friend, natural causes. I guess most of the people you sort of expect to go have gone already; grandparents, their friends whom you see as a child, and the like. All but my mother's mother have gone, and I am dreading that phone call, I'll fucking break down and pound the earth when that day comes, and I am terrified that it's soon. This is my biggest fear. I never got to see my other three grandparents, and I need to say so much to her, to ask her so much and to tell her just that one short phrase that says it all. She is not ill, but she is old, and there are no exceptions to how this works.
The funeral for Kaye was perfect though, in that way only funerals can be. I kept composed throughout, shook and struggled a little when Sid kissed her coffin goodbye, now a widower, and then cried alone for a few minutes that night when I got back to Portsmouth.
Others have left me this year, moving away, going travelling and so on. I miss them too, and every time I see them, man, it's just the best. There are a few people who have stayed around, but changed and become distant, and I'm learning to live with that still as there is a unique kind of sadness attached to that sort of disintegration, but every now and then our wavelengths overlap and we get on like nothing was ever any different.
I've had a lot of people enter my life this year though too, almost certainly more incomings than outgoings, and most, if not all of them, have ended up brightening it up a little. I've got myself in a few bands finally, one which allows me to have fun playing the sort of music I love to listen to, and another which is the most pleasingly accurate expression of how I think and feel that I've ever found musically since I started playing guitar over a decade ago. I love both my bands, we're just getting started but the thoughts of what we're going to do, what we're aiming and trying for, and how feasible it is that it will happen, have got me genuinely excited, which is a rarity.
It might sound strange, but I think I keep my friends closer than I keep my family. You see, in my eyes, in my experience, family are almost bound to you, they're so close and inextricably bound to you that there's almost a sense they're sometimes acting out of obligation or foresight in the ways that they treat you. You're stuck with them for life, just as they are stuck with you, and whilst I do love my family dearly, sincerely, there is still that occasional feeling of sheer tolerance sometimes, and of being bound, lovingly, but bound nonetheless.
See, friends, they can ditch you whenever they want. If you act up, get out of line, then there's really, ultimately, nothing to keep them anchored to you if they want to float on. This is why I am truly amazed by friendships, as opposed to familial relationships. For all the times this year I know I've been an embarassment, a terrible person, or just acted in a way my friends didn't deserve, there's been a core who have never failed to give me another go and have always come back for me, and I sometimes feel they see me as being someone better than I even see myself being. I don't deserve my friends sometimes, I don't deserve people like them, who would sit with me through the nights when loneliness may well have been the end of me, or who have thought nothing of answering their phone at some ungodly hour, or who have steadied my hand when I was out of control and steering myself wildly off course into the darkness. Thanks guys, I regret that I don't say it ever and perhaps come across as distant at times, but you've been the world to me this year and I could never express that in a way equal to how much I've felt it.

However, so many of my old closest friends, whom I shared so much with, are gone now that while I feel more secure in myself than I used to, I still feel a little left behind as well, and as I mentioned, this has sparked a wanderlust in me. Doubly, so many people I know are starting to get it together and settle down with someone they love, that I often feel a little left out in that respect too. It seems that as soon as I look for that other kind of relationship with a girl, more than just friendship, then they leave through coincidence and no fault of my own. Just divergent courses in life, wrong place, wrong time and so on, but fucking hell, when four or five of these random coincidences mount up, I'd like to think I can be understood for feeling like I'm jinxed or fucking cursed. These routine disappearances of love from my life are getting too much to handle. I now find myself resisting new intimacy, assuming that this too will soon be gone, they will leave like all the rest, and I know that this is no way to live.
I feel the need to confess that in my mind there is a recurring, precise sight; I am in a house, photographs and keepsakes of lives both seperate and conjoined cover the walls, as if the home was made of our very selves, and there are two children, two girls (Katherine Rose and Alice, whose middle name I don't know but I think is Natalie) and I am married, to someone who, typically, is no longer in my life, and equally as typically, never knew quite how I felt about her, and they are ours. This girl, I want her back in my life quite badly, and I want to tell her that I love her, because I never did, and though I don't expect anything good to come of it and in fact think it would probably be the final thing I ever say to her, I want her to feel the same way and start us on the path to making this sight something real.
My house and my wife and my girls in my head used to scare me when I first began to dream it, but right now, it has grown into a comfort, a some-when ideal. Wishful, futile, thinking.

There we have it though. I've got a life mapped out all the same, and that wasn't there this time last year. It kinda looks like, I want to live in Brighton, with a family, and I think the fact I haven't really got anything further in depth than those two massive yet vague goals is due both to the fact that I know this is a pipe dream that won't all fall into place in the forthcoming year or so, but also the fact that I don't really want much more than that, when I think about it.

I think I've been so busy trying to stay young that I've mostly forgotten that I'm getting older. I know 22 may not seem like much to some, in the grand scheme of things, but in my mind, I am growing older, more distant from my youth and there's nothing I can do to turn back time. This is my life that I am living right now, not some game, and I keep forgetting and forsaking that. If I come across as angry or 'bleak', as the years buzzword seems to have been, it's only because I've realised that life is wasting away second by second and I'm frustrated and wanting more all of a sudden, while not really being in a position to achieve it due to forces beyond my control right now. The decisions that I make from now on will matter, and this is something I must never forget again.