LOSING BATTLES

“Sometimes I just wish that it would all be over and I could relax and have a good rest”

Of course you should be careful what you wish for and merely writing that down has given fate a big ol’ temptation to drop me right in it, look down upon me from that circle of daylight at the top of the pit, taunt me with some platitudes along the lines of “Now you’ve got what you wanted, how do you like it…?” and then slam down the lid and leave me festering alone in the darkness.

I’ve rarely wondered what my own personal “Room 101” might be because I’ve never really thought about it seriously before, but I’m wondering about it now…

After all, when you’ve spent getting on for half a century pretty much terrified of everything life has thrown at you, which is the one thing you could pick out and say that it is absolutely, definitely the most terrifying thing of all…?

I do sometimes wonder whether fate merely shuffles the pack, has a quick chat with his friend Karma and then zaps you with the thing you’ve always secretly feared the most.

A loss of dignity, perhaps…?

A loss of the sense of self…?

The mind going…?

The anti-whatever-I’m-fors kicking down the door and dragging me outside to their killing fields…?

Prolonged torment and torture (because I know I would crack)…?

Excruciating and endless pain…?

A lifetime of Sunday afternoons spent with your family…?

A disfiguring illness…?

I remember once that a rather shocking image was put into my mind about a relative of a friend and it bothered me a lot. That image - it involved carving off a forest of mushroom-like growths from a face - kept me awake at nights for years (sometimes it still does) and would sometimes cause the bile to rise if I thought about it for too long, or it would unexpectedly spring to mind at the most inopportune moments and quite ruin my morning. Like, well... Right now, actually...

When similar disfigurements began to appear upon me as I got to that sort of age when they naturally start to, I did wonder whether she had indeed, simply by telling me, cursed me that day to suffer precisely the same fate simply by the fact of putting that image into my mind so many years ago…

Then, recently, I saw a man in a shop who’s nose had so many Rhinophymic growths bursting from it that I couldn’t help but notice it. But was it fascination or fear that drew my eyes towards it time and again? Was I really just wondering whether my own nose would one day look like that? Did it worry me that people would start to stare in much the same way in which I was as they strolled around the fruit and vegetables…?

Or was I just being horrible to keep on glancing at the poor man?

There is, of course, always lurking inside me the person that I really wish I could be, the sort of person who would never have noticed that, been “blind” to it and just accepted it as part of the great diversity of human life and circumstances.

The better person who hadn’t spent far too many years in a wretched state of fear and loathing, rather than this one who’s permanently disappointed, despairing, defeated or terrified.

The one who could enthuse about things, or be enthusiastic about something that other people might just consider to be “cool”. The bloke who could actually be considered to be good at something or not feel as if his life were always about to be torn apart…

Sometimes it’s as if all the fight has finally been knocked out of me, almost as if the battle’s been won and I don’t feel like carrying on.

Of course, sometimes it’s not the battle (or the war) that’s significant, but the opponent, and once the opponent has been removed from the battlefield, then you realise that you actually start to miss them in some small way, as if all of the fighting gave you some sort of purpose that you’re now lacking.

I don’t think that I’m explaining this very well, which is odd because I woke up this morning with this argument fully formed and now I’m groping around in the fog trying to grasp at the vaguest of recollections of what it was I meant, and I’m starting to suspect that I didn’t really understand what it was I was thinking about at all…

Another battle I’m losing…