On my return to my hometown I spent two years talking to barely anyone, a ghost of ill repute. I still often feel the urge to disappear again. A year apart from those I loved turned to ten; the landscape we grew up in transmutes into something unrecognisable, unrelatable. In their absence kittens become cats, our lives are too different and we have no shared language left. We have to make time for what’s important, and it seems we are no longer important to each other. And unexpectedly, conversely, what started to feel important to me is to feel okay with being on my own, to accept that despite my life orbiting around others it is the way I have always been.
Each morning before my fortnightly infusion I visit the hospital chapel, and I don’t pray but I read others’ prayers written down in the prayer book.
For someone who doesn’t believe in a god – at least not one who’s paying attention – I spend a lot of time in these spaces, thinking about how one day we’ll all be dead and nothing matters, and how sometimes the only way to deal with that is to spill it out as a prayer in a WHSmith ringbound notepad.
I think it reminds me that I’m not on my own, at least, in refusing to abandon the concept of a deeper meaning. Except my prayer book is shouting into the ether of this digital place, flooded with people who barely ever knew who I was or who haven’t for a very long time. I want to feel the existence of the congregation but not be of it. If I had any sense I’d be running a fucking marathon or something; just to force some meaning, anything with a finish line.
At the gatehouse of dreams stands a guardsman of duty,
and outside of those dreams your body’s not your body,
it belongs to God, the Company and to all loves and villains past and present
when he asks you to sing in his car, it’s him you’ll be singing for,
but your prayers belong to yourself, fill up the earth in landfill.
Still I read the prayers, like I read your statuses.
I’m not god (I don’t think), but at least someone’s heard you.