LITMIR.BIZ

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do hard drugs anymore, and urgently needs some kind of stimulant.

      It also seems rude to renege on the order half-way. But he regrets not doing so. And to the drip of desperation the familiar twist of self-reproach is added.

      The pressure inside him is mounting.

      I am a gasket starting to blow.

      But the coffee tastes different this time. More pungent and bitter.

      And as he tosses it back (like vodka, it is imperative it is consumed quickly) he feels that it matches his inner state.

      Unexpectedly, there is satisfaction in that. The first satisfaction he has experienced all week. His own physiology must have worked the effect; converting the insufficiently hot liquid into the mildly restorative potion it has seemed to become.

      And realizes how far he has fallen when miniscule unconscious influence over something so trivial seems to connote some kind of victory.

      Laney would not have been critical. She had been generously receptive to him as he had never been to her.

      Or perhaps to anyone for that matter.

       Hey we might as well have the full self-indictment.

      Rather than regarding them as defensive, Laney had seen all such comments as appealing self-deprecation. As evidence of his ability to laugh at himself.

      Where is Laney now when he needs her? She’d slipped his hold.

       Or had he driven her away?

      The possibility is one he doesn’t want to ponder. But there is little on which he wants to reflect on this cold winter morning of failure, with congealed dregs of coffee in front of him and a future which seems as unappetizing.

      Always receptive to distraction from the unpalatable (so I don’t, after all, lack receptivity) he scrutinizes the other patrons of the café. Checks out other accomplices in the pretensions this place has to being a decent coffee house.

      For those are the words emblazoned across the window- `Joe’s Coffee House’.

      An indolent scrawl, a hopeful suggestion. An aspiration perhaps.

      Maybe Joe, whoever he is, is having a tough time of it as well. Had envisaged, in his younger years (is he, too, middle-aged?) a profession more compelling than purveyor of indifferent coffee in premises at best banal and at worst sleazy. Maybe he had missed opportunities, fumbled the ball. And is now, in a different way like himself, not so much settling for less as valiantly holding on.

      Maybe the ability to hold on in the face of crumbling expectations is the most exacting skill of all.

       At the age of forty two, I have yet to master it.

      He needs to arrest his thoughts while he still can.

      Knowing and fearing where they could lead.

      A memory suddenly insinuates itself. A memory of doublebooking an engagement. He had arranged a dinner with friends when he’d already committed himself (except that he hadn’t) to a function with Laney’s family.

      How come, she had asked, you can recall all those work statistics yet not remember a simple arrangement with me?

      He’d said `they’re not comparable things’. And had been content to believe it; to leave unexamined a contradiction that surely indicated something concerning about the way his mind worked. Or about how it didn’t.

      Perhaps it also revealed something concerning about his character. Because of the two engagements, he had remembered the less important.

      The coffee shop is now thoroughly oppressive. He is not quite at the point at which he can locate the oppression within himself.

      He pays for the privilege (I am always paying) and seeks refuge in the street. Leaves eddy and swirl; a Bogart hat would not be inappropriate.

      For warmth. For protection.

      For disguise.

      And recalls something else as he saunters to the pub. It’s now almost one, and he needs food as much as he needs a drink.

      A(nother) conversation with Laney. A playful conversation (or as close as he could get to that) in the aftermath of sex.

      We can’t disguise ourselves from ourselves, she’d said.

      And he had said (and believed it)

       Ah but we can.

      How long had he believed that?

      And why, at this point, does it seem important to find out?

      Something jars him. He remembers a movie in which the quiet but potent denouement had been the realization of the protagonist that he had failed some obscure but significant test.

      That in the multiple, and sometimes unrecognized challenges life throws up, he’d been presented with one that had revealed him to be wanting. And had been forced to acknowledge an internal deficit of which he would have preferred to remain ignorant.

      Memory of that movie is disconcerting.

      For what other reason than that he can identify with it?

      But if he has failed to deliver in some important and irrevocable way (for that was the crunch; the self-insight had been non-negotiable) is that solely the product of his own weakness?

      Given what had happened to him – what had happened to him; those words still unseat him - could he have coped better?

      When he had always driven himself so hard?

      What chance had he ever had to indulge particular qualities and capacities, including some that denoted a fully functioning human being?

      What had happened to his ability to relax, to connect, to empathize?

      To spontaneity, generosity; the capacity to relate?

      He’d experienced those things fleetingly. Only to find himself withdrawing when something more seemed to be required of him.

      Sometimes, on those long night drives when almost all he could see was his own incapacity, he wondered whether it was possible to reconfigure himself.

      Or even to recognize what that might entail.

       Something has been taken from me.

       I don’t even know what it is. But I want and need it back.

      How did one begin to disclose to another, to a therapist, the enormity and devastation felt to have been wrought?

      He should be grateful even to be able to think about communicating it. For years he had stumbled alone like a blind man in a fog, barely able to register what he was experiencing.

      But it isn’t gratitude he feels now. It’s that cocktail of nausea and anxiety.

      It is overwhelming; he needs to pull over again…

       4

      `So how’s that skin cancer coming along?

      She winces at her friend’s directness. Diane is as forthright as she herself is tentative. Yet that’s also part of the reason for their friendship. The seeking out of opposites, the filling of deficits.

      For the most part they relate well. But there are times when their contrasting styles are problematic.

      And this is one of them.

      `It’s OK I think’.

      `Still using the Chinese herbs?’

       Does the question contain an implicit challenge? Or is she being over-sensitive?

      Maybe it’s the association with Shen.

      Gentle Shen, locked up in a detention centre.

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