Sadness

Thoughts flit and dive.

Memories.

When did I first feel this sadness? An image of myself hunched over my desk in the study in Dalston. I’m trying to revive a short story I’d started 5 years earlier. I’m startled by how hard writing is, by how difficult it is to get even one sentence to sing. I’m also fighting with guilt at a recent break up. It all piles on top of me. Guilt and failure. And creative endeavour.

The sadness starts there. The 3 will remain forever intertwined.

But no…my mind winds back further to an earlier instalment. After living away from home since the age of 19, I’m back home, aged 23. In the intervening years, I’ve travelled some; Israel, Egypt, America, Switzerland, Spain, France, India, Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, Western Sahara, Morocco, Mauritania, Mali, Senegal, the Ivory Coast, Guinea, Belgium.

Back in my childhood bedroom, working at my Dad’s miserable car body repair business in a forgotten corner of inner-city Birmingham. Losing patience with me one day, he smashes his coffee mug against a wall. He sacks me. The following morning, when he waits for me at the door in the grey dawn light, I refuse to don my overall. You sacked me, I say. I’m not coming back.

It’s very painful.

For both of us.

But thereby hangs another tale.

By night, I’m writing music with a friend – my lyrics to his music. But it’s very difficult and he peels off to go solo. I’m listening to Jeru the Damaja, Rae & Christian and a new band that’s just emerged from France called Air. Within 2 years, he’ll have a record deal with Björk’s label – One Little Indian. Ultimately, though, nothing will come of it. In Dalston, we’ll meet again.

It’s November and darkness oppresses us both, taking us back to earlier losses, earlier failures. We went from top of the class to University drop-outs in a matter of a few years.

This is sadness’ darker cousin – depression. I live with it, day in and day out. My friend was once hospitalised for it. I’m afraid of the contagion.

I needn’t be.

Within 2 months, I’ll be living in Paris and working at a Tex Mex restaurant at 68 rue de Ponthieu, just off the Champs Elysees called Cactus Charly. Within a year, I’ll have amassed the best friends I’ve ever known; they’ll be flanking me, Americans, Scots, Irish men and women, French and Moroccan, surrounding me at a shabby west African restaurant, singing “Happy 25th Birthday to You!” I’ll remember that we ordered food at midnight but it didn’t arrive til 3am and we didn’t care.

My mind continues to wind back further. Much further. To the birth of this sadness…