Wednesday 13 May 2020

Lockdown letter to a friend...

Dear you know who you are

THANK YOU!!!! Got your little package of delight this morning. Really cheered me up.

After good start with this whole situation (see post below) I have pretty much crashed into total gloom and apathy over the past week. Sick of gardening, cooking, and cleaning and can no longer even get off the starting blocks of anything creative. Spending a lot of time in bed watching stuff on Netflix and Iplayer.

Have been a few other things in the mix as always, including another episode of the long running, sibling-suicide PTSD drama, ‘I'm a sensitive, loving human, Get me the Fuck out of Here’. It’s like Netflix, only in your head and you have no idea you’re watching until about half way through the episode. This was a particularly harrowing episode called 'Missing in Spain', but I have not actually revisited this one before so am tentatively concluding it’s the last of the series. All the others are now repeats so I can generally switch them off as soon as I hear the opening tune.

It's not all shit tho... my birthday was actually great. We had a really nice day and night involving a takeaway from the pub and dancing in the vinyl room til about 1.00am. I think we concluded that Fear of Music by Talking Heads is the greatest album of all time. Mind you, on another occasion I think the conclusion was Tattoo You. Anyway I can't remember the last time we were up that late and we were very pleased with ourselves.

However, as much as I love my husband I am desperate to see and talk to another human being. Video chats and phone calls are now becoming more depressing than not having them. I just want to get on a train to an urban environment and hug random passers-by at this point.

Being so close to the station is also now frustrating.  I hear that lonesome whistle blow .... and I think of Evangeline and how I’ll see her in my dreams. And how I see K** and M** and Z** and S** and P** and D** and L** and T** and J** and other friends in my dreams too. Then I hear another train a-coming, it’s rolling round the bend and I ain’t seen a human since I don’t know when. If they freed me from this self isolation, if that railroad car was mine I know I’d take it on a lot further down the line. Then I could go shoot a man in Reno just to watch him die. Maybe not. Flights to Reno probably won’t be available for a while.

See I'm raving... song lyrics are increasingly replacing what used to be coherent internal dialogue. Maybe the best way to read it is as a scene-setting script for a new, dark comedy.... 

I love your new painting by the way. Really has an impact. Will look forward to seeing it and you in the flesh. I may get on a train soon. I could sit outside your house and talk to you through the window.

Really THANK YOU for prompting this communication.

See you soon.
Lots of love 
Xxxx