Sorrow, anyone?

Even cockroaches sometimes go away. Smelly neighbours win holidays abroad and give you two weeks respite. Your birthmark can look better with age, or rather, with age comes the knowledge that having a birthmark makes you interesting, and sometimes interesting will do, if beautiful isn’t an option.

But the thoughts at the back of your head have nowhere to go. They circle, like basking sharks, shimmying a terrifying fin occasionally. And if your thoughts are like mine, they consist of some incontrovertible facts coupled with some unnerving logic, resulting in an intolerable situation that has to be tolerated. And so you can tell no-one.

There are some things that you can’t tell anyone.

You can tell people you stick your bogies on the underside of the bed – they may love you for that, as it frees them to tell you about where they daub theirs. You can admit to sexual hang ups, deviances, frigidity or nymphomania quite openly. These days who cares whether you have sex with pigs in crotch less panties. It may turn up on a blog site and win awards.

But don’t talk about sorrow. There’s something not quite right about that. Today is just too gung-ho, go-getting and brash for something that smacks of misery. Misery is, after all, an accumulation of disappointments. Which implies that you just couldn’t shift your problem point of view and get past the depression and therefore, subsequently, you gave in to maudlin feelings and dove headfirst into sorrow, as if it were a sheepdip so clingy that you were stained with it for months. Now that’s just not on.

You know you’re going to get out of bed anyway, and go do those supermarket, office, park, coffee bar kinda things, lamely, but with your full concentration, since only by focusing on the mundane can you rock through today and into tomorrow and some other tomorrow after that. And all the while that sorrow is still there.

If you shared this problem, it would not be halved. If you spoke it aloud, just to get those words out of your head for a while, the other person would merely look back, with barely disguised pity perhaps, or feigned sympathy, or worse, disgust. The sorrow would not, could not decrease. The person would not visit for a while, would be waiting for the time when you call them and say “Hey, it’s a fine day, eh?” with some degree of conviction, before they deem it safe, forgotten, unsaid.

If it were only a miscarriage of a foetal clump, you would rationalise it. If it were the cancerous death of your mother; it would be an event to mourn, that dwindles its pain to a commonplace sadness over time. If it were the birth of your three beautiful daughters to a man who cannot love you, it would be a sentence to endure, write about, battle daily, but live in hope of reprieve. These things are not sorrow: since they are the stuff of life. When does it become sorrow?

It’s when I get up in the morning full of disgust for the things I have said yesterday to those children. It’s standing in the hallway holding the phone in my hand with no idea who to ring. It’s seeing pink handprints on her shoulder when she’s dressing. It’s the fights they shouldn’t have seen. It’s knowing ‘I’ve done this before and I will do it again’.

It became sorrow when the weight of my selfishness balanced the weight of my guilt, like some dull stones in a lead necklace.