As if desolate in the weeks succeeding harvest, this has not been the era that created a genius – as I perhaps once thought it would – but rather an epoch that in all necessity stripped a soul of all its pretense and guilelessly inappropriate conduct. That can be no detrimental thing when you consider some of the situations such conduct has found me in. Although, in my defense, I only ever sought balance: a life to lead that bore niether condition nor restriction upon that which I already possessed the ability to judge for myself. But there is it nonetheless, a debate for every psyche imaginable.
A few months ago I found a… I can’t decide which of the words sound less grotesque: lump? growth? cyst? Whatever you prefer to call it, it appeared brazenly and without prior warning in a most sensitive area. I ignored it at first, convinced that it was some sort of white-headed spot where soap had collected beneath the skin. And that was all fine until it became rigid - like a tiny discus, an ever increasing circle of fear inducing alien.
I was laid in bed the other afternoon, my mood missing the weekends’ lost seretonin and my brain the process of thought beyond that which was blindingly obvious. Meaning I was laid in bed studying my cock and scared enough into making a doctors appointment. It was for two days later and, as you can imagine if you know anything about me at all, I was convinced that I had the ‘C’ word and had left it too late to be treated.
Walking to the doctors in Wednesday mornings’ sunshine I lifted my head to the sky trying to catch my breath. My heart pounded and my knees weakened. But there was also clarity. I thought about what I would do if I didn’t have long: I decided merely to finish my book, leave something behind containing a life-lesson so that mine wasn’t obsolete. I wouldn’t need to in the end, it really was just a cyst. As gross as that may be at least I’m not within the clutches of the wasting.
The truth is, I had been flirting with the idea of death. Not for any reason other than to be free of that which I seem to bring upon myself. It is not the world that craves me, it is I that would prefer to devour rather than watch it glide by from my tiny hermits-window. The world is often erroneous but so much more often beautiful. I had already decided to live.
As for Nottingham: Tim is moving to London, to greet his own destiny as one of the most successful medical students in history. Michael is starting an MA at my old university, ever free from his own restrictions and with more love in his heart than the world would know what to do with. Anna has a baby and a single life now: she becomes increasingly tiresome, as loathed as I am to admit it of a woman who made me feel so welcome here. Gary is currently revisting Barcelona with some friends and, I assume, trying to piece back together the life I appear to have torn apart.
All out of love and in search of the equipoise. I have tested this city’s magnetism several times before now, but it is perhaps time to let the era rest. In the most abstract way possible I have achieved what I set out to achieve. Removed of all those erroneous naivities I leave this city with a template on which to sketch a new life…
