Sometimes, when I am walking down the street or watching television or looking out of my window, a feeling comes upon me. And no, it’s not the need to pee. It is a feeling that I crave – but I’ve never been quite able to vocalise. The closest I can get is that it’s a feeling of complete and utter familiarity with the world. Of perfect correspondence with humanity – almost as though we’ve all been holding our breath for the longest time, and we’ve only just let go.
It’s a sense of my own total connectedness with the world, that I am just doing what everyone else is doing and what I am doing, everyone else is too. It's like déjà vu except it’s not my experience I’m reliving, it’s someone else’s. I can feel the sameness running through me as I feel an ice cold beer surging through me on an empty stomach on a hot summers’ day. It’s a sense of the ordinariness of my existence, and the ordinariness of everyone else’s – and it’s a delicious ordinariness, ripe for the plucking.
It's not happiness though – happiness crests within you when you’ve had just the right amount to drink and no more, or when you realise the guy you fancy fancies you back. This isn’t happiness, not at all. Sometimes it comes upon me when I’m at my lowest. Other times, it comes upon me at the simplest of moments. When I’m looking through other people’s windows, at how they’ve chosen to decorate, at how they’ve chosen to live. I think about how familiar that space is to them, the things that must have happened there, and I think about how alien it is to me.
In the summer I want to throw the windows open and invite the world inside of my own. In the wintertime, I find myself looking through other peoples’ windows and wishing I was in there with them. And then I realise I have my own window that anyone can look through. And then this feeling rises within me, that we are all the same and that no one gets it really. That we’re all just eating our dinner in front of the tele, wondering what to watch and what time we need to go to bed and whether we’ve got a while to watch that film before we start to yawn.
When I’m in a bar speaking to someone and I think we’re flirting but I can’t quite tell. And we go out for a fag and we’re listening in to someone else’s conversation. It’s dusk and there’s still a whole evening ahead of us, but nothing is going to happen because neither of us will say anything that’s on our minds. And when I go back inside, the young woman on bar is rolling her eyes at the drunken idiots staring at her from across the room, and I realise that the same thing has been happening for thousands of years, and will continue in much the same vein for another hundred at the least.
I have chased this feeling for as long as I can remember. It never happens when I want it to. It never happens when I feel it should. It sneaks up on me and makes me feel that maybe I’m not out of place. It happens when I’m in a queue at the chippie or laughing at something someone said on the tele or walking over Waterloo Bridge after dark with the same view spread out in front of me that first confronted me when I was 18 years old and had no idea what the hell I was doing. It happens when I think of the rooftops laid out over London and everyone sleeping beneath them. But equally, it happens in none of those situations too. It’s the warmth like a flickering flame. It does want it wants.
When I was younger, I thought that this feeling inside of me was the desire to run off into the dark in the dead of night and explore each and every corner of myself and this world. I thought it was the future beckoning me. I thought that this was how I should feel all the time. How I would feel all the time at some point in my future. Now, I’m not so sure. I have thought that maybe this feeling is what all those religious people are chasing after. I’ve thought that maybe this is the feeling that people dismantle their realities for and head off to communes and retreats to try and achieve. I have thought that maybe this is enlightenment, or as close as I’ll ever be to finding it, but I know how that sounds.
Maybe it’s just living. Maybe it’s just the feeling life gives you, and I should be feeling more of it but I’m not. I just don’t know what it is in other people, barely myself. I want to know if anyone else feels this, or if it’s only me. That sounds silly – I cannot be the only one. But it’s an odd thing to bring up, even at the best of times. Certain experiences seem to not want to go in to language, says W.S Graham. And this is one of them. I cannot make language fit what’s already there. It’s an experience I cannot verbalise for fear I will have given away a secret. Whether it’s my own secret or someone else’s, remains to be seen.
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