Kissing Frogs

While I was falling, I hit a cloud of debris from long ago, full of unhappy things and times. They glued themselves to me adding to the already weighty feelings of misery, failure and guilt. By the time, I finally hit the bottom of the pit, I was literally encrusted with muddy memories and razor sharp rememberings of childhood and the playhouse, where the play that happened was a long way from the games that my friends and I played with each other. That all this should surface now, added another layer to the already crushing confusion.

It’s difficult to quantify the amount of loss that happened in the next couple of years, conferences not attended, road trip round the US to visit long-time-no-see friends not taken, trip to Goa declined, job opportunities lost, friedships failed because I couldn’t leave the confines of the abyss I had landed in. I was paralysed by an unnameable fear; if I set foot outside its boundaries, awful things would happen. I stopped, just stopped seeing people, consciously swerved away from any sort of social media, which felt like a mine field. What if I accidentally did a search or clicked on a profile which might get construed as ‘stalking’? For large parts of days, then weeks, then months, then years, it was just me in this dark, hostile place with only the shadow of my ESL (enter stage left) tormentor, never visible, never seeable or touchable, but the presence filled the space constantly leaving only the tiniest cracks for me to inhabit, to breathe in.

But, I functioned, I turned up as a facsimile of me. I went to work, dealt with family, life and the things we have to do, habitual, repetitive, constant actions requiring nothing much more than going through the motions. I kept a pilot light burning that meant I never quite went out. Because I did what was expected, no-one really noticed all the things I wasn’t doing.

Then Covid came along. I was in Reading the day the first death was announced at the hospital there. It didn’t feel particularly ominous. It was of course, the beginning of tectonic plate shifting in the way we lived and interacted with each other. For me, the loss of freedom was not an issue. The exhausting process of finding excuses not to do things, not to turn up, was taken out of my hands. I didn’t rail against being stuck at home, I was freed, liberated. It was a sanctuary. Being plunged in to a virtual world of Zoom and Teams and FaceTime, was perfect in a thousand different ways. No more slaloming around invitations to go to places I knew I would never make it to, and if I didn’t feel like being virtually sociable the poor Internet connection where we lived offered a convenient and plausible way out.

Spending so much time inhabiting a life online produced some odd results. Everything about the story of ESL is stranger than fiction, it defies logic and reason. As Neil Gaiman said, ‘Life is always going to be stranger than fiction, because fiction has to be convincing, and life doesn’t.’ And that defines all the events that happened.

Although I have varied the exact circumstances in different versions of the story, a bit of research for a thesis resulted in finding a version of the ESL’s life and the ways in which we create versions of ourselves. It brought him in to the light, he became real, substantial and for the first time, it felt possible to start work on the new version of the book.