STEPS

CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR Freedom

Running out of time. With each new death announced, my own impermanence counting down. The mind perceptive, yet this impermanence unchallenged. Not creating, only ever suspended in the knowing. What the fuck. I should abandon this room, grab my boys and start living, anything but this monotonous partitioning of lives in separate rooms. But I lack the basic understanding of this living, this being the same as everyone else.

My brother's recent birthday, I agonised for weeks beforehand: No one to take along, to have at my side so I didn't drift alone looking for some vague connection in the crowd of twos and fours. The day drew near and I dreaded it, knowing exactly the way the night would play out. How these nights always played out, my aloneness glaring. The problem of trying to fit me in...

I took my oldest son. Hovered alone while he sat alone, both of us desperate to run away, back to the safety of the rooms we each occupied. A mass of couples, groups, groups within groups yet there was no way for me to reach any of them apart from brief cursory greetings. Nothing to say. A different world full of everything I lacked and at the same time despised: the flow of ease, the predictability of futures, the assurance of continuity... the comfort of stability. Concepts only ever tasted briefly and spat out, the taste unpalatable.

Upward fucking mobility. More labels. Earning by sacrificing, entitlements achieved by perseverance and adherence to a system I defined as soul-killing. Giving over of time, freedoms, dreams - for the right to consume, amass. Who were those people? Floating in their designer labels and arriving in their prestige vehicles from gadget-filled homes and annual holidays to foreign places? Perfect teeth, perfect hair, perfection wafting around them; a scent from an expensive bottle broken and spilling over. Measurable success equitably spread among them since they'd journeyed the decades in synchrony.

Whilst I side-stepped. Dancing and prancing. Seeking and rejecting. Craving and never satisfying the gnawing hunger. The straight road offering insufficient 'value', the side paths always beckoning with their lure of adventure and the chance of capturing this illusive essence of being. Their mobility systematic, arriving at a comfortable albeit compromised future at some point. I on the other hand dragged to it, spitting out wild words of protest all the while.

What the fuck. Is it worth it? This room I occupy, this isolation, is it so different from where they're at? What the fuck? Is the only distinction between us the degree of affluence? Who in fact holds greater freedoms? Me? Lacking the means to make desired changes yet not bound to exchanging labour for the privilege? They? Bartering their time and effort; working long hours for the entitlements they so proudly display?

Where did this unwavering need for freedom come from anyway? I try to source the beginning, the point where from it began. Was it them? I know my most feared fear: Being restrained, unable to move, caught in tight, restricting spaces. This likely surfacing after one held me down in the truck cabin, and the other held me in the cramped space, my pushing to create distance but having no room to move, the closed door on one side, the bulky stove on one side - and their mass on the other.

I've experienced this claustrophobic sensation over time, when in narrow, compact spaces. Elevators too full, rooms overly crowded, where I cannot move without touching another being or a solid barrier, a wall. Hotel rooms without opening windows or balconies. The ensuing panicked sensation of drowning, unable to draw breath, heart palpitating, eyes struggling to focus, mind overloaded to the point of blanking out.

In contrast I love heights, open places, mountains and valleys... vast seas. The countryside calls me over and over... the land. Forests, despite their at times jungle-like appearance fail to incite fear. Only humanity's closeness, the bodies of others too near, only the thought of being pinned down, trapped, disallowed movement.