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I watch him almost everyday. I watch him now, through the reflection
in his bedroom window. See the expression on his face, the deep lines
of weariness as he leaves his bed having been awake and turning for two
hours. He almost doesn't sleep, finally falling at one maybe two and
then waking again at four thirty maybe five. He falls out of bed around
seven thirty, dangling his skinny legs over the side of a raised bed
and then lazily pulling on whatever clothes he finds to go down to
breakfast.
I watch him there again, regular as clockwork normally, although today
he has eaten a little less. He normally eats the same amount every day.
I think maybe he counts it. Securing his world and himself by making
everything around him rigid. He told me that himself once. Then again
he jokes about it in the same line turning whatever seriousness he
might otherwise have been talking to me about into black humour.
Having eaten, dissected whatever was on his plate and either wolfed it
down or nibbled in the most minute pieces we pull ourselves up and
slink out. The joyful chirpiness of those around us was all too much as
Oscar Wilde said 'only boring people are interesting at
breakfast'.
Today when I watch him I think I can tell that he is apprehensive. He
thinks that something will happen or maybe he is slipping back a little
again, back to the security of self destruction and self denial. I can
tell this, because he spends longer after the shower than normal,
looking at himself. Pulling rolls of skin off his body and testing
whether they are even slightly larger so that he can have a reason
other than the reality for being even slightly unhappy. Turning round
and round in what to my eyes only seems farcical madness to observe and
test every part of himself.
Then we both each of us go through our routine, dress, walk to
assembly, lessons. The non-descript part of school life that we are
supposedly in school for. I observe him through the day. The way he
walks sometimes slightly hunched and then normal, as if a weight has
been lifted off his shoulders. I only catch him in reflections,
otherwise I can't watch him. He talks to people, but for each one I
know he shows different faces, different skewed visions, of what is
really him.
Then later in the day, in between lessons, one of the teachers stops
him, and she tells him that he has to do assembly the next day. Maybe
this is it, the apprehension I could sense. He tells me later that he
knew the day before but had assumed he wouldn't have to do anything and
that his last girlfriend who he deliberately hasn't spoken to in weeks
is the other person he now has to organise it with.
I watch him again later when he comes out of himself. Stops for a
little withdrawing into solitude, and the inevitable paranoia and
depression that searching within his own mind for self comfort only
inevitably brings to him, I think. He talks to her for once again. In
the beginning I notice he is scratching his arm, where his three bar
line scars are. An obvious sign of his own under confidence in the
moment as he reverts back to proving to himself he is real through his
own ability to hurt himself. Then he frees up, into a happiness I
haven't seen him in since she ended it, and he felt dropped. Or so he
told me, abandoned again. They laugh at their own particularly stupid
wit and attempts at philosophical intelligence. The pretence at knowing
about things particularly him because he has already been forced into
so many realisations about the reality of life, through hospitalisation
and forced rehabilitation.
They become to my eyes, close again in that moment. They hold each
other once more, finding comfort in each others arms, and then I think
as I watch them talk they are considering going back, but both between
them each make their own choice not to. In that when I watch him in
reflections, walk away he seems happier, strangely as if in choosing
for himself he has let go. I hope he has, he told me over and over
again, how he has always been the one dropped and how much it hurts him
again and again to be rejected.
I meet him again, later and we talk, walking back and then trundling
through to the end of the day. He still eats little, dissecting what he
does and then eating later at inappropriate times and inappropriate
things for someone who knows they should be careful of guarding their
own feelings. Locking himself up again a little. Trying to secure the
sudden confusion of talking to her again has caused, as he flips too
quickly between different masks of himself. In the changeover
accidentally having showed glimpses of the real self beneath. As he
switches between happy and angry and sad and depressed only serving to
confuse him as to which he really is, confusing me. Slipping out of
control in the most stupidly primeval of situations, when he as to eat,
the one situation he should be in control of. Stupid such a simple
thing that has been tipped upside down, by any one of the little
actions she might have done when they talked and I didn't see or
notice.
Then he falls back into being silent and simple self denial again. He
has been more silent than he normally is all week. I noticed earlier in
the day someone else talking to him, asking whether he was ok, or being
messed around again because he had been so quiet. Simply tired he
answers and then laughs for no known reason other than to laugh feels
better than to cry.
As we sit in his room at the end of the evening talking and I see that
on his desk, he has been painting and writing again. We're laughing
because he thought of something he had said earlier in the day.
Then suddenly as he looks in the mirror and I see in reflection him
poking himself, he explodes into anger. I watch all the muscles in his
face contort and then , as he smacks his fists into the hard wooden
side boards of him bed again and again, not repeatedly and
uncontrollably, but timed so that he puts maximum force behind each
punch so as to hurt himself the most. He screams in himself he wants to
be sick, that he is too fat, that he needs to loose weight. As I watch
him its as if in switching faces so many times he has forgotten which
one is him so the easiest solution now to any challenge to him is to
try and deny he has a face.
Then he stops, after minutes, and starts crying, wailing at the lack of
the numbing of the pain. I can see his knuckles and within minutes they
are already swelling. The middle one on his right had where he
fractured it doing the same thing six months ago, bulbous and already
going grotesquely purple. Then after a while he picks himself up having
vented his anger as he daily does whenever he cannot cope with some
emotional event, and looks into the mirror. The mass of contradiction
that talking to her again has created, wanting to be held and pushed
away, whether he is in fact a friend , but then as she tells him
everything he doesn't want to know that he isn't. Whether he should
exist, and have a face, secure himself, but give a target to whatever
he slinks and hides from or simply deny whatever he is but then not
know what or who he really is.
I examine in the reflection the blotchy red eyed face. I realise in
examination, that it is me I am watching. It is me, I watch myself,
only it is the older version, who has learnt through experience and
forced acceptance of what unhappiness in life there can be.
Then after momentary realisation we collapse back again, climbing into
bed and slipping again at last temporarily into the exhausted numb
refuge that sleep offers each night. When finally briefly he no longer
questions himself and we reach in unconsciousness what we truly
desire.