A Portrait of Sad

Mille fois.

What is that? What does it mean? It was all over my dreams last night. Even after one scenario had passed and I had moved into my next banal dream-narrative, it was still cropping up, swimming heavy and languid in my unconscious. “Mille fois”.

I Googled it when I woke up. French, obviously. “(Merci) mille fois”: trans. “thank you a thousand times”. “Many thanks”, “thanks a million”, that sort of thing. Not related to the mille feuille, which is a type of pastry. Did I know this already? Was it one of those little tidbits of information you pick up in life without realizing it, and that resides somewhere in the recesses of your hard drive just waiting to pop out during dreams and pub quizzes?

I recall my “Eusebius” dream of many years ago; when I came to the next day I researched the name and learned that he was the Bishop of Caesarea in the 4th century. I guess I must have read about him somewhere. But last night- mille fois? Where did that come from? Was it you, Henry, sending me a message? Before I went to sleep, I had invited you to meet me on the astral plane. Was mille fois actually “non, merci mille fois” ; “thanks very much, but no”? A rejection, in other words. How typical. Rejected even in my own dreams.

Or yesterday, Henry, when I masturbated and chanted your name like a mantra, dedicating those three orgasms to you, was merci mille fois your thank you? If so, did you mean it in a good, genuine way, or in a condescending, dismissive way? “Gee, thanks a million. You really needn’t have bothered.” Or, when I touched myself and thought of you, and asked if you could feel me, did you hear? Was mille fois your way of telling me, “Yes, my love, I feel you. Very much. A thousand times.”

Of course, I haven’t eaten in three days, so maybe I was dreaming of French pastries, and I’ve just remembered it wrong. Come to think of it, I was eating a chicken drumstick later on in the dream…

***

Oh, Henry, sometimes I wish I’d never laid eyes on you. I know that’s not fair to you. I know it’s not your fault, and what I said makes it sound like I blame you. I don’t. This is my problem, and it always has been my problem, ever since I can remember.

Sometimes I think I’m not wired for happiness, except in my fantasies. Happiness is, for me, experienced as a simulacrum of what I imagine it must feel like to be somebody else. That woman, in those circumstances, with that man, and those children, and that fabulous career. The images are never based on my own life, only on the pretend me. I’m never that woman; she is not really me, and I can never be her. Consequently, I don’t believe I’ve ever really felt.

Actually, that’s not true. I feel lots of things; despair, self-loathing, misery, loneliness, hurt, sadness. What I mean is happiness, joy. I don’t believe I’ve ever felt joy. Joy, to me, is like the summit of a mountain — one of those big, fuck-off type mountains like Everest or Annapurna. There are clouds wafting lazily around the top of the massif and beyond them, at the highest peak, there are lots of little poles with multi-colored flags flapping in the wind, left there by all the climbers who made it to the top and found their joy.

Whereas me, I keep climbing and climbing, thinking I’ll soon get to the summit. I climb until everything hurts, and I’m almost ready to quit, but I keep going nonetheless. Occasionally there’s a little glimmer of hope that peers through the clouds; for a while, you were one of those glimmers. But when I do emerge on the other side of those clouds, I’ve still not reached the peak, and there’s another rockface still to traverse.

Well, I don’t think I’m ever going to reach the top now, Henry, and I’ve been on this expedition for a while now. I’m tired, and my body is starting to give out. The air has been too thin for too long, and it hurts to breathe. I don’t know how much stamina I have left in me for this interminable climb.

***

When I’m in bed at night, I imagine that you’re lying beside me. Sometimes we talk as we settle down to sleep, and I tell you about my day while you stroke my hair, or my forearm, while I rest my head on your chest and feel your heartbeat on my cheek. Other times we don’t say anything at all. We just look deep into each other’s eyes. At times it feels so real that I get that funny, flickering feeling of butterflies in my solar plexus. Other times, when I’m honest with myself and acknowledge that you’re not really there anymore, I feel so empty and sad, and my lip starts to quiver and tears sting my eyes.

During the night, when my duvet gets tangled up in just the right way or the pillows on the right side of the bed (your side) slip a little, it feels like it’s you there in the bed with me. I move in my sleep and I feel the sensation of your body next to me or pressed up close behind me, spooning me. When that happens I always lean back a little harder, pressing body against you and making the most of that happy accidental arrangement of bedcovers that gives the false impression of your form; supine, dreaming, and restful.

But deep down, I always know you’re not really there. And I’m starting to resent that duvet, those pillows, because it feels as though they’re mocking me: “this is as close as you’re ever going to get. You better make the most of this imagined intimacy brought by tangled bedclothes and your semi-conscious mind, because this is all you have left now. This stunted half-life is all you have to hold on to.” Bastards.

At times talking to these four walls is my only conversation for days on end. Weeks, even. But even although it’s four cold walls and an empty room, in my head you’re there, and you hear me when I talk to you. I imagine that you’re responding to what I say, and I write your dialogue and feed you your lines. You always know just what I need to hear at any given moment. Funny that, isn’t it? At times I almost feel like we’re still two normal, healthy people having a normal, healthy relationship. Except there aren’t two of us in this relationship any more, are there? There’s just me. And I’m not normal nor, I fear, healthy.

***

The first time I saw you, I don’t think I really registered you at all. Sorry! But the more I saw of you the more I liked you, and gradually I came to find you the most beautiful creature I’d ever seen. I think it was your eyes. Such an iridescent blue, sockets just that little bit too narrow giving you the look of someone who’s half-asleep. With the sockets so small, you could almost miss the impact of those irises. Until you got close up that is, and then -BAM!- there were entire galaxies in there. There was a fleck in the left one, and I used to imagine it as a little planet hovering there in that incandescent blue solar system. Hmm, a solar system is different to a galaxy, isn’t it? I’m mixing my metaphors.

See how much I still need you here, Henry? I can’t even make a decent metaphor anymore. And you would know exactly how to frame that whole astrological analogy to turn it into profound poetry. You were always so clever, whereas my brain is now atrophying at a rate of knots. And that’s got to be a huge turn-off to someone like you, always so wise and erudite. I’m just an idiot who’s forgetting everything she once knew.

And I used to know things, Henry. I was quite bright in my heyday. But what would you think of me now? Fool, imbecile, ignoramus? I guess I would at least prefer those monikers to weirdo, sick, mentally ill. After all, pity is far more painful than disdain. You can’t really respect someone if all you feel for them is pity.

That’s probably why there’s such a stigma around mental illness, and why the prospect of being exposed as a crazy person is so terrifying. I mean, I know that everyone worries that they’re a bit of a loony, but there are different degrees, aren’t there? Different degrees of lunacy along the spectrum of madness. We’d probably all be mortified if anyone we knew found out just what level we were at, because what if, God forbid, our own level of crazy were further advanced than theirs? We’d no longer all be laughing together- “ha ha, aren’t we all just so mental?! What are we like?” Now there would be hesitation in the laughter while everyone around you tries to gauge whether you’re so far gone that you’re a danger to yourself or others.

I can’t imagine anything more soul-destroying than seeing the moment when laughter and camaraderie turns to questioning and then pity. And so I keep my crazy bottled up, hidden away from the world so that no one can see it and feel sorry for me.

Thank God you never saw me like this, Henry. The last vestiges of my thinly cobbled together sanity would leave me instantly if I had to see those magnificent swirling blue iris galaxies cloud over with pity and disappointment. Better to have lost you quickly than to have had to watch you retreat slowly as I got crazier, and fatter, and stupider.

***

My life doesn’t feel real since you’ve been gone. I feel like I’m living in a black and white movie, or that I’m nothing but a figure in an old portrait that’s colors have faded, turning the image wan and insipid. Everything is grey. There is no color anymore.

My mind seems to slip further away every day, and I feel like I’m stumbling about in a thick fog, trying to catch up to it. Losing you was like being lobotomized. People talk about the pain of loss, but for me it’s numbness. It’s shuffling through life in a constant state of catatonia, my hair lank, my mind slow, and my body lethargic.

Day after day, I float from the bed to the sofa in a daze, a ghost of a woman. Stretched out on the cracked leather, cushions strewn around me and an overflowing ashtray sitting precariously on the arm-rest, I stare at my reflection in the funereal blackness of the television screen. It is a sepulchral image of emptiness; a portrait of sadness that would be exquisitely filmic, were it not so perniciously destructive.

©️ Jupiter Grant, 2021

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Jupiter Grant is a self-published author, blogger, narrator, and audiobook producer. Buy me a coffee here: https://ko-fi.com/jupitergrant

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