It’s hard to think about the past sometimes, to remember old pains. I have chosen to do this to myself, to recant the life of a man merely surviving. For the most part, it was a good life. I had a loving father and mother until the age of eight, and after that, I had a mother who tried her best to hide the liquor. Granted it was not one of those lives that film is made of, but it is mine. So, I thought I would tell it, and I do hope you find some understanding of the difference between survival and living.“One cannot change, that is to say, become a different person while continuing to acquiesce to the feelings of the person one has ceased to be.”
― Marcel Proust, Swann's Way
It starts on the day I lost my father, the day I lost everything. It was the first day I heard my mother cry. Even now, I can picture it clearly in my mind – I was eight years old, sat in a hospital waiting room, and my mother, my mother broke before my eyes. For hours she would cry, beg and wail at the walls, in some vain hope, in some misguided belief that God would somehow bring back her beloved Richard. Of course, he never did. I wanted to be there for her, to protect her from whatever was making her wail, but the nurse pushed me aside and told me to wait until my mother had calmed down. It never happened, she never stopped crying, and in the end, my mother died that night, as the nurse held her and spoke words of condolence. No one looked at the little boy who had lost his world.
For a few months after my father’s passing, she tried to be the mother I had known. I would arrive home from school and my tea would be on the table. She really did try. Every day, she tried. I never knew that in that mug of tea was whiskey so strong it could strip paint. She hid that from me until she could hide it no more.
When the social worker came and took me, she didn’t cry. Instead, she took my hand in hers and whispered that she wished she had been in that car with him. It was the last time I would see my mother. From the back screen on a police car, I watched her being carted off to the asylum. The police tried to tell me it was for the best, that she would be helped, and I would be returned to her care in a matter of months.
Well, months passed and instead of being taken home, I was placed in a boarding school. They had figured out how bright I was, and my mothers’ brother was some big shot barrister. He sorted everything. After all, no nephew of his was going to be some factory worker. No, he fixed everything. I had a place at Eton where all the good, honest boys were. I would grow up to be just as brilliant as him.
My uncle was a good man. He may not have shown me much physical or emotional love, but he did right by me. I had a good education, I was never hit, I was never hungry – but I was never happy. Those days at Eton were some of the hardest to bare. I would see the other boys with pictures of their families, and I would hear them talk about their holidays – meanwhile, I was alone. Every school break I would be sent back to the cold and empty house of my terminal bachelor of an uncle. There were no holidays, he was far too busy with work. I would cook myself breakfast, lunch, and tea. He would come home at three in the morning and head straight to his office. I was to be silent. I was to be unseen. How could that ever have been life? I was surviving.
It wasn’t until I was eighteen that I started to find a small amount of happiness. I was accepted into Oxford University where I was to study History alongside English literature. It was there that I found my first and truest love. It hit me like a bolt of lightning. There, as if waiting just for me, the most beautiful sight graced my eyes. The Library. I had never seen such wonders. Even now, the scent of ancient leather-bound works of art has me in raptures. Almost immediately I had found my new home for the next six years.
Things were never the same after I left Oxford. I worked a few different jobs, all carefully vetted by my uncle. It wasn’t until I was aged twenty-eight that I found my calling. A small antiquarian book shop needed a weekend assistant. That job meant the world to me. I still had other jobs, mainly working in my uncle’s office as his personal assistant, but nothing fulfilled me like shelving books in that small little shop in Camden.
Another ten years passed before my next meaningful life change. I had stopped working for my uncle, instead, I was running the small shop as the owner had decided to retire two years previously. If I had known then what I know now, I would have been far kinder to that sweet old man. You see, he had no children. There was no one to leave the small little shop to, no one, except me. Ten years after starting to work weekends at a small antiquarian book shop, I suddenly owned it. I can not begin to tell you how wonderous it felt, though bittersweet. I was finally the master of my own life.
That bookshop was my everything. My husband. My child. Everything. I could have happily passed my life in that small little book shop, selling rare and valuable books to rich and powerful men. And I suppose, for a time, I was happy. Every day was the same, people would come in, books would leave. It truly was the most precious period of my life. But, like everything else, peace always has an end.
The end of my peace starts in the present. A month ago, I decided to move here to Canada, a good friends daughter lives out here and I thought it would be wonderful to spend more time with her. I came here with every intention of starting a new life (still owning an antique bookstore, I couldn’t change that part of myself) but instead, I have found myself just repeating old patterns. I have never truly lived, just accepted the things that were happening around me and surviving.
Two weeks ago, I was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, a week before that I found out that I have a cataract in my right eye. I am suddenly faced with becoming old. My next big life change will be death. I do not wish to survive anymore, I wish to live. But I do not believe I can change who I am.
I’ve decided to write this, while I can, in order to in some small way live a little. This will be the journal where I document the last twenty or so years of a life unlived.
