Mount Pleasant

I needed, badly, distraction from* M. I decided to get off my Cardiff-bound train at Swansea (I wanted to forget about Cardiff too). Even if distraction were to prove impossible to get, I could do some grieving there, I thought; somehow, the city seemed well suited for sadness as it had a quite distinct air of un-fulfilment about it. As if it were a place living without its other half; in fact, I believe Swansea has given up on looking for its other half. 

When I emerged from the modest, albeit elegantly-façaded, station, it was already dark. The evening was unclear and damp, so my mind immediately felt at home. I veered off High Street and brushed past some decent architecture, which normally would introduce a dose of harmony into me but this time it did next to nothing to pacify my painful confusion. I was looking at the details, proportions, materials but they couldn’t reach me. A veil of numbness descended between me and the world in place of the thrill-magnifying love-lens that was there just a few weeks earlier. I strolled on, nearly indifferent to the aesthetics of the universe; only my intellect knew the beauty I was passing; my heart remained immune to it. Soon I found myself climbing a madly steep lane.

Out of habit (and out of good philosophy), every time I stopped to regain my breath, I repeated an old mantra I say on loveless days: ‘The thrill is out there, somewhere’. I was moving up alongside a crescendo of cheap, generic terrace houses. Most were dark inside, but in a few the lights were on; I tried to see what's inside. I wondered if there was some passion or at least romance there, but I failed to see any. Everything felt half-alien. Projecting my life onto the lives of the invisible inhabitants, I imagined them pointlessly going through loveless motions of loveless lives. 'Why bother living in those houses?' I thought. 'Why bother living in Swansea? Why bother doing anything?' I stopped near the top and looked back.

The awkward tangle of the streets below, not so dissimilar to all those streets in Britain and in Poland where the recent and final developments had been taking place (well, at my end and mostly in my head at that; what had been going on in hers, only Jesus knows), looked less daunting now. The lights below succeeded in breaking through the damp mist and offered a whiff of relief. I was quite high up and the city at my feet took humbler proportions. I had an illusion that everything was growing manageable again, potentially comprehensible again; I felt bolder – seeing the bigger picture always lifts me up, a little. Unfortunately, the faint optimism didn’t last long: the Swansea on the other side of the hill dashed any hope of a new bright vision; the architecture was all over the place, so was the way it was laid out.

There was no view over the bay - not that I was likely to see more at this time of the day and in this weather anyway – or any indication which way to go, except one: another, even higher hill. I started the ascent. A tall, ugly building sprung up in front; a part of its name was 'Trinity'. A little farther I noticed another name: Mount Pleasant. I tried not to focus on what the names were attached to, but on their message.  

As I moved up, I realised something: not only did I struggle with gravity, but also with another force, an anti-force in fact: a feeling of being unsustained; all the emotions, words and thoughts I’d been the target of for over the last few months had been taken away and redirected on someone else. I kept existing only thanks to some great miracle; and if it hadn’t been for my intellect, it would be an animalistic existence. A pub appeared on the horizon, but when I got closer I decided to ignore it; it was one of those old establishments whose warm tradition had been gutted to make room for a new, cold one; there was little chance I would find any comfort there, apart from the booze.

I came to a fork in the road; I took the steeper (and I’d like to think - less taken) path. ‘How could I allow my existence to become dependent on one person?’ I scolded myself, but stopped short of branding myself a fool. A man and a small boy appeared further up the street, walking towards me. The boy, evidently loved, was trying to catch up with his dad and as he was making his small, fast steps, he was singing a pop hit, as if my problems didn't exist at all, as if they were all invented by me; but, somehow, I didn't hold it against him. When they passed me me, I turned round to enjoy the sight of a child who had what I had not. The man waited for the boy and then picked him up and rested on his shoulders. The boy went silent for a brief moment and then gasped.

The view before him, and before me, consisted of hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of small lights rolling out far into the night. We couldn’t see the bay, but in the distance a few single shimmering dots marked the edge of the Gower Peninsula. And then I became that boy for a moment and, just like him, I felt - and the feeling went through me like an enflamed arrow - that the gift is always there, that it keeps on giving, that it’s all the time at my disposal, and that all contingent thrills must be enclosed in the Necessary Thrill, that all contingent loves must be contained in the Necessary Love.

I took one last look before resuming the ascent and thinking about the woman. “Actually”, I said to myself, “any piece of **skirt will do***”.

 

 

 

*thinking about
**decent
***I was probably wrong