Homesick
I once went to Shoreditch House with a famous transphobe, racked up a huge bill and told the staff that they would pay for it. Unfortunately the person in question made me pay them back, which I think is outrageous. I obviously did too good a job of pretending not to be poor.
The most embarrassing thing that has ever happened to me is drunkenly paying for all my friends at a restaurant and then, the next day, soberly having to send a message asking them to pay me back because I really couldn’t afford to have made such a gesture. Probably they wondered why I had done it in the first place, to which I can only say: I love paying the bill, but I hate having paid the bill.
At 4am I go into the baby’s room, which is warmer than the rest of the house, and I take him from his cot. I sit on the bed, lift my clothes and feed him. I don’t turn on the light or talk to him because I want him to know that it is still night time. We sit quietly like this, him drinking and me holding him, occasionally looking at the clock and calculating how much more sleep I am likely to get. It is warm and quiet. It took about four months for breastfeeding to stop being painful, but I persevered because I love to suffer. The feeling of him drinking from me is good. He is so heavy against me. He breathes noisily. Then I put him back in the cot and he falls back asleep. I go back to my bed and lie there, cold now, and I say to myself “You must go back to sleep now or you will not have had enough sleep. You only have two more hours of sleep. If you don’t go to sleep again now, it’s too late. Now there are only one and a half hours until the baby wakes. Now there is only an hour. Now there’s no point going back to sleep at all. Now I can hear him crying.”
This morning the baby woke me from a dream, in which I met the comedian, musician, actor and filmmaker Bo Burnham at a dinner party. In the dream he asked me to buy him a coat, and I said yes even though he is much more successful than me and could probably buy his own coat. In the dream I thought to myself: I need to be better at maintaining boundaries. Which is true!
There are three places that I can think of that make me uncomfortable to walk past, because of a feeling of homesickness, and two of them are round the corner from where I currently live. The first is a house with a green door. The second is a restaurant with a copper shelf in the window. The third place is far away: a flat with long orange curtains and a wooden floor that dips in the centre and very, very steep stairs.
It’s more common for me to feel homesick in a way that means not that I miss home, but that the thought of my home makes me sick. I wonder if this is a feeling shared by other addicts, trying to think of a reason not to go back and then suddenly realising that you’ve been awake for three days.