To become more

I rang home over the weekend and spoke to Mum and Robert.

Everyone had just got back from their respective holidays. I told Mum I was coming home on Saturday for a fortnight or so. Robert and I talked about Easterby Athletic. I’m not really looking forward to going home. I know exactly what I will do and how it will be, all the “sweaty apathy and daydreams” described above—depressingly familiar.

On the other hand, I find the idea of a change of circumstance refreshing . . . I’ve said it before, but I need saving from myself—more so now than ever, because the older I get the more I’m aware of time slipping away. If this sounds ridiculous coming from someone just one month into his twenty-first year and who, to all intents and purposes, has all the time in the world . . . but that’s just it—I don’t have ‘all the time in the world.’

Soon I’ll be 22, then 25 and in no time at all 30 and unable to believe it (like Robert). I see no way out of my present state.

The thought of defeat fills me with real dread. I suppose like Hazlitt says youth believes itself to be immortal. Well, I hold to a belief and a certainty that I’ll succeed as far as my own satisfaction is concerned. This is never voiced in so many words but I think it remains true. I can write, but too often the fancy phrases and important words conceal an emptiness, a vacuum, at their centre. All the tools are there but the purpose (and so the meaning) is missing.

I say I want this narrative “to become more” but I haven’t mastered it in its present form yet!