And The Band Played On
I’m sitting here in the dark as the wind screeches around the flat. It’s nominally the last day of the year and I’m lit only by the glow of my laptop screen and the Technicolor spectacle that is our Christmas tree. It’s been a strange year, one spent mostly retreating from the world. One by one I’ve been losing my carefully created connections to the rest of humanity as I disappear into the cocoon I’ve created for myself. It took spending the days around Christmas down in Portsmouth for me to truly realise how far I have come. I didn’t understand more than a handful of the cultural reference made by people I interacted with. Like some antarctic explorer returned from a year on the ice or someone’s doddery old granddad I had to have the elements of contemporary culture explained to me. And all the while I only really wanted to get back to my books and my code. I tried getting drunk, but I found that distasteful. I’m not sure who, or what, I am anymore.
I miss Hong Kong.
For the second time this year I got to live in the city I love. And like the withdrawal symptoms of the finest of drugs, once I was ripped from its bosom I felt nothing but loss and desire to be returned there. But I cannot go. Not yet.
I must stay here and force myself back in to the world of work; not for any pressing financial need, you understand, but purely because I realise that if I don’t do something to cajole my mind into the reality of startups and deadlines and swift pints after work with smart people with beautiful ideas I will begin to rot and ever so slowly go mad, and once that road is taken it would be too much for me to come back from. Too much for anyone to drag me back from.
I worry.
Not for myself. I am past that petty vanity. I worry for those around me, as more and more of them surrender themselves to the base business of the propagation of the species. I worry for the ones left behind. I wonder if they are really ready for the loneliness that will be their life, the pitying looks they will receive, the eternal questions they will be asked and the lack of belief they will encounter daily when the say the don’t want that life. How their friends will begin to exclude them even as their bonds with other breeders grow ever stronger. It is a hard choice we make and the future is a harsh and brutal place.
And I guess this is what this year has really been about, hiding from the cruel reality. A year of cowardice. A year of fear. A year of retreat. Not my best, not by a long shot.
