No Distance Left To Run...

...Is an excellent song by Blur, from their album 13 and chronicles as far as I'm aware the dyeing embers of a relationship. I can't remember whether they played it at this years Glastonbury. I was there this year, my first time, towards the back of the field as they played, some distance from the Pyramid Stage trying to stay awake as the crowd beneath me swayed to the music and people around me released lanterns that drifted slowly into the cool night sky. It really was quite beautiful at times. I'd been lightly cajoled into 'looking after Alan' duties, hence my position at the back, where we could lie down on the grass if necessary. Alan is Louise's brother, who we'd lost earlier that day and had completely failed to find again. A task made doubly difficult by the complete lack of mobile reception. Messages would arrive en-masse usually long into the morning after they were sent. Consequently Alan, with the meeting time set for much later in the day at goodness-knows-which-bar-it-was, had more or less the entire day to ply himself with neat vodka becoming slowly pissed to the point of spreadeagled and sick by the time we found him. Not being overly bothered about being at the front and happy just to chill out at the back I was content to accompany him whilst Louise went to join her other brother and his friends further down.

About half way through the set Louise returned, struggling to find us at first - there'd been a slight crowd surge and our position had moved further down the field. Louise was happy, the first time I'd seen her truly happy in months, and that in turn made me happy .I'm a pretty uncomplicated fella, I really am, and if Louise is happy, then so am I. Other oversubscribed adjectives I'd choose to use to describe her then are 'radient', and 'alive' and 'truly beautiful' in the dress she'd just bought as she stood there silouhetted in front of me, back lit by he light from the distant stage. And yes, I know I don't know nearly enough hackneyed adjectives, but she really was all those things, and for the first time in a long time I felt that I really had the Lou I first met - back at last. For the rest of the set we held one another and I really began to think that we could get though this - her depression - and that we really had a chance. Somewhere though, at the back of my mind, being the realist that I am I knew that this moment, as those lanterns drifted further skyward to their inevitable extinguished demise and Blur played out their closing few songs, I kinda figured that this euphoria she felt right now wouldn't be enough to carry us back into reality and beyond.

And it hasn't been enough.

I don't really feel like writing anything today, certainly not tailor-made, job-specific covering letters, but least of all this. But in some ways its quite theraputic to put events into perspective. Being made redundant couldn't have come at worse time, just as I was beginning to feel that we might have a chance and that we might make it - this goes and happens. And I don't know where Louise's head space is because she wont tell me. And when I try to talk to her, as I did last night, she closes down - affecting some kind of dumb insolence that was as infuriating as it is childish - but I can't say that, can I? If anything it was what she didn't say that spoke volumes, and what she didn't say was a lot of nothing. Every advance I made, exasperated though it became was rebutted with a blank dimly lit silence as we lay in bed together. Either that or the meagre pretence that she was tired and didn't want to talk about it because she had a busy week at WORK tomorrow. Ouch. The word jarred, and I knew what she was cruelly getting at.

I'm starting to face up to the fact that I'm going to ineveitabley lose this girl, or even that I've already lost her. I needed to know that I had her support last night because it just didn't feel like it. Not financial support, but emotional if possible, or even just the limp Radio 4 Thought For The Day variety that lamely tells you 'not to worry about it, that something will turn up - it usually does', would do. Anything. Maybe it was unfair to ask with the way she is right now. But there was nothing there, nothing was forthcoming and that was what really really hurt. I figured that I probably would need to know that she was supportive of me if I were to go down the path of re-training and starting afresh in something new, but she just didn't seem to care.

Today, the way I feel today is that I might as well stay 'doing' what I'm soon not to be doing but relocating to another area where at least there are jobs, but most likely miles away and re-train in my spare time. But worse; The way I feel today, If that happens, I don't think I'd even tell her - it will just happen, in part through a vindictive trait that I try to keep hidden and in part to protect myself from being hurt by Louise, because I can't allow myself to go through that again, and I don't deserve to either.

And that is why I'm feeling low, and that is why it feels as though there is no distance left to run, with our relationship at least.