left wanting

by Daniel Payne

left wanting  

1

I have been thinking about how bored I am on lockdown. Perhaps I can write about how bored I am? But that sounds boring, and I think I am too bored to want to write it. So what do I want? Inside boredom, that’s all you can think about. What do you want when nothing will do? 

2

It’s a Monday morning on Coronavirus lockdown. Your son, eight years old, walks into the room. 

“Mummy, Daddy”, he says. “I’m bored”. 

What’s your next move? 

“Well, why don’t you watch something on television? Or paint a picture? We’ll be Zooming Nanny and Grandad soon. Or how about baking a cake? Or what if...”

You trail off, hoping one of these activities is the solution to boredom. Apart from the perceived slight on your ability to be an entertaining parent, you’ve got a theory here about boredom in your answer. You think of it as a black hole inside your child’s mind, or one your child has become. When he yawns you can almost see the edges of it at the back of the throat. He can certainly feel it. You know how difficult it must be for him to sit with this thing, to want something but not know what. You remember it well. In fact, it still visits you sometimes. Your strategy, as it has always been, is to find the right activity to fill it up. 

“Chocolate cake!” he says. “That’s it! I’ll bake a cake!” And off he goes to make a delicious cake. You are relieved. He is relieved. Your kitchen is a total fucking mess. 

Something has been filled up, kept at bay. Forgotten about or answered to. 

Resolved, until it comes back. 

3

It has come back.

You parse through a list of activities. You throw another cake at the black hole, a walk to Tesco, suggest making something together, watching an instructional YouTube video. Nothing sticks.

The black hole fattens in the face of nothing to do. It leaks, it spreads. It recruits frustration and anxiety and it gets everywhere. It’s all you can see. There is nothing to do. There is nothing to be done. All he can do is wait. 

Boredom is when you must wait for something impossible to come, like a letter from the future guaranteeing the correct activity that the black hole wants. Because that’s impossible, all you are left with is waiting for your wanting. 

4

It’s a Thursday evening in lockdown. Your son is having a conversation with the wall and seems fine. They are planning to build a boat and are talking about the sea. 

You’re working from home. The thing that you have always wanted or meant to do in life was to be a writer, but here you are on a Zoom meeting talking about business continuity or whatever it is that you do that isn’t being a writer. 

You finish the meeting, close the laptop, and enjoy a few moments of quiet. You can’t bring quiet to Zoom. You can’t sit with it. It gets filled up too quickly by are you still there? hello? hello? The connection keeps cutting out?

You think about the social contact Zoom pretends to offer you, yet instead ends up reminding you of everything you have lost, and that it does this on purpose. You wish you could pack it all in and be the writer you always suspected you might be if only the right circumstances would align. 

Why weren’t you being a writer when you weren’t on lockdown? Probably you had a few excuses you believed in. You’ve got a very busy job, a long commute, time consuming children, sick relatives. As soon as everything becomes less busy - as soon as you have time - you’ll start being a writer. 

And here you are on a Thursday evening in lockdown and all you have is time, time and time. 

5

You open up your laptop, start a new document, call it “writing project.doc” and you stare at it. You wait for something to happen. But you’re bored. You’re too bored to write. 

If you wanted to write but you’re not writing, did you ever really want to write? You’ve been tripped up by your own wanting.  You’re lying down on the ground, beaten to a pulp. “I want to be a writer” stares down at you, laughs at you smugly. It says: I thought you wanted this? What are you left with now? It walks off and makes somebody else a famous novelist. You’re left there, guilty and bored. 

You go to the kitchen and cut a slice of bread still warm from the oven. You slather it in thick salted butter and stare out of your window at the quiet world. You Tweet about how nice bread is as if you were the first to discover it. 

Perhaps you’ll come back to this? Perhaps you won’t. 

6 

It freaks me out how the river becomes the sea. 

A sudden seamless transition. No hope for a badly-made boat like me, barely holding it together above the waves.

Lately I’ve felt myself speeding towards this terrifying place with no edges; the great yawning mouth of the river. One foot wrong and I’ll be sucked along a current and spat out into the infinite sea. Lost forever in the constant blue. No way to get back to the beginning, where I imagine the rain once fell on that lush green hill. 

And what if the current should take me out? I’ll relax my shoulders, unclench my fists. Sail out into the deep and boring sea with no trace of a motive. What’s left after all that sailing? Some things start to move around the boat. I’ve never been bored enough. When I lower myself into a hot bath I get a weird feeling. I love my mother very much.

Copyright Daniel Payne (2020)