With you, with you, with you,

With you, with you, with you,

With you, with you, with you,

With you, with you, with you.

Sometimes I come across an old overlooked worry-list. The items on one ran:
1 Row with A.
2 No letter from C.
3 Tooth.
4 Look for green overall again.
5 No ideas for magazine story.
6 What D said last week (Wed: 7th).
7 People I ought to be dining.
And I am harassed this time by occasional total failure to remember who the ‘C’ of the missing letter was or what the deuce ‘D’ had ‘said’, which only shows that if you sit tight long enough nothing matters at all, while I know that this particular brand of philosophy is no good and never will be to people like myself. One must live. And worrying is probably a part of the business and a sign that one is still in the swim! It is rather the same thing with old letters that you re-read. Like a rude, whispering couple who exclude you from the conversation, they indulge in allusions you can’t trace, hint at emotions you can’t recall, and make infuriating plans of the outcome of which your mind is a complete blank. ‘Who is this stranger hissing in a corner?’ one despairingly thinks, and it is oneself, as little as five years ago. And as for the letters dating further back, you get well-nigh to the stage of begging the correspondence to let you in on the conversation, to give you at that moment a little of the love expressed for you in the letter of which you are dimly jealous! You almost whimper, ‘It’s Barbara asking my best friend, in those days’, and it’s no good at all. The Barbara of the note excludes the Barbara who holds it in her hand (though you feel she would be miserably remorseful, eagerly, tenderly explanatory, if you did meet again). Meanwhile, you are left hiding a secret from yourself, and a most extraordinary and forlorn sensation it is.

Jupiter

Mars

she

I'm not in my body

milkshake

abstract

yes/no

Hawaii

any vague sexual reference

Mastercard/Visa

chap

anti-intellectualism

poisonous food

doctor's bills

IGNORANCE is too harsh

G.O.D.

mush in people's mouths

any playfulness

Indian accent jokes

tennis ball

no clothes

Chinese restaurant

greediness

silence

carried list in wallet

screaming into pillow