The Sub-Editor - At Home

AT HOME

Make yourself at home; that's what people often say. So, this Christmas, I decided to give it a go. Of course people ask you to make yourself at home precisely when you're not; when you're away from your home and in somebody else's. But, before I can make myself at home somewhere else, I need to make myself at home where I live. I need to make myself again, because it seems sometime ago - a time I don't seem able to remember - the self I'd created (the self-made me) melted into air. 

So, this Christmas, I decided to give it a go. To make myself while staying at home. 

I found an old, synthetic Christmas tree in the attic. It was cold as death up there. Breath escaped my lips to form an ectoplasm in the black-iced air. My teeth ached and my fingers felt like bone. But I knew if I continued to search I'd find some Christmas baubles too; in two shoe-boxes, and each glass-ball wrapped in a thin skin of white tissue paper that crackled with age when touched.  

The coloured lights worked once I'd tightened each bulb in its socket. I switched them on in the dark. Icicles of pink blue orange purple and green piercing the gloom and, for a terrible moment, I was blissfully melancholy: achingly so. I wonder, is this what people call 'happy'?  Christmas past present and future converged suddenly. It was then that I properly devised my plan.

An old woman once said to me, 'perhaps if you could be yourself with other people you wouldn't be so weary in company'. I thought her both rude and mad.  The teeth in her mouth were like tombstones:  large blocks of weathered granite inscribed with a life already exhausted. I could see the blood in her veins pulsating through her liver-spot hands, but her cavernous mouth made me think of a corpse.

That was a long time ago, and I am truly weary now. So, this is the plan I've devised. 

I plan to make myself at home; away from the company of any kind of society. I will live my life within the confines of this house - which, as far as I can see, merely amounts to my property. I will live my life within the confines of this house until I've made myself again. I will exist in isolation: solitarily confined. The internet makes it possible: to work and to shop and to maintain the relationships one's obliged to sustain. 

I give myself a year: a new year's resolution.  Starting today.