But I Don't Want Us To Circle Back

There is a smile on my face.

It’s a good one too; I’ve practiced crinkling the corners of my eyes and making sure it bobs up and down like a wave, following the swell of the conversation.

I made myself learn how to turn it off too without letting my eyes show that the strings, tangling all the way down to my heart, have been cut. Severed neatly by their owner.

Sometimes it’s best to frown, and nod your head as if to say “‘good point, well made’”. There’s way of doing this – sometimes you must slowly draw down the lips, in direct inverse proportion to the seriousness of the topic. Other times I blink in surprise and raise my eyebrows, a pantomime emoji rendered in flesh.

I suspect that others do this too, I tell myself they must. The alternative is unthinkable. The man on the other side of the table has kept his grin a little too fixed, slow off the draw. A woman sits beside me, her heads nodding up and down in excited agreement. I see her hand beneath the table, the knuckles white.

To anything otherwise would be to not fit in and that is a crime punished most harshly. To conform is the way of the world, a shifting rulebook with an unclear author.

*

My father was in Human Resources – and how a human being can be a resource is another tired joke – and taught me about fitting in. “FIFO” he would say, “Fit in or fuck off”.

He was trying to be kind, to help smooth off those rough aspects that catch and tear us in our tenderest places. But I liked some of those rough edges. To me they felt like the places that scored the fabric of this life, letting us both know I was there.

Oh, his way worked, don’t get me wrong. It got me the nice house and the nice wife and the nice car and the nice suit. It just feels like too much was smoothed off, leaving only surface. I slide against the skein of life now, no grip.

Now I fit though, and is that worth something?

I look at those shavings of me and wonder which would have been the kindling of my true purpose? The piece that would have sparked my ‘passion’, something the dopamine-adjacent reels won’t stop going on about. I see soldiers, and firemen, and men simply live in little cabins by the water, their days surrounded by green. I see them cold, my fire out so as not to singe those around me.

Maybe they feel the same? Hopefully, the alternative would be unthinkable. Maybe they wanted the nice house and the nice suit – most of all the money, the cash and safety that insulates against the world’s unpleasantness.

Is everyone sat in meeting rooms or in cabins, wishing for the other? Fake smiles and fake lives, each one nudged into a mould they didn’t want?  Maybe the first ape thought the same and we are bound by something beyond us, something that compels us to contort ourselves to fit while the shape we are is always within sight but never reach.  

*

Or maybe it’s just taught? God knows there are lessons aplenty as we grow.

You can be taught it lovingly – by parents or aunts or family friends – nudge nudge nudging until you are on the ‘safer’ path. That that safety will strip the colour from your life is known but never spoken.

The harder truth is you can’t but help yourself do it too, that in many horrible ways it’s right.

My daughter says she wants to be an artist and she’s old enough that I’m worried she’ll try and make good on that threat. Something inside, something insidious and conditioned but unassailable reaches out and uses my voice to say things like “well of course, you make beautiful things… but”.

But is a word we use like a club, a hedge we lay against the world.

But there’s no money in it.

But there’s no security.

But what if you fail?

Now there is a phrase I would strangle if I could.

My beautiful girl. The world’s eyes are cold and their measure is unceasing. Perhaps it’s better that I hurt you now in this small way (coward, that’s what they told you and look where that has led), before the world can have its turn.

That is the other teacher, the harder, sneering one. The bullies and the ‘friends’ and the uncaring. They will show you with sharp fists and sharper words that there is a place for you – although who and how these places are decided will always be unclear – and deviation will be answered.

People in the company, in this very room, often talk about how excited they are to see the new graduates file in every autumn. Bright eyed and bushy tailed. Psychopaths or true believers I cannot quite decide. Instead, I note them as they fall away, the detritus from the lathe that will turn those who remain into something useful; round pegs ready for round holes.

There are those of harder wood – the world breaks them on its knee most thoroughly. Sometimes they fail the FIFO test dramatically – drink and drugs and fast-lived beautiful corpses. Sometimes it is almost poetic, curled over in abandoned buses in Alaskan wildernesses, until the flies come.

Alas for those who prove softer wood. It takes longer and but ends the same.

For most it is banal. Drinking and debt and resentment and screaming inside of ordinary houses. Your soul and your mind grow sluggish, a salamander retching in your stomach while the fire it was meant to breathe is wasted.

My father had another saying, “Fall behind and you’ll be left behind”. Harsh but fair, I think now. Our yokes weigh the same despite being shaped by different hands. I must carry my own and ready my children’s.

Although as I sit here in this meeting room, the same fluorescent lights staring unseen at the same suits and pens and whiteboards – it’s only their owners that flicker, a forty-year blink of an eye – I think that I have kept up, and fit in and what has it brought me?  

There’s no cabin for me, or a life of art, or smashing through a burning door with an axe, a hero and a man. There’s only this smile on my face, that lets me fit in.

But now I see that I was fitting myself into a cage – my shoulders stooped and raw against its bars. And as I turn, I see my daughter following dutifully behind.

*

I drop that collar from my hands, and the cowardly advice from my tongue, the words that would lull my baby onto the lathe. I’ll tell my little girl: “Yes, I think you should go for it. It’s a tough world but I think you’re tougher”.

I’ve fit in and the price is not worth the paying. I’ll be glad to bear you on my back, Aeneas in a suit and tie.