"Why Don't You (Fuck Off And Leave Me Alone?)"

Let us talk, you and I, a little while. Let us talk about depression. Actually, no, let us talk about one of the root causes of my depression: Loneliness.

At time of writing, I am twenty seven years old. I live with a friend, although he's not here much. We've lived in the flat for coming up for three months now. Before that, I lived with my mother, and we never crossed paths much either. We both worked full time and we each had our things that we liked to do. So it's fair to say I spend a lot of time on my own. It sometimes strikes me as odd how much time other people spend with their friends. Ashley, for instance, that most famous non-girlfriend of recent times (she thinks I'm too old for her) seems to be hanging out with her friends all the time. Even when I was at school, I never hung out with my friends that much. Blades came over for tea once a week, we usually had a night out once a week and then every so often we would have a party at someone's (usually Gilli's or Emma's) house. I can probably count on the fingers of one hand the number of times we all went out as a group of friends to the pictures or whatever (me and Blades alone went a few more times) and I can't really remember us just hanging out outside of school. How did I therefore spend my time? Well, I must have spent a lot of it writing, altough I can't remember coming in from school and sitting down to write. I remember spending most of my study leave for my GCSE's writing the first draft of 'The Trouble With Girls'. That was when I first had my electric typewriter. I still have the draft lying around somewhere, seventy some pages crammed full of tiny type. I hadn't at that point learned about double spacing or even leaving acceptable margins. It was more an exercise in getting as many words down on each page.

I did spend a lot of time watching movies. I know when me and Sarah were going out I was at the height of my film buff phase - I was all about Scorsese and Coppola. It's from this period of my life that movies like Taxi Driver and Short Cuts stem from. It's also from this period that my first bout of depression stems from.

While me and Sarah were going out, I was writing the original screenplay that eventually formed the basis for my novel 'Various Artists'. At its heart, it is a novel about trying to find yourself and maybe finding that the person you're interested in isn't the best person for you. It's about suffocating relationships. It's also probably the funniest thing I've written, but even then it ends with a suicide. Gordy, having been dumped by Sophie, finds that he can't cope without her and in a bout of madness, ends his own life. And this is the novel I was writing when I was going out with Sarah. If you want to get analystical about it, the Mary-Sue of the novel for me is Will, who goes out on his first date, enters into a relationship and then kinda freaks out and feels like it's not for him. That was me and Sarah. I had my first date with Sarah and we go and see There's Something About Mary. Will goes and sees Star Wars at the old revival theatre. Stuff happens. It's probablynot exaggerating the point to say I had my sexual awakening in that cinema (the cinema, incidentally, the old Warner Village, is no longer there). I'd only first kissed a girl a few weeks previously. Sarah and I had known each other for a little under a week, we'd met on the Monday and she'd asked me out on the Friday, although our 'date' had been established as far back as Tuesday. We'd first kissed, a hot, passionate, groping kiss (a kiss that led Louise Russell to comment that it was disgusting) on the Friday. I recall that I asked her if, now that we were going out, I could kiss her.

She liked me. A lot. She would probably deny it now but she really liked me. For my part, I really wanted to like her back. And I did like her. But at heart, I was a horny seventeen year old boy and I let my hormones get the better of me. The main point I always look back on when considering our break up (which is something I do far more than I should for an event that's now almost ten years gone) the main reason we broke up was because she said 'I love you,' and I couldn't say it back. At the time I wasn't sure if I did love her. All I knew is that I was in love with someone, unfortunately for Sarah and for me, it wasn't her.

No, there was another girl, one who shall remain nameless, but a girl who I was in love with. I told her so at the New Year's party following mine and sarah's break-up. She shot me down. I was drunk. I might have said some stupid things. I can't remember. I can't even remember how she shot me down. I can't imagine she was cruel about it. But it did lead to a bout of suicidal depression that lasted for thebest part of six months. I had already been on the brink following my break up with Sarah (and my subsequent rejection by a girl who I got off with at a party at Gilli's but who then avoided me), but following New Year, I was convinced that I was incapable of love. So there I was, heading towards my A-Levels at a rate of knots with no clue as to what I was going to do with my life and I was questioning my entire reason for living. Because what is the point of livng if you're never going to make a connection with anyone?

Love is a mutual dependence that two people share. It's an emotional connection that overrides any sort of rational thought. And as they say, no man is an island. Because what do men (or women) do when left to stew in their own juices? Well, I don't know for sure, and I'm pretty confident that it'll be different for everyone but I'm willing to bet that going nuts is high on the list. It's the reason why you see so many old people with cats, because, deep down, everyone's shit-scared of being lonely. There comes a point when you'll reach out and grab hold of anyone or anything you can just so you're not alone.

So how did I get here? Okay. Deep breath. After me and sarah split up, I went to university, had a completely miserable first year as my parents split up, fell in love with a girl named Isabella, asked her out the beginning of my second year, found out she had a boyfriend and then spent most of the second year depressed, buoyedonly by my friendship with Neil and Sue, two of the lecturers at uni. He's a huge Doctor Who fan, so we got along well. Most of my third year was spent in a blissful limbo, neither majorly happy or sad. I had a brief crush on a girl named Kat in one of my practical modules but I doubt she was even aware I existed. All through my time at university I never really connected with anyone. Sure, I'm still friends with John-Paul and Neil on Facebook, but Gilli and Blades are still really close friends with people they went to university with. Maybe it's a side-effect of moving away to go to university, but again, like at 6th Form, I spent much of my time at university by myself. At this point I was fairly sure that I was a solitary person by nature and that I was forever destined to be alone.

Now, that's a pretty sweeping statement for a twenty one year old to make, but even now, six years down the line, it's still holding true.

In my final year at uni, I started working at Global, developed several crushes on both staff and customers, none of which came to anything. I then started working at Mills and, within a few months of Andrea starting, she'd set me up with Alison. Irony is something I appreciate, and so I can laugh (bitterly, true, but still laugh) at the fact that me and Alison split up because I told her that I loved her. Did I? That's a question I don't know the answer to. I know why I said it. I said it because I had spent so long alone (before meeting Alison, it had been three and a half years since I had even kissed anyone, let alone had anything approaching a relationship) that I wanter her desperately. I wanted to be with her. I wanted not to be alone anymore. And she ran away. She didn't even have the common decency to dump me to my face. She sent a text, while I was on holiday (those bonus points just keeping mounting up - not only did she dump me, but she did it by text AND I was on holiday at the time, so she managed to spoil that as well, for good measure - I broke my tooth the following day and haven't been back down to Oxford since...). So me, Blades, Amy and Amy's boyfriend Ali ended up getting shitfaced (well, I got shitfaced - I can't remember how drunk the others were) and bemaoning my shitty life. Amy espoused the opinion that if she was going to do something like that, then she wasn't worth being with. Now, with the benefit of a year and some change of hindsight, I can agree, especially given that although the reason she gave for splitting up with me was that she thought I wanted something serious and she didn't in the June, not three months after we had broken up she was engaged and moving in with someone whoshe barely even knew. The thing of it is, I'm probably best off out of it. Coming to know the kind of person she is while unafflicted with my feelings for her... well, let's just say that it never would have worked out.

But it does leave me on my own again. It's something that's come to the forefront very strongly these past few weeks. I don't know what it is, whether it's the fact that I haven't been to the pub in the past couple of months on a Tuesday night or what, but I feel so very alone and every attempt I make to try and get out there is met with failure. I repeatedly try and make a date with Ashley and she just as repeatedly rebuffs me, I ask Bryony if she fancies going to see a movie and she's got a previous engagement, Clare and Richie always seem to be at work or off doing their own thing (and to be perfectly honest, I'm sick of being the third wheel in their relationship) and Emma and Haz are so set in their own routine that anything that isn't work or sleep has to be negotiated within an inch of its life and I'm sick of having to make appointments to see people who claim to be my friends. I want to be able just to give people a ring and hang out. That's not too much to ask, is it?

I'm really getting too old for this shit.

Lovers Town Revisited, or My Adventures With Girls Not Named Natalie

It's Sunday. Again, and like pretty much every Sunday for a long while now, I've had the day off. I may hate working every Saturday, but at least it gives me the Sunday off. Not that I'm generally appreciating it at the moment.

Okay, Ashley. After a great deal of cajoling on my behalf by Shaun, I finally got her number. Not that it was an easy thing. She apparently asked Shaun to get me to ring her at work (she's the phone jockey at a pizza place along Birtley). So I got on my break and I do. I say Hi, it's Mark. She says, Mark who? which is a great start. I say that it's Mark from Shaun's party. She says hi, but that she's got to go now.

You know me enough by now to know how fucking paranoid I get. I'm sitting there, on my break, feeling like I'm going to throw up. I mean, was it some sort of joke on Shaun's part, on Ashley's? It turns out that it isn't, it's just that her boss popped up and obviously talking to mates on the phone when you're supposed to be at work isn't the done thing. So Shaun says he got a text off Ash to give me her number. This he does and I text her and we have an interesting night of bouncing text messages back and forth. The penultimate one comes about one o'clock. Me and Shaun are still up watching Doctor Who (another thing I hate about working Saturdays) and she says she's going to bed. An hour later, I'm in bed watching telly and my phone goes. It's Ashley again, saying if I want to ring her, I can. So I ring her. We talk for about quarter of an hour, about nothing in particular, although the whole age difference between us does come up and she says she wants to be friends, nothing more when I make a comment about us having a 'relationship' (I think I freaked her out a little then, what is it with me and saying stupid things during late night phone calls? Were it not for me blurting out 'love you' to Alison we might well still be together, or at least it might not have ended so miserably after three weeks). After a while we each go to bed. I promise to text her tomorrow.

This I do. She'd said on the phone that she was going out to the town with a friend today so I text her and suggest that maybe once she's finished in town she could come over and we could hang out. She texts back that she's hanging out with her friend all day. I reply that that's no bother ad maybe we could do something during the week and was there anything on at the pictures she fancied going to see, the implication clearly being that we could go and see a film together.

That was at one o'clock this afternoon. It's now half eleven and she still hasn't texted back. Hello Mr Paranoid.

So. Let's forget Ashley for the minute and let's just wonder over my whole history with girls and how I seem to fuck everything up comprehensively. Most recently, we have Kayleigh who I liked and who I thought liked me. She arranged to come over one afternoon after a weekend of texts which I took to be very flirty. I made some moves and she freaks out, although she doesn't tell me. She tells the Guv and gets her to tell me. Since then she hasn't come over. Even Natalie hasn't been over and she seemed to find very convinient excuses every time I asked her over to watch Harry Potter (god, that sounds a bit twisted, but in all honesty, that's all it was going to be) and now she's off to Tenerife to work in a bar so it's odds on that I ever see her again. You have to start wondering when girls are actually leaving the country rather than spending time wth you (and yes, I'm well aware that I'm indulging in hyperbole, I probably don't even begin to figure on Nat's list of things that she'll miss about the Mow let alone being the sole reason she's leaving).

I try too hard, apparently. Even Christina has said that and for Christina to make a comment that doesn't directly relate to herself, it's a major thing. But what can I say? In my twenty seven years on this Earth, even if you only take into account the period from my first kiss (August 1998) that's still nearly a decade in which I have had relationshipness for seven weeks. Seven whole weeks. I've probably spent longer watching Star Trek over that period (at which point Christina, probably thinking she's some stellar wit, would most likely opine that that is specifically the reason why I don't have a girlfriend). So, yeah, I'm desperate. But only for something that everyone else has.

You see, all these people offering advice are in relationships or have had significant relationships and entering into another relationship at some point in the future is not some impossible goal. Like it is for me. I have my low periods (or perhaps I should say 'lower' periods, because I am generally low,all the time anyway) and in those periods, I'm always reminded that there are people youger than me who are married and have kids. Pretty much everyone I went to school with is in a long term serious relationship. Blades and Will have been together for something like seven years, Emma and Haz are coming up for being together an entire decade. Even Amy and Ali have been together something like four years. And out of the single triumvirate that once existed composed of me, Gilli and Tom, Tom is now happily living with Emily and anyway, both Gilli and Tom have had serious relationships before. It's not like some great mental block that they have. I think I might be incapable of being in a relationship, at least not without fucking it up in some way. I fucked it up with Sarah quite consciously and maybe my subconscious was trying to sabotage my relationship with Alison. Seven weeks out of a decade is nothing. Most people would hae spent a lot longer than that on holiday during that time. And if I was to work out the amount of time me and Sarah spent together during that month or how long me and Alison enjoyed each other's company, it'll boil down to even less.

Maybe I should just face up to the fact that I'm not boyfriend material. Fuck, I'm hardly even friend material.

The area manager and the Guv had a talk with me on Thursday. I had a little stressout on Tuesday and the Guv had a few words with me. Then the area manager comes in and puts on his 'friend' hat and tries to talk to me but just comes off as being patronising. I tell him that my depression is in large part due to my lack of relationshipness and he says that it happens to everyone. I felt like asking him if he knew how it felt to be more or less single for ten long lonely years. Or how it felt to have only had three girls who liked me enough to even kiss me in the last five. And one of those was completely pissed out of her mind. Because I know he won't. He's married and he's got a kid. There's something that happens to you when you have that sort of security. You stop being able to comprehend the fear.

The fear of course is the fear of dying alone. Actually, no, it's the fear of having the live your entire life alone. Dying is, by virtue of the act itself, something everyone does alone. Sure, you may have peolpe around you when you kick the bucket, but the actual dying? That's something you do alone. Living a solitary life? Now that's difficult.

It would be impossible I think, for a lot of people. In fact, as I have said before on occasion, put someone else in my shoes, give them my family life and all the bullying and the esteem issues and see how well they cope. I think that it's a testament to my strength of will (or sheer bloody-mindedness, whichever) that I'm even still here at all and as well adjusted as I am (which,as I'm sure you'llbe aware isn't massively, but I'm not exactly a back brain recluse yet, am I?).

Back when I was a kid and actually believed in God, I used to pray at night and wish for the chances everyone else got. And that's all I still want, although events have precluded my belief in any sort of higher power, all I want is for what everyone else has. Or at the very least, a chance to have what everyone else has. You know, you see people coming into the shop - complete dickheads with no discernable personality or even borderline good looks and they have girlfriends. You have to look at them and then consider yourself and wonder just what the fuck it is that is so repellant about you that girls just don't like you.

I've got an appointment at the doctor's on Friday. Seeing him about my depression. Part of me still hates the idea of popping a bunch of pills to make my life better because as far as I can see it, my life is shit because of outside forces. I'm considering counselling, but the cynical part of me knows that it's going to be the same old patronising bullshit that everyone's been trying to feed me since I was eighteen, just so they can comfort themselves that they are helping but without actually putting themselves out.

Fuck.