I’m not happy, but I’m not unhappy either
WE ONLY VIEW the past as if by candlelight: everything looks better than it should. We sit back and replay our movies through filters of gold, fish out the good times from the swamp, our hand cupped dripping round a memory, proudly offering it up as perfect. And sometimes rightly so. There are parts of my life that were as good as memory claims, the highs so colourful they drowned out any mediocrity.
So it was odd to revisit a part of the city where I know I’d been objectively content, and feel a coldness. Early October, the first chilly day, always an unwelcome surprise. Something in the air felt a little unkind. Leaf dregs clustered in the doorways of big houses owned by rich people who were never there. The streets were lonesome: the day loomed large, unplanned and exhausting. I walked towards the house where I used to live like I was walking back from the supermarket weekly shop, remembering the endless cycle of pickle jars and broccoli, grey skies and yawning textbooks. These days I live in London as something other than a child or student, I wrote recently in an email. I see a whole new city now, and it’s a much happier one.
I wasn’t truly myself, the year I lived in that section of north London, amid the terraces with their sphinxes and their olive tiles and blue doors, buffered by Cally Road from our house and other beige council estates, Iceland, vape emporiums, and the watermelon shop that was always shut. Walking that terrain now, I felt incredibly relieved that part of my life was over. It belonged to a different human, one with calm surface waters but a disturbed undercurrent. I trotted out the same day over and over, months of walking to the library, walking home, in shapeless clothes, my eyeliner long blunt, my head lost in an impossible romance winking from some horizon. I thought that was life, my life, as good as it could get.
It occurred to me that maybe I am unable to realise I’m having, if not a terrible time, then at least a not-happy one, until afterwards. It’s only when I squint back at an era as it recedes on the plain that I think, oh! I was actually a bit glum then. To revisit a place I once lived and wait expectantly for the warm wash of nostalgia only to experience a lonely shudder: that’s how I know. I can’t judge the present very well, or rather I am too lenient on it, grimly plodding through the uncomfortable bits, convincing myself everything’s fine.
I’m not happy, but I’m not unhappy either. That’s what one of Alan Bennett’s history boys says to his sixth-form teacher Irwin, long after leaving university. He’s describing how life feels when you graduate into adulthood. Not happy, not unhappy. But that was true for me before university — it has always been true — which prompts me to question how happy my present can ever be, and to answer: do I even need to know?
