Am I too needy and what do I want, really?

On being round the bend

Am I too needy and what do I want, really?

I am loving being at Finca El Cerillo high in the Andalucian mountains for a 'Writing Holiday', an oxymoron if ever there was one. Some refer to this indulgent week as a 'retreat' but I find it the inverse of that. I live alone, sleep alone and usually eat alone at home, which I love, although men who think they know me better than I know myself disbelieve that. Wouldn't we all love to have a male ego? 'I know you'd rather be in bed with me, Darling,' they insist. They're wrong. When you've been talking to yourself, twizzling sheets and wandering vaults at night for as long as I have, believe. I like it like this. I'm not saying I've forgotten or that I don't hanker after 'The Joy of Sex' and intimacy, love, but in my every day, I like myself much better when alone.

Throw me into an immersive experience for seven days and with fourteen other people and I start freaking out. Every Other's utterance sets me off.

'You're very self assured,' One says.

Another, 'that's a cover'.

'You're loud and fast; you're very physical' someone says, passing me the coffee pot.

'I'm not. I went off sex for 20 years.'

'You're missing the point,' some Other says.

'Which is?'

'You know.'

'Do I?'

'You know you do.'

I butter toast. I ruminate and note, it's Wednesday and we've been here now since Saturday. Four nights. The first discussing flights; the next, out to eat discussing meat; the third, frenetic - first a quiz and Salsa next and last night out in town, the end of term parade, a Spanish thing, blasting play-school songs through megaphones, throw-backs on the stage while we passed plates of honeyed aubergines up and down the line of fifteen faces, ours, now known, communally. Each day, intense with classes and then time to write but reading before dinner, hearing how the other writers feel about the personal made public in our texts. There's time to rest; reflect on what it means to sum life up in lines.

I've dropped the need to trauma dump, I think. I posture I use ink to find some way to reach across divides, to shape an explanation for the way that life is lived. But between lines, where space exists, unbidden memories give birth to fashion buried deep anxieties.

'D'you mean that I'm too needy; leachy; loud? Now you are like my family who argue that I ought to think before I speak. They do not know, I do. They can't imagine what I choose to leave today, unsaid. You mean I talk too openly about what goes on between sheets? Oh, paper sheets? I see. I mean. We're not that different really, are we, you and me? Or I. I am different. Grammarly's not mine.'

They've all gone out. I've stayed beneath the Carob tree to write but find my head is counting those who have and those who might connect with me, but most of all's obsessed about or by the mystery of those who won't. 'Why does the tall one with the dead straight back, who's Buddha like, deny me time?'

Why do I count the negatives in life? Why do I let the things that don't work take up much more space than those that do? Why must I 'analyse'? My elder peers internalised still criticise. I wonder what I want. It's quite nice still to be alive; un-dead and not still paralysed, in bed. I've lived a dreadful happy life. I'd like to fall upon some peace and write. Of course I do but every time I press the button labelled 'send' I'm anxious as an anxious thing. I live just round the bend.

Perhaps they're right. Perhaps a big fat ego, in my bed, might ground me, calm my head. Perhaps it's quite unnatural to live alone. Although, I know. I've got it down. I'm only sane with no one else around.