What Even Is Harmony

There’s a transition from night to morning, before dawn breaks, when the darkness becomes warm. The black sky holding until it meets a full rich blue with the depth of far away worlds brought close, then, before the sunlight breaks through, comes a period of greyness. The world washes out, lacking colour, lacking detail. It’s time when your soul is lost. It takes resilience to see yourself through that slight state, to not be taken in by the anonymity, the lack of personality in the world.1 I had woken in the pitch of night and by the time that dull wash of soon-to-be morning came I was wholesome and alert, airy in thought, and ready to see myself through to a day I had already won over.

Before sleep I imagined my living room becoming a place of work. Not a livelihood that would garner income, more taking the form of a space I could allow myself occupation. My laptop was perched on a stool next to my bed, just shut down from TV shows that had brought me near to rest, and I decided I would move my TV into my bedroom. I only ever used television to wind down. I knew that well, even better for having formed the thought fully, but in that moment I wanted my days to be wound up. I wanted my daytime engine to be powerful. I wanted a space to read, to write, to program, to do all the growing activities that bettered my place in the world, or at least my own belief in a purposeful self.

As the grey light of the nascent morning changed to a pin sharp clear sky, the rays of sunlight almost perceptible so solid were they in their invisibility, I’d already moved the TV and its stand to the corner opposite my bed. I’d moved my desk from my bedroom into the living room, and set the couch I knew I would be getting rid of on its end to save in space.

For some reason I had taken a measuring tape to the walls to get an accurate drawing of the room. Bespoke fitted furniture was far beyond my reach but I charted the room into one of the many notebooks I’d bought for my thoughts. I would leave the house, in an hour or so, and go and think on what I would achieve once the room was filled to reflect my new dreams. For the moment my desk was pushed against the wall perpendicular to the window, so, when I wished, I could look out and relax in contrast to whatever passed on the street.2

The other side of the room, once the couch was disposed of, would have a bookshelf and an armchair, a small sidetable for a lamp and to rest a drink on, and I could ease into the seat taking my time with books, music and thoughts brought on by peace.

I sat at my desk and powered on the newly placed computer hoping nothing had been jarred as I moved it. It started with no issues, speedily, and soon I was looking at the restored web browser that did no justice to my newfound ambitions.

It featured the same websites I always went to, the same forums, the same chatrooms and the same details on hobbies I would take to for a few weeks before abandoning them again for six months or a year.

I went back to my bedroom and picked up the stack of journals I’d been keeping ever since my night with Niamh, in her apartment above the bar. That was a passing part of my life. Fleeting and temporary it served a purpose in the moment to see my emotional needs through a scattering episode of disquiet. The journals did the rest of the work, all stemming from her sharing of her mindful routine.

I’d read about such activities many times since. I’d looked at psychological papers that spoke of the value of charting our thoughts. For me the journals were a holdall, a bag I dumped my worries in never to return to. The brightness that warmed my imagination that morning had given me the clarity to see I needed to engage with my past.

Back in my new office-space living room I set the journals down on my desk but I didn’t sit before them. Instead I turned to the window and looked out. The street was desolate with no need for anyone to travel down it at this hour of the morning. I was alone with my thoughts, alone with my history of thoughts written down, but ever more I felt isolated with them. Battling within me was the soothing still waters of having found meaning and drive, and the turbulent, tossing realisation I had no-one to share my dreams with.

I could see Niamh’s face sharp in my mind. Her broad nose, deep blue eyes and wavy brown hair framing a face readied to take in all. I thought on the people in my local as I felt my stomach’s emptiness. How they provided a way to spend time but not a way to afford myself. They were empty calories, much like the beer I drank, and indulgent in the moment but not the fuel I needed to power me through my life. The emptiness I felt in that thought was not one of a morning’s hunger but a lifetime of longing. The early morning pub would be open soon and I was more likely to find conversation there than I was in a café. I knew it would provide the same form of distraction as I found in my local, but, maybe, with my ambitions set out differently with my newfound perspective I would find something more. With rearranging my physical space, my purpose in my home and myself, the atmosphere of the bar, the simple indications of life would allow me to take in the truth in sharing a space, time, and both combined in a moment with others. I hoped to see the new experience of myself bear fruit in how others saw me. More than anything I wanted more than a reflection from an impassive mirror, alone: people sharing themselves as a way to see who I was. I needed to see who I was.

I sat and opened up my journals. I opened up the word processor on my computer. I began to type up the thoughts I’d noted which were flowing through my mind two weeks after I was first admitted to the psychiatric day hospital.

The beginning entries were simple, rambling. They began with a sentence summarising my mood but then went on to short, stabbing, exclamation marked sentences and words that highlighted the force behind all the impulses I couldn’t discern.

I stopped typing. Apart from the beginnings of each entry what I wrote was indecipherable. I could read my handwriting but I couldn’t find the meaning behind what I’d written. I couldn’t recapture the feeling of my mind, scatty but acute, despite every desire to do so on that smoothed out day’s starting. I could remember the general feeling, I could re-analyse those memories through a perspective, but my written account held nothing.

I looked out the window again at the empty street, sighed deeply, rubbed at my forehead and returned to my notebook. I wouldn’t give up on who I had been. A few weeks into writing my mind I’d attempted to catch the rattling of my thoughts from the midst of psychosis. I flicked page over page as I searched out the story of my madness, or at least its form.

What I surmised was a week into writing my journal I began a story. It was about a woman walking to a cliff. She was escaping something, leaving behind the world that plagued her. The story was written in a stream of consciousness. Sights, sounds, smells, fears and worries all in the broken language of a mind talking to itself but incapable of doing more than barking rabid fragments of accusatory thoughts. I tried to read it through fully before I typed it up. I couldn’t follow the flow of what I had written but I did remember the purpose of it. There was supposed to be indications that she would jump off the cliff at the end of the story. That she was leading herself to despair, to a drastic decision. There were words indicating thoughts of falls, of dropping, of crashing against rocks throughout the frenetic slapdash of prose showing a mind fragmented. It wasn’t the clinical split mind of schizophrenia, although the story was, at a higher level, about that. What my writing was was the ever reducing, ever breaking apart of every seemingly solid whole. It had all the signs of thoughts burst apart under the pressure of telling a me-adjacent story. I couldn’t hold onto a stable idea in the words, other than the impression of a story, and I certainly couldn’t write it. It was a perfect account, but not an accounting of what my internal monologue had been like, even if it would mean nothing to anyone but me.

My handwriting had begun tamed. It was precise, and I knew, at the time, I had dedicated effort to ensuring if someone read over my shoulder they would see the genius I worked on unfolding. As the story progressed the writing strayed off the lines of the page, scrawling downwards and upwards. Edits were pushed into margins. Corrections, clarifications and desperate expansions were squeezed between rows of text. As the story approached its end my writing became wilder and wilder until the finish where I breathed deeply knowing I would reveal all. The woman sat at the edge of the cliff and rested. She didn’t jump. She just wanted some peace. I had tempered myself, relieved, and my writing had returned to its carefully crafted state during those last few paragraphs.

I opened up the word processor again and transcribed those final few lines. That was all I needed to write, to copy. All I needed to know from my mind was that even during the most difficult period of my recovery the simplest desire I held was somewhere to rest. I didn’t understand it then but I had felt it intuitively. I knew it now more completely, as I saw with the rearranging of my room.3

I saved the document on my computer. I closed the window and stuffed the first of my journals into my bag, then placed a new, blank journal in there too.

Walking to the early morning pub I moved the world around me. There was a moisture in the air I felt settling against my skin but it wasn’t from the potential of storms or rain, or even humidity, it was the morning’s freshness awakening me. A dew rested on the grass in the park I passed, a thin misting that slowly burned off cars’ roofs and windscreens as the sun rose high and I came closer and closer to the dark mildewed pub.

Walking in I readied for my eyes to adjust to a shadowy gloom but it was brighter inside than I recalled from the memory of my previous visits. I sat myself at the bar, and, it being an early breakfast, ordered a stout. The man behind the counter hesitated at first as though he didn’t hear my order. A crackling groan echoed from his throat and blew into a raised lip as he tilted the glass beneath the tap. He looked up at me, then towards the middle aged and elderly men at the corner of the counter.

I wasn’t a partier escaping the dawn with friends. I wasn’t a prostitute relaxing after a night’s graft. I wasn’t a broken alcoholic getting my early, settling fix. My failure to fall into any of these roles, I imagined, seemed strange to him. I tried setting aside my out-of-place image and the thoughts that went with it as I waited for my pint to settle.4 I took out my notebook and opened it up to a blank page.

“Homework?” a man with cheeks that were so lined, above and below, they almost folded in over themselves, said.

I shook my head. “Just some thoughts,” I said. “If I can manage to find them.”

A snarled grump passed his lips but I could tell there was a pleasantness behind it with the nod and raised glass he offered in discreet salute to me.

The pint was placed in front of me and I paid. The barman stayed standing in front of me, holding the note in his hand as though he had forgotten the purpose of money, then wiped his hands down on his shirt. He turned as though coming to an acceptance and when he came back I held out my hand for the change. He slapped the few coins down next to my glass.

He twisted his stance towards the men reading the newspapers and started up a conversation about the day’s races. A conversation I imagined was a feature of every morning.

Taking a sup from my stout I wondered if it was the first pour of the day from that particular line so ripe was the taste. I tried to picture myself sending it back, but the grottiness of the pub precluded me from doing so. The pint tasted how the place looked but even then I knew I’d never send a pint back, never make myself stand out, unless I was in a bar I was regularly familiar with.

I took another drink and while the tartness was still there it had rounded out a little.

I tapped my pen against my notebook. My surroundings were quiet although it seemed the light coming through the postered-over windows had taken on noise rather than brightness. The streaks of sunlight cast against my eyes and made me aware that, despite me being awake for hours, this was the true beginning of my day. I didn’t know if the scenario I had found myself in, quiet solitude amongst others, was the entire purpose of what I had set out to discover as I passed through simple hours seeking new meaning with reorganising my life. If this was all I would ever have. I tried to settle into that feeling. I was drinking early in the morning. I had nowhere to be and no demands on me. Some would give their all for such freedom.

I began to write. I tried to capture the words in the voices and consciousness that spoke to me during my madness by relating them to what I found in feeling of the bar around me. I couldn’t do it. The setting had found me too composed. There was no radio playing, the conversation was too sporadic and the dedication everyone gave to their drinks held me in a stasis of both deed and thought stopping me from tumbling along with my own haphazard mind-stream. It didn’t exist in that moment, I had succumbed to escaping the potential of the day.

Despite the seeming peace there was a buzzing deep within me: my worries. I tried to centre in on them, to bring them to the fore but the still of the morning was imbued in the bar—just not me.

I turned over to a new page.

“A diary?” the man who spoke to me before asked.

I smiled what I felt was a shy smile, but was probably more awkward, and nodded.

“My wife kept one,” he said.

“It’s a nice release. Settling, I’d say.”

“Ever since she was a teenager. There’s stacks of them in our bedroom, my bedroom. I can’t bring myself to throw them out.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“I don’t want to read them either, even if I can’t throw them out. They’re her private thoughts.” The irony of him asking what I was writing didn’t escape me but there was an honesty to his acknowledgement, a recognition of the value in what I was doing. A recognition I felt for me.

I tried to picture who his wife would be but I couldn’t imagine her despite trying to conjure an image. I didn’t know enough about her. I did see him. Lonely in the bar, although maybe that was a presumption. Every so often someone would walk in and be acknowledged by the other people, a few words, quick but not short, then they’d take a seat as the same piece of news, someone’s operation, today, was relayed.

I thought of her friends. People she was close to who’d get the filtered version of her diary. They’d talk regularly, when they were young, when her and his relationship was starting out and the details of new happenings and shared hopes came thick and fast. Then, as life became settled, industrious in routine, they’d meet every week or maybe two weeks, as they all passed through middle age. The man looked to be in his late sixties so I imagined she re-found daily friendships as children grew out of their home and work came close to retirement. I didn’t know how long it was since she’d passed but from the way he brought it up I imagined it was only a couple of years. Long enough for his life to have found a baseline but not so long the hurt wasn’t sharp.

I hadn’t realised I’d reached for my phone, my hand fidgeting through the contents of my bag and pulling it out without my notice. I was thumbing the power button on the side.

The scenario I’d found myself in, the delicate community in passing would typically be something I saved for my journal, if I could still think on it by the end of the day. Instead of looking to write it to myself I realised I wanted to text a friend, those important to me, and tell them about the small miracles of connection.

I looked at the widower.

I put my phone on the bartop, screen facing downward, as I couldn’t imagine who I would text. All my friendships had slipped away with days, then weeks, then months. Most now fell by years.

I picked up my notebook and pen and wondered how rude it would be to write about a desolate life, a life lost from the moving on of those closest to it, a life of empty mornings only satisfied by an out-of-breath walk to the early morning pub for a few start-me-up beers and the shallow recognition of those in the same, never-acknowledged situation.

If I had the fingers of an artist I would have drawn a picture of me—not brave enough to think I could capture the people in here. It would be a graceful illustration, all mottled pencil marks but precise in its representation of what lay beneath. My eyes would be impassive, my hand would be next to my pint but not grasping it, my poise would be lowered, and there would be a world passing me by I couldn’t look towards. There would be a hint of pride in my face, some resilience in having fought off the worst of what had come to me, and if not satisfaction then acceptance of my role in a world, in that morning as representative of so much more, of an ease with myself. It wouldn’t be a truthful drawing: it wouldn’t capture my desire.

I picked up my phone again and keyed in the passcode. I brought up my contacts list and quickly scrolled, without ever reading a name, through the list of people who had, at some point, warranted a place in my life.

The list blurred past me as though it was my eyes not focusing rather than the screen unable to keep up. I could make out cut-off names half rendered before the screen slid onto the next. I stopped scrolling with my thumb. A name stood out, Fionnuala, someone from college I worked on a group project with, I thought. I wasn’t quite sure. I dashed my thumb against the plastic again.

Names raced past briefly before slowing and stopping on one contact: Ian Beard Pub. I vaguely remembered him as someone I met in a bar who was interested either in building a startup tech company, or possibly just starting up with me.

I put my phone down and took a sip on my pint that ended with me, instead, finishing the rest of my drink in a deep pull.

“Another?” the barman asked.

“Please,” I said.

There was a kindness to his question, a familiarity as though I had proven myself by simply staying quiet for long enough, sharing a few appropriate words with those around me, and keeping to the singularity of drinking. Mostly I imagine his change towards solace was due to the small solitude of sorrow I felt seeping from me, a kindred spirit in need of early morning, low percentage alcohol, in a small dusty room an entire world—with an entire society—of its own, separate to a harsh, uncaring one.

I was entirely free but all I could think of was all the ways I wanted to be tied down. Friends weren’t a restraint. They were a way of securing yourself through obligation. A method of wiring yourself to the earth should a surge charge through your existence. They were more than just useful. They were a taking of time. They were the back and forth, push and pull, up and down of all it meant to be a person.

I began to write names in my journal: Eimear, Aisling, Priti, Sean, Marta, John, Tara. I wrote over with new, emphasised strokes on each letter, making bold these people I no longer saw.

“Ask her,” the barman said, and I saw him looking, open with conspiracy, from the men at the counter to me. “It might be luck.”

“Go on,” the man next to the man I had been talking to said. “I’ll pay for half.”

A newspaper was set in front of me, along with the small pens from a bookies. “Pick a horse,” my widower friend said.

“Which race?”

“Any.”

I knew the basics of form, what the numbers next to the names meant about how a horse had finished on previous rides. It seemed more in keeping with the spirit of what I was asked to do to pick on outsider, or a horse based on a good name than it would be to try and figure out the odds-on favourite and give these people no ambitious chance. I scanned down through the card, through each horse and looked at the colours the jockeys wore and what racecourse, if any, I had heard of.

The names all blurred into one meaningless stream, more colours than writing. I slowed down my reading, instead of just passing over each entry, and tried to find one with a name that would remind me of the friends I had just moments ago been caught on. None did. My friends’ relationship to me was about as true as my relationship to the horses before me. I was about to randomly stab the little green pen on an entry when one caught my attention. “Lazyboy,” I said.

“He’s no hope,” my widower’s friend said.

“That’s not the point. Why’d you pick him?”

I wasn’t entirely sure on the nomenclature, especially now I was put on the spot but felt it was only reasonable to give them the misguided basis of my pick. “Lazyboy is a kind of chair, isn’t it?” I asked. “I think I want one.”

“It is a chair, Pete,” the other guy said to the widower. “With the footrest that pops out. Luxury things. You’d never get out of one.”

“You want one of those chairs?” Pete, the widower, asked me.

I want an armchair,” I said. “For my living room. I’m turning it into a kind of office-library-relaxation-thinking space.”

“To write in your diary?”

“And other things,” I said.

“Would any kind do?” Pete asked.

“Well, I picked Lazyboy because it’s a kind of armchair,” I said. The man who knew Pete had taken the newspaper and the barman was handing over a collection of blank betting slips that were in a glass behind the bar.

“Is it any kind of armchair you’re looking for?”

“Once I save up I’ll pick one out,” I said.

“Jesus Christ, just answer the question, will you?” If his eyes weren’t on the point of popping I’d imagine them rolling, such was the look of exasperation he gave as he looked to his friend writing up the bet.

“I suppose, as long as it’s comfy,” I said, as he turned back and nodded at me.

“Right,” he said. He pulled out his phone, holding it in both hands like someone either unsure of his grip or unsure of the role of technology. He flicked through photo after photo before eventually holding the phone in front of me. “Would this do?”

I moved my stare from anywhere not-him to the photo on the phone and saw an armchair, big and square and covered in a grey felted corduroy material. “You’re selling it?” I asked.

“You can’t answer a straight question, can you?” he said, but he was laughing as well. So were the others in the bar. “Would this chair do?”

“It would, I suppose.”

“It’s yours,” he said.

“What, why?” I asked.

“My son is redecorating, or his girlfriend is. I’m getting their old lounge set, not like I have a choice. They told me the armchair doesn’t go with what they’re giving me, not that I’d care, but there isn’t space for it anyway, so I have to get rid of it. It's yours if you want it.”

“How could I get it?” I said. “I mean how could I move it to my place. I mean, thank you. But...”

“Do you want it?” he asked, and I could hear the impatience in his voice despite this being the strangest conversation I would never have imagined early morning over beers.

“I do,” I said, giving into charm.

“Give me one of those slips,” he said to the barman. “Write your address down on that. I’ll deliver it over the weekend.” He slapped his hands together, rubbing them with satisfaction. I hesitated over giving out my address but knew there could be no malicious plan concocted by people who didn’t know me, didn’t know I was coming to their bar, and who happened to have a photo of an armchair on their phone just as I picked a horse called Lazyboy. In fact it was entirely me who opened up about needing a chair for my new room.

“Thanks,” I said again. “Let me get you a drink.”

“Peter only ever has two,” the barman said.

“And I’ve had two,” Peter, the widower, said. “I appreciate the offer but you’re doing me the favour taking the chair.” I knew it was him who was helping me.

He knocked back the last few dregs of his pint, placed the glass down on the counter and shuffled his jacket back up and onto his shoulders. He looked every bit the person, to me, who would never change his routine short of an earthquake. I felt blessed that I had somehow met with his approval. “I’ll bring it up Saturday afternoon, most likely. Maybe Sunday.” I could only nod as he waved to the bar, but equally to no-one in particular, and walked out the front door.

When he left I turned back to my drink, back to the rest of the bar wondering what gossip would pick up him having departed. Only silence reigned. The barman stood, hands against the taps, staring out into space. Pete’s friend was busy examining the rest of the race card and the other people in the bar were oscillating between looking past their drinks and mechanically picking them up for a slow draw.

I looked down at the list I had written on my notebook, all the friends who seemed farther away than these far away people in the early morning pub, and thought on how their lives were no more or less interesting, no less occupied or fulfilled, no more active or insecure than what I had in that moment. Their lives, as I imagined from knowing them well at one point, seemed much like mine: typical of an even state, un-harried, uneventful, average and everyday, but presumed as full.

I thought on Marta, on how she had as much luck with love as me—I looked around the bar imagining ever finding love in such a desperate place—and the schadenfreude I found in both our love’s lack of success seeing as she tried a lot harder.

I took a drink of my pint, and without thinking of what I was going to say sent her a text.

— I haven’t seen you in too long. If there’s some time you have free text me. We should meet up.

I bookended the text with another drink, wanting to order a rum, but satisfied myself with my plans for another beer as I waited for Marta’s response.

Index - Part 3 Chapter 3