Portaloo Sunset

Have you ever been completely happy?

Have you ever been completely happy?

What does that even mean? To be completely happy? For a lot of us, I would say it's a concept that's hard even to describe because it seems so remote. It's probably something that we've experienced only fleetingly, if we've experienced it at all. Hard to imagine, isn't it, the idea that a day, or even an hour might come where we could move through our lives without the dirty grey itch of anxiety or discontent at the back of our heads telling us there's something we ought to be concerned about. Even on particularly good days that we've experienced there's bound to have been something setting us on edge; maybe an unpaid bill, or an upcoming social event that we're not at all looking forward to but feel obliged to attend. It could of course be more existential concerns, like worrying about if our job is truly what we want to be spending our time doing, or if we'll ever find the right person to settle down with.

I would dare say that for most of us, if we can actually get an idea of complete happiness in our minds, it would be in the form of some kind of dream life, in which we've attained all the things that we think we need to spare ourselves from the need to worry. We would of course be healthy and wealthy, happily partnered or free and single but, of course, also irresistible to our preferred sex, obviously depending on which scenario seems more appealing to us. In this state of being, we would be flourishing in our chosen careers, or prosperously unemployed and, particularly if we're Irish, probably living in a country where the weather is significantly better than where we live now for good measure. In my case, the time when I was most completely happy is surprisingly easy to remember and, maybe even more surprisingly, absolutely nothing like the scenario I've described above. A few years ago I lived in a house in Salthill in Galway (one of a succession of many) and for a very brief period, I was playing music every Friday in a local pub slash restaurant only a few minutes walk away with one of my housemates. It was a gig I took the gig very seriously; during this very brief period, I was gigging twice a week,the other gig being with a cover band who I played with on Saturday nights in one of a number of perpetually lively and very loud pubs in the city centre.

The work with that band was very steady and helped to provide me with a good income but which came in exchange for playing music I detested. As I was playing the pub slash restaurant (henceforth to be referred to as the gastropub) gigs with my housemate, a Swedish folk singer who had a much more similar taste in music to my own than what I was forced to play in the pub band I had a far greater degree of control over the set-list. I took the gigs with these gigs much more seriously even though I made a lot less money from them as the opportunity to play music that actually meant something to me was a thing that I placed a lot of value on. Unfortunately, in my case at least, taking something more seriously is just a synonym for saying I stressed about it a lot more.

It was a Friday afternoon and coming close to Christmas. Although I didn't know it at the time it was also only a few hours away from what I didn't know was going to be the last time that I ever played with my Swedish friend as the gastropub ultimately never asked us to come back after Christmas.

At about 4 o'clock in the afternoon I was sitting in the front room of the house we shared looking forlornly out of the window. It was very cold but it was a beautiful, clear and clean Irish winter's day.The air was fresh and the blue sky seemed as uncluttered as the earth it hovered over, which was free from puddles of rain or typical December slush on the ground. The shortest day of the year was almost upon us and the sun was already starting to turn red and sink down below the houses and trees that I could see through my window on the far side of my estate. I couldn't enjoy it. My mind was filled with anxiety, becoming more intense as the hours wore on, congealing from it's usual dirty grey into a black slime that clogged up my senses, hanging there, almost visible, at the back of my eyes.

My housemate and I were meant to be learning a new song, maybe two, one of which was meant to be a special song for Christmas but my housemate had another job which was keeping her out of the house. She was already late and I had no option except to sit and stew as I sat and waited for her to come home so we could rehearse. My mind whirred round and round, as if it were a record and the anxiety slime had gunked up the needle, leaving it stuck repeating the same few bars of it's song over and over again. I kept repeating every detail of all the things I had to do in order to be ready for the night over and over again. As far as learning the song it probably wasn't going to be too difficult; it was simple tune, but my inability to actually rehearse it properly was still causing me a huge amount of stress. Maybe there were some chords in the bridge that I needed to go over, I could have done that by myself without my partner if I'd had a mind to. But I didn't. I was too stressed about the parts that I needed to work on with her. Maybe I wasn't sure about a particular harmony part or maybe I wasn't sure if we could even both sing it in the key we'd chosen. I don't remember now; in fact at this point I don't even remember what song it was.

I became more and more conscious of the time and that even if my housemate were to magically swing round the corner and march up to the front door within the next ten seconds that would still probably leave us with only about three hours of practice time at most. My mind started to whirr round faster and faster still. I started to fear that if it didn't slow down I'd soon be able to smell it smoking. "How the hell are we going to get this song learned?" I thought.

“I have so much to do on top of it, I have to eat something, I have to change my clothes, I have to take a shower! How do people find time to get anything useful done with all this mundane shit that they have to do every day as well?” I felt nauseous with anxiety. I kept staring out the window at the street but no matter how hard I scrunched up my forehead and demanded her to materialize my housemate still didn't appear.

And then without the slightest warning the power cut out. All the lights in the house flickered and less than a second later went dark. I stood up and tried the light switch in my room and then the one in the hall, but nothing was working. "What am I going to do?" I thought. "We have so much to do, shower, cook, eat, sing, everything has to be perfect, everything has to be just so. How can I have a shower now when the shower doesn't work? What the hell can I do about this?"

The answer hung in my mind as if someone was standing in front of me holding up a sign. Nothing. I can do nothing. I breathed in. All there was in the house was silence. The air suddenly seemed less heavy. The best way I can describe it is that it somehow seemed like it had more open space within it, if that makes any sense. My room wasn't big, the whole house wasn't big, but despite the fact that nobody had arrived with a moving truck and carted away half the furniture while I'd been busy stewing in front of the window, somehow now the whole place seemed more spacious. I looked around my room again, I looked into the corners. My eyes were adjusting to the reduced light. The gold/red of the fading sun replaced the place where the sickly electric yellow had been. Everything felt so much lighter.

"I can do absolutely nothing." I thought. "I can't rehearse. I can't have a shower. I can't cook. Whatever is going to happen is going to happen." And in the space of a few seconds just let go of worrying about the outcome. The slime behind my eyes melted like snow in the sunshine. The knot in my stomach loosened up. All that was left was an emptiness. But not a numb emptiness. The sunlight rushed in to fill it up. I felt warm inside and completely content. Cheerful even. In silence I went up the stairs to the tiny toilet at the top of the landing. I closed the door and sat and watched the sunlight fading into a single point, the colour of blood, on the picture frame that was hanging on the back of the door. Inside myself I glowed like the fiery red ball reflected in front of me.

My housemate eventually arrived, although I have absolutely no idea how much later it was as my perception of time, never good at the best of time, had stopped functioning without any clocks to remind me of it's importance. We rehearsed and I did myself up. We went and played the gig and it was fine. But that moment in the toilet at the top of the stairs was far more memorable than the show. It certainly wasn't a spectacular moment. It wasn't even a moment of accomplishment; nothing occurred to further my future financial security, to make me more desirable or send me off on the path towards my dream job. But It was one of the few times in life when I was able to dismount the relentless train of thought that runs through my head every hour that I'm awake. I'm forever manipulating and calculating, playing with reality and fretting about scenarios that are not now and, often, never will be, under my control. When the control was taken away from me, and I was able to accept that fact, it was like I took a breath and unclenched my fists, letting all the perpetual tension go out of my body. And what came in to fill the space where the tension had been was simply a wonderful a feeling of warmth.