Perfect, and getting better by the day.

That’s the only way I can describe my life. It goes through these periods of sustained calm, steadily growing toward the ‘good’.

It hadn’t started so easily. The early years were far from a suburban dream, they were grass filled but urban. We came up in the intermittent chaos of a very large city.

Tumultuous, exciting and always things going on. Cultures swirling together and yet separate.

There are more ways to describe it than I have words. It was everything, and my heart and soul were filled, even if the fridge was sometimes empty. That went for many kids in the neighbourhood and yet we were all healthy and happy.

Laughter echoed from the shared bedrooms and packed homes. Extended families that hadn’t yet given way to the atomisation and so called abundance afforded to the well to do, the ‘lucky’ few.

‘Look at how far you’ve come’ are words I hear too often. It has a double meaning because I’m 200 miles from the place that made me, the place of effortless happiness and familiar street names. Squares. I miss Squares having swapped them for Places and Pleins at various different stages.

All of life’s a stage, isn’t it.

Now, I act the part here some Place else. Flagey is where it started here. Now I play the family man down south near Waterloo. Ironic because home is down south near Waterloo, just in a slightly different context connecting this loose association of names that reflect places which couldn’t be more different. For me at least.

I wake up from my recently disturbed nightmares in a huge bed that little me couldn’t even dream of. The extreme comfort of a perfect mattress and my struggling psychology is perfectly juxtaposed with my childhood.

I open my eyes as the weekend sun starts to light the room. Turn to my right and see a woman sleeping calmly. Peacefully. She is so beautiful at this moment and seeing her this calm fills my soul. She is so different when she’s awake, like two completely different people I get to know and love.

She’s beautiful.

Like this bed, little me could never have dreamed of her. Her! Thank you god for her and what she has given me.

I lean over her and draw a deep breath over her familiar scent before kissing her too lightly to disturb her slumber. The subconscious calm version of her knows she’s home and knows it’s me.

I step lightly from luxury onto the thickness of our new carpets over the underfloor heating. I slink into the hallway and see the morning sun over our lush green garden.

It’s all so fucking beautiful. So wonderful.

It’s thanks to meeting her and to having a great therapist for those first years away from home where the loneliness had set it. This time it would be different.

I knew how to ward it off after the terrible first experiences of being away from home at university and subsequently travelling to and living in different places. ‘It’ being the impulse to self sabotage leading to a spectacular implosion so that I could go home and recover. Ground hog days, months and years.

I’m glad it never worked out the previous times as I look about me now thinking how perfect this all is, and how it will continue to be so. Previously when things got good I’d think…no, I’d know and act out the destructive impulse whirring through my mind. Stirred by the loneliness and alienation bubbling in my homesick soul.

The only answer is arson.

But not this time.