ANDI JAMES CHAMBERLAIN - WRITER
ANDI JAMES CHAMBERLAIN - WRITER
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IF WE MUST BE CENSORED
LET US CENSOR OURSELVES

Words from Andi. 
Opinions, thoughts, articles and musings outside of the book releases and upcoming work. All opinion expressed within is simply that - opinion -
based on facts available and research made. Feedback is welcomed and comments are open.

Talking about books, movies, art, politics, love and life.

What a Difference a Day Makes - (9 Years Out.)

20/9/2016

5 Comments

 
​It was my 9th wedding anniversary only two and a half hours ago.

Then at the strike of midnight, it was done.
Much like my marriage.

It is now 2.32am.
Much around the same as when I learnt my marriage was over.

In two short weeks my divorce will be finalised, and I will officially be a single man again. A divorcee, yes – But a single man all the same.

It’s weird.
The last three years I have hidden from this day, moped and milled around in silent rage, anxious and fidgety; miserable and angsty; uncompromising and ill company.
This year, I had forgotten all about the significance, caught up in other matters, my head in the clouds, wondering and struggling with other things happening…
Right up until the stroke of the first minute past midnight, when I looked down at my phone as I put it on the charge, and saw the date shine back at me.

19th September.

In my mind the calendar goes 17th, 18th, 20th – when it gets to this week.
I blank out the 19th entirely, save for a brief birthday greeting to my friend Paul Minehane (who turned 30 this year, HAPPY BIRTHDAY MATE!) then I turn off my brain, and I try and steer away from social media where possible, and away from people as much as a human can in this day and age.

In years gone by it was much easier as I lived on my own with no other soul but my cat as company.
I’d close the blinds, I’d shut the window and lock the door. Make myself some dinner, and pretend the day was not real.
This year I live with two of my best and closest friends, so hiding was not an option, and interaction was a given… So, I had to suck it up and face the day for the first time in 4 years since me and my wife separated.

Thankfully, I closed my Facebook page just after we married, and the one I have now has no posts or pictures for me to be triggered. Neither does Timehop, Instagram or twitter, so I would be shared some flashback to the once so happy day. No pictures popping up and throwing me off-kilter and into a sadness spiral.

Instead, all I had to battle with was my own mind.
And, I have to tell you, I did ok.
I did an ok job – thanks to one friend in particular coming round and making me laugh and sharing a misery with me over silly things, complaining at each other, sharing dinner and laughing at stupid and inconsequential life troubles that were more trivial than life changing, and easy to moan about at the expense of falling into our own heads for real concerns.

I made it through pretty unscathed all being said and done.

If only it was easier in years previous.

I loved my wife deeply.
In many ways I still do, not in the way that matters most, that ember has long since been extinguished by grief and misery and sadness, resentment and a flicker of hate – something I am loath to spread in a world filled with so much already.

My wife was the first great love of my life, and in many ways, she will always be a love of my life.
We shared moments of rare intimacy and each other that no other living soul will ever know about. We looked at each other as no one else had looked at us until that point – and despite my flaws, despite her flaws, we found love where it should maybe not have existed.

We both failed in our marriage.
All being said and done – it is easier and right to say she failed more than me – but I am not innocent in any respect. Two people enter the union and two people need to work to make it succeed. That is the foundation of a happy, fruitful and loving marriage.
She made some terrible mistakes I will never be able to fully forgive her for…
And I failed to be the man she wanted and needed. I was angry, burdened and full of confused ambition and ambivalence.

She broke my heart in ways I am still trying to come to terms with, and that will shape me as a person for years to come.
She fractured my mind in ways that still hurts and make no sense to me.
A psychic crack running the width of my brain. Thoughts confused and blurry, ideals shaken and bruised.

But I loved her, and in many ways still do, all the same.

I have taken a path of philosophical openness that has taken four long years to coalesce inside me, in relationship to what happened and how our lives broke off from each other.
The Pangaea of our marriage cracking and deconstructing into the continents of hate, resentment, grief, guilt and regret.
The ocean of love I had now vast and in many places, impossible to navigate.
Full of wrecked ships from failed attempts.

But, I have grown as a person.
As a man.

I look in the mirror now and I often do not like what I see, but I appreciate the effort I am putting in to improve.
I realize the seeds of who she wanted me to be is mixed in with the rest of my DNA, and I am a cocktail of ideas and intent, needs and wants and accidental progress.

I think I was a good husband.
As successful at it as I am in being a good man, human and person to my friends and strangers.
I cared. I loved. I learned.
I failed…

So many often do.
And though I was angry over my marriage coming to an end, and sad - sadder than I have ever been about anything – I realize this is all part and parcel of growing up.
I am not the first man to be divorced, I will not be the last.
This is a thing that happens, take the hit, roll with it, carry on dusting yourself down and shaking failure off of you.

Every year on my anniversary I wake to a small, short, often single word or icon message from my wife.
This year at 7.45am I received a single red heart. Nothing more.

Rather than get angry, or upset, or mad – like the previous 3 years since we separated – I just half smiled, and reflected on the good and the happy times we shared, and realised that that message took a lot to send, it meant something, even if from a place of guilt (which I don’t believe it was from… Not this year.)
And I sent a short message back, three hearts. No words… nothing else said between us all day… and I carried on with my day.

In two short weeks our decree absolute will be here and we will no longer be associated with each other in any legal sense.
She will be free to do as she pleases and will go her way, me the same…
And life will go on for us both.

Sadness, anger, guilt, joy, happiness…
These are tools we use to make life manageable and easier.
Sometimes they drive us and we lose control, such simple/complex/brilliant/stupid forces of nature in the driving seat is a deadly and dangerous game.
But so is life.
So is love.
So is regret.

I suppose from here on out, I choose to not let them drive, and I want to be in control.
Take the punches, accept the praise when it comes, don’t be scared of the great unknown – and let the past be the past.

I understand love better because of my wife.
I am still scared by it and I have lost good friendships and wonderful people from my life because of this fear.
Some I truly wish I had said the words “I LOVE YOU” to.
They deserved to hear it, because it would have been the right thing to do – but more importantly – because I truly did love them.
Maybe more than anyone I had ever before – Love being so potent in my mind now it had been denied so long.

But, fear took the steering wheel and drove me and my mind and body in stupid places, and I lost a pure and brilliant lover because of it…
Regret then takes the wheel.
Then guilt.
Then longing…

Soon, you have to wrestle it back and though you hate yourself for your cowardice, and you wish the person would come back to you -  you have to accept when its over, and accept your mistakes.
I made plenty.
And to that person – I am sorry.
You deserved better. You were one of the best things that ever happened to me.
I am sorry If I let you down.

* * *

I Breathe.
Take the punches. Accept my faults and try and move on.
I learn.
Such is life.
Such is love.

It’s been a strange 24hrs.
An even stranger 9 months.
An incredibly weird 4 years since my marriage fell apart…

But I have learned so much about myself as a person, and it has revealed to me friends I never thought I would be lucky enough to have, I have learned to embrace things in ways I never thought I could – though I have been hurt, and I have cried and it has been painful in ways I had never experienced, I cannot but feel that it has made me a better person for it all.

You adapt, you learn from it and you roll on.
Full of hope.
Full of boundless, optimistic hope.

To live - and – hopefully be brave enough to love and say you love again.





5 Comments

REFLECTIONS ON THE TOWERS - A recollection of the day the world changed.

13/9/2016

0 Comments

 
​Reflecting on the last 15 years in context to the horrific and world changing events of 9/11 is a sobering and eye-opening thing..

I was 21 years old when the planes penetrated WTC1 and WTC2.
And I was at college in Stratford Upon Avon studying Theatre Practice with 12 or 13 likeminded people – several of which are still friends to this day, several more I have not heard hide nor hair from since our final day at the school.


One such friend will be a life-long inspiration – and was the person I based Jimmy Edmunds on from the novel ONE MAND AND HIS DOGMA, my first novel.

We were starting the day as we ever were in the canteen drinking weak coffee, eating fried breakfasts, and talking amongst ourselves about the day and lessons ahead.
No idea of what was happening over the Atlantic and no idea of the epoch making situation occurring in the skies of America.

The first inkling we had that there was any issues was the chatter coming form a friend of ours who was in Heathrow of delayed flights and cancelled travel plans due to a “Small light aircraft” crashing into the WTC.
The same friends father was a pilot for British Airways and was getting incomplete updates, half assumed and half processed from colleagues on the other side of the ocean.

Bit by bit though the story was emerging.

We had taken our lunch and a stroll into town to do some shopping and look at books and music in Waterstones and HMV, when we walked past the high street electronics store, and saw on the giant 40 inch screens the true story and terror unfolding.

The first plane had sheared the tower at a skewed angle, exploding fire and debris and devastation onto the streets below.
We watched as the first few bodies started falling from the building in confused escape from the toxic fumes and fire inside, some madness in their minds driving them to suicide as a way of escaping a fate unimaginable inside the building.

The news was different on every channel, different reportage, different views and opinion; the videos all differing angles and vantage points – but the gist the same.
This was an attack, not an accident.
This was a monumental attack on freedom and the United States that would change the world.

As the reports were being made the second plane sliced a vast crease through the other tower.
And we collectively all held our breath, hands covered mouths, I vividly remember my hands retreating to my head, fingers entwined, and my mouth flapping open as I looked at the screen, my friends, the screen again, and was at an absolute loss as to what I was watching.
Like some horrible movie, but played out in real life.

It was beyond shocking.

The store quickly filled with passers by engaged and troubled by the noise and gasps and commotion inside, soon the store was full of pedestrians and staff, all stood in shock and awe – long before the same was unleashed on the desert in woefully misjudged retribution.

For a moment, amidst the evils of men, humanity shone out as people hugged and held each other, others openly wept at what they were watching.
I remember looking at a middle aged man who was crying holding his mouth, and he saying that he was there just last week.

The confusion and the fear palpable upon his face.

we went back to college, and found lessons had been called off due to the situation, and they urged us to watch the news and pay attention, as it was clear whatever was happening was the dawn of the new future.

We retreated back to our friends house, and TV on, internet up and loaded, radio chattering away in one of the bedrooms, we scoured the networks and ether for updates.

More planes were missing, others unaccounted for, others still non-responsive.
The story becoming bigger and bigger as the day went on.

Then Philadelphia, then the Pentagon, then….
Silence.

The day goes blurry and the world went murky, and I remember little more until…

That evening I am in Coventry.
My friends are playing a gig – the biggest so far of their careers – with Lost Prophets, the big buzz band of the UK scene right then – from the label VISIBLE NOISE.

The evening had been subdued and weird, the crowd shaken and distracted.
The music was amazing, and each band gave a moment and paid lip-service to the tragedy in the USA, and a single solitary voice of dissent shouted back each time

“FUCK THE USA.”

Drunk and lairy, his demonstration met with derision and hate from his fellow gig-goers, the guy unrepentant and confrontational with everyone before being asked to leave and escorted out by bouncers.

The evening ending with autographs from the Lost Prophet band members, years before any inkling of what was happening within front man Ian Watkins mind, his secrets still locked and hidden at this time – his unforgiveable sins far from public knowledge and his life on an upward trajectory, far from his pitiful fate.

We went home and slept and I cannot remember dreaming, I remember only silence and darkness.
Before the morning woke me.

I ran to the local newsagent and bought every paper I could, absorbed the views and opinions and take on the situation. Soaked in the pandemonium and fear mongering and remember clearly thinking that this was seeds of what-was-to-come.

The TV stations already building cases for the blame, already making clear statements of accusation.
The world already spinning on a tilted axis as the new dawn broke.

I honestly feel after the events of 9/11 humanity took a turn down a path we are yet to find our way out of.
The world became a more muted, darker, miserable place – and everything we have done since has just made it more  and more this way.

We are quick to accept things based on surface value and explanations by people we trust to be telling the truth, but never knowing where this truth comes from.

We no longer analyze or dig for fact, we just take it as read because the TV said so. We no longer hold the world to a high moral inspection, we accept blindly that everything is as it should be because that’s what the voices on the radio and the news says is “NORMAL”.

We lost the ability to reason on 9/11.
Instead, we became closer to sheep than people, following the easiest thread and trend, rather than blazing new trails.
accepting what our peers says is true and right, without questioning its value.
Allowing second best to be the new high standard.

We de-evolved on that day.

I remember asking a million questions, and getting a dozen answers in return.
Being hungry for information, disseminating it with friends and peers over coffee shooting wiled theories and ideas at each other, and people calling us conspiracy nuts, saying we were crazy and deluded…

But we knew better.

I don’t know what really happened that day.
Whether the “facts” we were presented were real or false, truth or lie.

Truth be told…
I am past caring what the establishment and the news and the “media” peddle by and large on any subject now.

I stopped buying newspapers soon after 9/11 as I did not like the narrative they were all selling.
I stopped reading conspiracy theories as they seemed too real, and less “conspiracy” – and I learned that the world is a three dimensional construct we observe and experience via two dimensional rationale and medium.
We miss the woods, often because of the trees, and we accept the opinion of strangers rather than finding it out ourselves – through – fear? Boredom? Ambivalence?

I do not know.

9/11 was a tragedy of so many levels that we are still trying to recover now physically, psychically and mentally.
Humanity took a battering on that day in so many ways – visible and invisible.
We will take generations to get over it.

Truth or fiction.
the world is a darker place not because of the planes, or the loss of life – as terrible and as heartbreaking as it was.

No.
It is darker because we accepted the surface of things that day rather than dig to the core.
And that is where truth lies.

I am 36 now.
I have witnessed so many things.
Beautiful, brilliant and sad.
But very few days exist in my mind as clear and concise as that day in September in 2001.

And I don’t many more will.
and that makes me sadder than anthing.


0 Comments
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    AUTHOR

    Andi James Chamberlain is the author of Urban Fantasy novel ONE MAN AND HIS DOGMA and short story collection 10 SHORT OF 31. 

    When not writing works of fiction he can be found sharing his opinion vociferously online, sharing his thoughts on art, music, film, politics, love and life.

    He doesn't pretend to be right all the time, but he often is. Except when he's wrong.
    ​Which is often.

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