The [Kleinian] nondescript life

The mug is an obedient moon. It orbits my hand while the tab bar tides in and out, twelve open, twelve closing, twelve returning like guilt. If I breathe, the foam quiets. If I scroll, it hisses. I keep calling this vigilance. It keeps sounding like fear. Today, I am going to test a small superstition: one act, one hour, one voice. No echo. Not today.

Sunday went well. An unexpected session of cooking and having lunch with my mother and sister. Followed by a strong afternoon sleep. When I woke up, my mother had already left for her trip. My sister went out for evening snacks and came back with the soft rustle of packets and her friend whose laughter fit the room like a borrowed light. They talked. I added two sentences, late. We hadn’t spoken in a while; the awkward began to melt, not pretty, just melting the way ice does in a sink you forgot to empty. We talk about nothing much. She is, annoyingly, both: the one who does the dishes and the one who brings the wrath. Holding both without downgrading either is the upgrade: from halves to a whole person. I practice holding the two in one face. The friend left. We went to our respective rooms and came out after a while for dinner. Doors locked. Lights out. Each bed waiting for sleep. My mother isn’t here, so I have the room to myself and the old noise for company, and I sit down to write the thing that has been circling me like a mosquito I refuse to kill.

"Nondescript". I was reading something recently about a freedom fighter while searching for another one who left his home at the age of eight. I could not find the latter. But, about the former... He called his childhood ‘nondescript’—his father seldom there. That was the hook. This idea, this bit, this theme was circling in my mind ritualistically, a combination of nothing-to-look-back-to in life, going away from what-/who-ever is in my present, inferiority complex, my mediocrity, my banality.

Nondescript is how the house looks whenever I look around. The ringtone I’ve refused to change since 2013. The cupboard’s cumin ghost. The bus pass number I still know by heart. The beige switchboard with one missing screw and another just coming out. The fan that clicks every fourth turn. Nondescript is the fan’s fourth-click. I didn't mind until guests or friends came; then the click was all I could hear. The house answers my hiss with its own; click, click, click; until ordinary becomes an alarm. By nondescript I don’t mean empty. I mean the kind of life that refuses a headline but keeps receipts. By evening the house resets to default: beige, obedient, unremarked until the fan insists on being heard. The metronome of dread. I log the details like a field worker, as if naming the small could make the large less sharp. From one missing screw to a missing father is a vulgar leap, I know. The point is not scale; the point is texture. Texture is what splitting erases; I’m writing it back in: naming both the milk and the click. So I open a ledger of the unremarked: objects, then outcomes, then the parts of me that learned to keep quiet. On quiet evenings the room is the good breast: tea, sleep, a soft hum. On clicking evenings it withholds and I imagine sour milk that curdles on in the wires. I keep them split so neither cancels the other.

Mediocrity is the school prize I never won; the way an unframed certificate curls at the corner until it becomes its own shrug. Banality is a life already telling me it will never go anywhere. The inferiority complex is the way I erase myself a little each day so the finite end feels closer. Nothing to look back to, so I make everything up. I borrow pain, other people's stories, heritage, legacy and embellish castles in Spain while my own life idles outside the gate. I watch other people’s lives on trains, in queues, in rooms where they know what to do with their hands and something in me fogs the glass and traces a better face. I start small. A different childhood. A father who shows up on time. A city that spells my name correctly the first try. In one version I’m the one who left at eight; in another I’m the one who stays and makes tea and is thanked for it; in a third I’m a rumor with a passport. I call it imagination so I don’t have to call it hunger.

This is where I confess the theft.

This "stealing pain" has now become the shadow-economy of my nondescript life: when my days feel beige or gray, I shoplift color from someone else's disaster. Laundering someone's pain to give mine "texture", then pretending it's about justice. I steal pain like a bargain hunter: not the whole coat, just a button to stitch on my plain jacket. Spoiling is its love language. A headline here, a statistic there, a father who wasn’t there for someone else, a grief shaped like a window I could lean out of. The button holds for a day. Then the jacket is still plain, and the button aches like it remembers another garment. The fan clicks every fourth turn. I count... four, eight, twelve... like rationing biscuits in a famine. When the room is this nondescript, someone else’s grief arrives like spice, bright and unforgivable. I sprinkle too much. [Then call it empathy.] Envy doesn’t just want the coat; it wants the fabric to fray so no one wears it. Maybe it isn’t empathy; maybe it’s envy: the old attack on the good breast. When my own cupboard is beige, I raid someone else’s color and call it solidarity. I keep their names off the page. Where facts matter, I source them. I do not speak as them. If their pain doesn’t change my next action, I put the buttons back in the jar. I describe my own plain jacket. Like... a boy who left home at eight; I wore his departure like a borrowed coat to warm my ordinary hallway. Or, a woman’s court date; I pinned her number to my chest to feel important, then forgot to call. And sometimes, a city I have never seen; I pronounced it correctly and thought that was solidarity. The switchboard studies my face and refuses to learn it. My daydreams queue up anyway, polite, well-behaved, asking for a stamp. I stamp them. I become my own forged document, valid in my pocket, questioned at every border. Banality signs the bottom in a careful hand. Inferiority passes it across the counter without meeting my eyes. Mediocrity carries my bag and forgets it on the last step. And still there is the itch to run. I don’t mean the cinematic exit; I mean the smaller escapes I map on receipts: the path from bed to sink where I can change the screw; the path from phone to sister where I can say tea tomorrow, yes or no; the path from tab to tab to the one that quietly asks for fifty words and gets them. Sometimes I only run a sentence long. Sometimes the sentence is enough to move the air. Maybe that’s what nondescript means for me: not a lack of story but a refusal to perform it at volume. A life that whispers and has to be leaned into. A room that clicks until I get up and touch it. I will still daydream, I know; I will still press my nose to the glass of other people’s days. But the fingerprints I leave tonight are mine. Call it a trial run at reparation: mend one small thing I’ve imagined I ruined, even if all I broke was the air. One act. One hour. One voice.

This is depressive-position courage: fix one small thing I’ve fantasised I spoiled. I fetch the screwdriver, seat the stray screw, and the fan forgets my name; I remember the room as whole. For tonight, good and bad drink from the same cup. No echo. Early on we learn in halves: the soothing half and the persecuting half. A Kleinian lens calls them part-objects—the good breast and the bad. Adults relive the split in quieter ways: tabs that comfort, rooms that accuse.

For tonight, the room is one room.

~

Reference to Melanie Klein and her "good breast" and "bad breast" concepts within her broader Object Relations Theory. This theory describes how infants initially perceive the mother's breast as two separate "part-objects"—one satisfying and "good" [good breast: nourishing, protective], and one frustrating and "bad" [bad breast: persecutory, withholding]—through a process called splitting. Early on we split care into a “good breast” that feeds and a “bad breast” that withholds; adulthood replays that split until we can hold a person—or a room—as both. Because, a single room that can both soothe and annoy without turning persecutor. Adult life replays that split until we can hold both together; then small acts of repair (reparation) become possible. The reparative impulse belongs to the depressive position: the wish to repair the damaged loved object. When we manage that, envy eases, guilt can be used, and small acts of repair become possible.

- Oizys.