I spent my childhood missing somebody I hadn’t met. Then every girl became, for a while, the possibility that I had found her.
This thought was sparked when I stumbled upon a broadcast of TFI Friday and Bjork performing ‘I Miss You’. It is quite the most wonderful performance.
The lyric sums up ten years of my life, maybe twenty. The duration of the quest for the person I was missing.
I miss you, but I haven’t met you yet So special, but it hasn’t happened yet
You are gorgeous, but I haven’t met you yet I remember, but it hasn’t happened yet
And if you believe in dreams Or what is more important
That a dream can come true
I will meet you
I was peeking, but it hasn’t happened yet I haven’t been given my best souvenir I miss you, but I haven’t met you yet I know your habits, but wouldn’t recognize you yet
And if you believe in dreams Or what is more important
That a dream can come true
I miss you
I’m so impatient
I can’t stand the wait
When will I get my cuddle
Who are you
I know by now that you’ll arrive
By the time I stop waiting
I miss you
I think I had been missing someone long before I had any proper idea what that meant.
Often as a young boy, wandering the tracks in the dunes at Beadnell, I thought there should be someone with me. Not a mate, another boy; not my older brother, who I still did things with often; not my younger sister who, at two years younger, was like a baby.
Yet a girl.
Not even a girlfriend. I wouldn’t have had the word for what I meant.
More like a twin.
Someone I’d see when I looked in the mirror, though I didn’t understand the concept of an alter ego. Someone who should have been there beside me because somehow she already belonged there. I was talking to someone in my head and getting a reply. Thinking like an echo that would change things on the rebound.
I had an image of her too. Often a Scandinavian blonde, always blue eyes, a winning smile and manner. Pixie or Water nymph-like. A lover of the outdoors like me. Feral. A thinker. Imaginative.
Where had that come from?
The children’s television of those years was The Magic Roundabout, Camberwick Green, The Singing Ringing Tree, then Bedknobs and Broomsticks and Chitty-Chitty Bang Bang. Perhaps fragments came from all of these things, but I don’t remember constructing her out of them. She felt less like somebody I had invented than somebody who was already out there.
Somewhere.
That was the peculiar thing.
I didn’t think, one day I shall find a girl.
It was closer to: where is she?
Or even: where has she gone?
Years later Björk found exactly the right expression for it in I Miss You: missing somebody before you have met them. That was it. The impossible logic of it was precisely what made it true. Somewhere there was a person for me, and somehow I had already missed her.
Sex wasn’t attached to it. Not then.
Maybe it was as my mother said to me in my later teens, “sex isn’t everything”. Indeed! But intimacy takes many forms. An intellectual understanding, laughing together, common enthusiasms and games, until everything somehow tumbles together as a young adult into physical intimacy.
I think that was what I was looking for before I knew enough to describe it.
Someone who understood.
Someone I wanted to understand.
Someone alongside me rather than merely present.
Then, as I grew older and girls stopped being imaginary and started turning up in classrooms, swimming pools, discos, holidays and houses, there was sometimes that astonishing delight at feeling there was instant rapport. An immediate desire of some kind to put up blinkers so that we could concentrate on each other.
Everything outside the two of us could disappear for a while.
And there came that feeling: where have you been all my life?
Could you be the one?
Of course growing up meant discovering how unreliable that feeling could be. The commonality that brought you together might be a false one, or a transient one, or the only thing you had in common.
Sometimes it was simply that you were the same age.
Sometimes you were both “up for it”, however innocent or otherwise that might be.
For a while that could feel like everything.
Then it wasn’t.
You can only run with a relationship that is not going to take off for so long.
And perhaps that made disappointment easier to survive. If something failed, then she wasn’t the person I had been waiting for. The belief itself survived the particular girl. Someone was still out there.
That could make every new encounter disproportionately exciting. It wasn’t only about meeting somebody new. There was the possibility of recognition.
Is it you?
Perhaps that was why an apparently slight connection could become important so quickly. A look, an enthusiasm, the way somebody laughed, the discovery that we liked doing the same thing, an hour-long conversation in which neither of us wanted to stop: any of these could trigger it.
There you are.
And then the blinkers went on.
Much later, once I had enough experience to know what I wanted rather than merely sensing someone’s absence, the outline became clearer.
Trust.
Understanding, or a desire to understand.
Belief.
Nothing judgmental.
Love for the moment.
Physically fit in life and in bed.
Maturity about intimacy in all its forms.
Tolerance of our differences.
A common desire to be a couple and raise a family.
But those were adult words for something whose beginnings lay far further back.
A boy alone on the tracks through the dunes at Beadnell, thinking there ought to be somebody walking beside him.
Not another boy.
Not his brother.
Not his sister.
A girl.
Like a twin.
And somewhere, impossibly, I missed her
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