Day 65: Splodges

A bad day. Alarm set for 09:00 but I snooze every 10 minutes until 10:00, then turn the alarm off and sleep until 11:30. Wake up half through a sleep cycle, groggy and dull, can barely move, can barely think. Fran, next to me: "Maybe you needed the extra sleep." But I don't want to be like this. I needed to go to bed early and get up early and go out and get exercise. That's what I needed. Not to lounge around wasting the few precious hours I have before work. She doesn't understand. I snap at her.

I get under the shower and think about work, think about worries, mind darting everywhere but the present. I look at my body in the mirror. My skin is bad. I put on acne cream, moisturiser, do my teeth. Everything is effort with no reward. Will I ever not be scarred?

I come out of the bathroom to find Fran sobbing, bit fat splodges plopping onto my leg as I sit with my arm around her. She's tired of her chronic fatigue, tired of hurting, tired of always being tired. I'm no help. I have nothing to say. No energy for myself, let alone to give her. "It'll work out." I say. I don't know if it will.

She gets a taxi home and I walk into town, write in a coffee shop, but I can't get the words going. Nothing comes out. Just frustration, emptiness, rage. An hour passes. I have to go to work but I can't. I can't go to work. I can't. I can't.

I go to work. It's the same as every day. Eight hours of serving, cleaning, scrubbing, waiting. Smiling at customers. Not telling anyone to go fuck themselves.

I get a taxi home, make empty small talk with the driver after we drop Chloe at her house. I try to see the driver as a human being. He makes small talk back, trying to see me as a human being. I don't know if either of us is successful.

At home I go upstairs and lean on the windowsill and look out at the city, the distant lights shimmering through the haze. I see the searchlight of a city centre nightclub, blaring its million empty nothings into space.

Maybe we need to scrunch our world up and throw it in the bin and start again. Maybe we need to give it up as a bad job.

Or would it come out the same every time we tried it? Do you need this precise balance of suffering and joy to get any reality at all? One mote more or less and life would not flourish. Maybe this is the very best it is possible to get.

Frustrating, petty, broken. And the best we'll ever get. Maybe this has to be enough.