Day 180: Gloom

Loose in soft skinned motionless shadow the room bends and churns. Wind rattles the skylight’s frame’s bare pine. One bulb spills its soupy glow.

I sit in the gloom and play on videogames. My phone by my arm mumbles with notifications for work’s social media accounts, bought interactions calling into the void.

My desk: 47 pence in coins, a bar blade, a coffee mug, my camera, a LEGO dinosaur, keys, cotton wool pads, dust, drugs, empty space.

My mind: post-migraine syrupy emptiness, lethargy, an inability to feel content.

I can hear the housemates downstairs home from the cinema, I can hear the wind outside doing its thing. I should sleep soon. I shouldn’t stay up halfway through the night. Frosty spectral hours with pulsing screens and walled-in noise and in the stretched deep-lidded fatigue the voices stop. The anxiety stops. Too tired at 4am neck dropping in front of phone light to be depressed.

But this is not a solution. Not a way through. Only holding pain in stasis. Only getting comfortable at the bottom of a pit.

I shouldn’t stay up halfway through the night...