Again you wake up in the dark an hour before the alarm's due to go off.
It’s become routine now.
You’ll feel for the phone on the bedside table, cancel it and turn immediately on your side. Wanting to sleep more but knowing you won’t be able, you’ll start browsing social media instead, eyes flinching against the slab of light in your hand, blinking at the lives of artists, photographers, writers, musicians, actors, filmmakers and the other, more ordinary people you follow as they scroll past in a blur, wondering what their secret to living is and if they ever have days that start like this, knowing that at least some of them must but that you only see what they want you to see.
See?
No, you don’t see anything. But here in the dark you can smell. Smell that you need a shower, that the pillow and the rest of the bed cushioning you need changed and the room cleaned and the floor washed and suddenly determined that doing these things is how you’ll start your day, you pull yourself up into a seating position and then
you fall back down.
No, you’re not going anywhere. You don’t even know what day it is. It could be a Tuesday but it could just as well be the Monday or Wednesday for all the difference there is. You had a way of separating them once but that’s gone. Gone with the job, gone with the dinner and movie dates, gone with the holidays, gone with the nights out and catch ups with mates. Gone with anything to look forward to.
The phone lying on your chest now, interlocked in your hands like a bouquet for the dead and the head already bursting as more black thoughts seep in like pitch through the cracks.
Thoughts like: There is no reason to get up. No reason at all when every day is exactly the same.
Thoughts like: There is only the severed connections. Connections cut between one day and another. Between you and the people you love. Between your thoughts and actions. Between your heart and soul.
Thoughts like: Life is out of balance. The whole thing, viewed globally, is like a great bloody plaster peeling off, exposing the gluey rot and inequality underneath.
Yes, you’ve seen the testimony to that on the screens. God, the constant assault of the screens. Police officers still murdering people for the colour of their skin in the States. Apocalyptic fires across California. Lives lost and ruined in the blink of an eye in Beirut. Fire pits in India for fuck's sake. The suffering felt like a mental health asteroid had crashed into the globe. Enough to make anyone feel exhausted all the time – sick and tired and done with it all.
You sink with all these thoughts as
the
room
grows
lighter, a rim of light widening around the curtains.
Your stomach grumbling, you suppose you might as well have breakfast and a cup of tea. Start from there and the rest will piece itself together somehow.
Yes, somehow.
Somehow you’ll get up, dress yourself in the pale sliver of light, one leg and then the other pulling themselves into the same joggers, one of three sets you keep alternating between. Snatch a random t-shirt from the dishevelled pile in the wardrobe – any will do – and somehow you’ll at least be ready.
Somehow.
Somehow you’ll find yourself firing cereal or toast into your mouth and then you’ll watch yourself brushing your teeth in the mirror and somehow you’ll get around to that shower and that washing and you might even find yourself doing a bit of exercising somehow.
Somehow.
Yes, and somehow you’ll come to repeat it all over again in reverse, on rewind until your head is back on the pillow, figuring out in the space around you how you’ll start again tomorrow. This petty pace and how you’ll keep resisting it somehow.
Resistance is important. Vital to life.
You’ve seen that on the screens too. A statue in Bristol pulled down because Black Lives Matter. A candlelit vigil held on Clapham Common for a woman who was only walking home. Two men released back onto Kenmure Street because of the collective rebellion of their neighbours.
People fighting smaller battles too, becoming more conscious of one another’s mental health and trauma – the impact of the asteroid.
You can fight too, you tell yourself.
But it starts with getting up and
you do.
And that itself is a victory.
Such small victories are important, as empowering as those larger ones. There is a fierce courage in not surrendering. A pride in knowing that you’re one of millions of people like you, shattered and alone with the same demons, their dreams stalled like you and enduring the bad times to see the good like you, knowing that the world has changed forever but that things will get better again and that life is still worth living.
So live, damnit.
Just
wake up
get up
and work it out from there.