Please note: this piece contains strong language.
Fear is a strange beast. Real fear makes your eyes pulse and your pores tingle. It snakes its way through your nervous system, clamouring for a feast, exiting to pounce any way it can: through your eyes, your skin, your arsehole.
Waves and waves.
Fuck fear.
I sip my cold instant coffee and brake another piece from the stirring stick.
I'd been collecting stirring sticks for a while now. You know the thin pieces of wood that sit next to the sugar sachets? Magnificent things.
I've thought at length about how many one tree could birth. Loads.
One pocket of the olive coat I wore to my gran’s funeral last month is full of wee wooden soldiers, and the other was on its way. Tiny pieces of wood that scrape my finger tips, “snap”, “snap”.
My routine is proving quite effective.
The “Bend and Snap” never looked so clinical.
A one-handed acrobat, I move the wood between my fingers in rolling motion, I snap a little piece at a time until it's gone.
Usually this takes 5 snaps.
Sometimes it's 4, and when it's 4 I need to locate the longer piece and dig my fingertips in hard to create twins.
10am is my morning coffee. I have a fag by the sliding doors and take the filthy looks from the visitors. They don't know the miracle I'm performing here.
The new Queen Elizabeth squeaks and creeks and the greeters wave and marvel as the people of Glasgow come and go.
This fucking place is only weeks old and it's sucked the life out of me. I haven't slept in days and my hair is falling out. I make a promise to myself to never have children.
1pm is my afternoon coffee. I snap and bend and snap, furiously. I'm late to this meeting with the stirring stick, so I have to move fast.
6pm is my evening coffee. I don't even like coffee anymore, but I need to feel the tartness running down my throat as the wood stabs my fingertips, hidden deep inside my pockets.
I breathe a sigh of relief when it's done. The stick is gone.
I board the lift, look at my aged face in the mirrored section and say out loud, ‘We will be ok now.’
It's day 49. My daddy lies in bed five of the ICU and the machines continue their dance with his internals.
I smile because everyone in here thinks those machines are keeping him alive, but me and the stirring sticks, we know better.