Lethargy

Every day for the past four or five weeks I wake up, and my first instinct is to head to the couch. My days without a paying job mean that I am under no necessary obligation to move. I mean this in a very literal and visceral sense. In the absence of any other concrete societal responsibility, the entirety of my days have become hyper focused on the series of tiny bodily movements, gestures, and muscular contractions that make up my day. Some examples:

1. A look out to the setting sun in the sky will inspire the thought to head out to the balcony to write for a little, read, or simply just sit and observe the people below taking their dogs for a walk. However this mental decision to move outside signals a momentous event for the muscles, tendons, and bones that make up my languorous and supine body. The slight (but consciously present) straining of my quads and glutes that brace to in order to help my stand up from a seated position, for example.
   
   
2. The feeling that my throat feels slightly parched and in need of a drop of water will have me psyching myself up, "better to just get this over and done with instead of trying to put up with this annoyingly dry sensation of a parched mouth" I think to myself as I shove my body upwards and forwards towards the kitchen. What was hitherto a more or less automatic movement to a sensation (thirst), now requires convincing of its relative benefits to remaining in a vegetative state.
   
   
3. After getting myself psyched up to go for a jog (including caffeine), it started to rain. I had thought to myself that the idea of running in the rain was one that I should aspire to, but the comfort of staying dry prevailed and the idea of it remains exactly that.

Birth

In the beginning it felt like a pause between breaths. You know the sensation? When you realise, suddenly, that you are holding your breath. Perhaps you were anticipating something, and once conscious of the tension, released it in a rush. But for a split second you existed as a stillness.

And then everything comes back at once in an onslaught. My onslaught was a bright blaze. A burning radiance that pierced the inky stillness and saturated my plasma. Everything was on fire, with such an intensity that I struggled to contain it through sight alone. I couldn't stop myself from accepting this fire into my depths. So deeply did I breathe it in, so deeply did I accept it that I can no longer distinguish it from me. I am intertwined with it, and it with me. In a glorious daze I burst into movement. My entire being tingled as if alight; my muscles, my senses had been infected.

Another year older

Today I grow a little older. I turned 27 at the start of 2016, and for the first time in my life, I felt the pressure of time. Before 27, time was white noise; I did not abide by its timeline, my sense of self was not wedded to each year that passed. Time was a crescendo - it was light and I rose up with it, basking in the feeling of weightless ascent.

Something changed when I realised I was 27: time no longer feels like a rising. I feel resistance to it for the first time, a heaviness tied to me. It no longer feels inconsequential.

The other day I awoke suddenly in the dead of the night; my body was dying. In my hypnagogic state, it felt as if every single cell in my body was starting to decay. Like I was paying up a debt with every little piece of my mass, my physicality, as if my body was finally giving up something. The life that burned within me and had hitherto only expanded, was starting to slowly seep. All I could do in that moment was cry. I curled up into a ball and cried. Cried for the loss of something. Bone marrow? For the girl I used to be?

Distracted

My thoughts are grains of sand that slip through my hands, hastily making their escape through the spaces of my fleshy fingers. I try to press the tiny pebbles together, but they do not cohere.

The time

What time is it? I look at the clock hanging over my bed. Its hands are made of thin lines of steel, gossamer threads that glint in the morning sun. One short hand points towards ‘7’ the other, longer, towards ‘23’. Twenty-three? Four plus three. ‘4’ with three tiny spaces after. The long hand points to three spaces after 4. The time is 7, three spaces after 4.

Apathy

That sense of paralysis crept up on me again. You know, the kind that asks, "What's the point? We are all slowly dying anyway." The nitpicking at the conditions of everyday life. Of how it operates, of how it propagates itself. How it rudely intrudes into my daily habits like a mildly disliked acquaintance who presumes themselves invited to a friends-only event. And in their wake, leaves behind a vague sense of unease and resentment. Every day, I am formed by a totality which itself has one foot sunk helplessly into the recesses of time while the other dangling limb reaches limply out to grasp a future it cannot  yet see clearly. Ossified in this chrysalis state, never to emerge whole. I am stuck in its midst. A stick in the mud. So what shall I do with my time? Choose to forget my circumstances. My motto for this year is:- Don't think, just do. Just do, just do, just do.

Anger

Bitterness. Bile. Some kind of abhorrent medicinal tonic that is always administered, never taken (the latter implies some sort of voluntary aspect). A thick, sticky goop that is plastered messily onto my internal organs. SPLAT. It just clings there like a festering wound. If I leave it for too long one day I shall forget that it was not originally a part of me.