I don’t think it’s true that the worst time to be alive was during the Holocaust, or the Great Depression. I think that the worst time to be alive is around 4 in the morning, when it’s too early to get up but too late to get back to sleep and when darkness aspires beyond His means.


I lie in bed, thinking about nothing and it’s such sweet relief; if eternity continued thus I would be satisfied as when there’s nothing to think about and when you think about nothing there are no expectations, no disappointments, no regulations, no rules, no rule-breakers and no heroes. To lie back and just let the absolute darkness press in on you; to think about nothing: are you still thinking when you think about nothing or is thinking an act defined by its target? I’ve lost it, now, I’m thinking about whether thinking is or is not an act defined by its target but funnily enough I don’t mind too much. This is humanity at its very lowest and my favorite time of the day.

It’s dark outside: or is it? Who can tell when the shutters are closed and your eyes are as much use as your hands for telling the time of day? Does it matter? If it’s dark enough in here for me to even question the outside world’s shades and hues should I be at all bothered if it is in fact bright outside? What if somebody was to think that it’s not bright outside, but dark; that is to think specifically the same; would they be more disappointed than I am right now? Am I disappointed? Can emotions be judged on anything less than a scale which pits them relative to each other? How much do I really feel? I can only feel what I really feel; I can’t feel what anybody else feels so am I at a disadvantage or is everybody in the same boat; rocking and bucking in all its ragtag elegance; barely stumbling on: but that in itself is the purest form of life, surely? To just about get by; to struggle (not too much of a struggle but just enough to allow one (does one really need permission?) to categorize it as the same) but to win every single second of every single day and not to make noise about it and not to scream but to simply go on, to continue, carried forth by none but your own momentum. Power built on lies is still power; lies stemming from power are still lies. Does everybody imagine that someday, we’ll all just cease to exist? Just stop. Darkness. 4 in the morning for ever and ever. Our final gift; I’ve told you before; this is your last warning! I’m not afraid; in some bizarre aberration of human thought I look forward to it. I’ll have guessed it right and while everybody else dances on in gentile ignorance I’ll have been waiting but that’s not what I really want either; how can I tell what I really want when all my thinking does is spin around in circles and rectangles and circles again and it’s not too early to get up now; it should be around six thirty judging by whatever obscene clock has been born inside me; no excuse now, or do I need one? Who would notice if I were to just stay here, if I just lay here, and if time dripped slowly from the brightening sky like gelatinous drops of maple syrup and if the world kept spinning around and if nobody else were to ever consider anything again ever?

Up again, I potter around the flat a bit. I’m still a bit early so there’s time to play Definitely Maybe; once, maybe twice. In a moment though; the finest pleasures are not always the simplest but when one combines the simplest pleasure with the pleasure that is not rushed into, that he waits for and deprives himself of until he can no longer stand it; ladies and gents, we have liftoff. We have art. The blinking numbers on the oven read 5:49, a harsh illumination of another failure; I’ll live though. Until I won’t and until I can’t and until I live. Maybe it’s time now? Maybe just once I should spare myself the constant deprivation and just escape into something that once was and something that can necessarily never be again and there’s a sort of beauty in that, too, a sort of majesty in the sporadically grim acceptance of something so pure. I sit down in the too-new armchair and push the needle down and allow myself to imagine myself as something else or somebody else and it’s so pure and so simple and so quiet and I think I might never get up.



Happiness doesn’t feel warm; that’s a lie. Happiness doesn’t feel at all; happiness merely is, and happiness is a cold, barren planet, the color black; the absence of all feeling has come to be known as an emotion in itself. Humans strive to be happy, don’t they? When it is dark and when all is said and done and when the birds have gone to sleep don’t we all just want to be happy? A species whose very livelihood is based on nothing at all; on the complete and frightening lack of anything, tangible or otherwise. I don’t think that it is a crime to be happy; it is a crime to pretend that joy is anything other than cruel neglect, created by us, for us; a pleasant alternative to what is a stark and painful truth. If when the lights are turned out for good there’ll be nothing and nobody to hold the weak and to comfort the crying, will people say that they’re happy? The hell they will. To be happy is by definition an unobtainable state: euphoria even sounds like the name of a Promised Land, capital P, capital L for emphasis and for hope. I’ll say I’m happy if I can. I’ve been happy all my life, so very happy, and I still don’t see what all the fuss is about.


I rise after an eternity and pretend for a brief moment that I don’t exist, that I’m purely a figment of He Who Is Illogical’s imagination; it’s a routine, necessitated only on Tuesdays when I’m at my happiest and when the world seems grayer than usual. Do others really see in colors or do they just imagine they do, just as they imagine themselves to be content and satisfied and pleased, safe in the knowledge that nobody will ever have to see the mistakes they’ve made? My world is one of grays and grays and I don’t mind one bit.

Before leaving the house I make my bed and close the blinds and before I can blink it’s the next day and I’m doing the very same thing and time has passed so quickly, in an instant, so that there’s nothing I can say about whatever I did in between.


If it’s dark inside how can you tell what time it is?


Silence, laden with unthought thoughts. It’s a tangible thing, this peculiar incarnation of quiet; you can feel it press in and in until you feel your ears must pop.


Dial tone.

Shouldn’t be doing this really. On my own time if anything. I should surely be able to wait until I get home. Do I have anything on? Apart from another peaceful evening set to the soundtrack of the Gallagher brothers? You wish.

I’m about to hang up when somebody on the other line picks up.

“Hello?” A woman’s voice. Pretty, like her face. Delicate, yet somehow rough in its own way.

I introduce myself. D. here.

“Ah. Hello, D.” Even though she sounds disappointed I could listen to her all day long.

There’s a brief silence while I wrestle with myself.

“Can I help you? You shouldn’t even be calling, you know. The judge was very specific about that.” So precise, so uncompromising: so perfect.

I know. I was just calling to see if Elise got the present.

“Hang on, I’ll ask her.”

White noise. Company.

I hear the tail end of her laugh as she returns within earshot of the telephone.

“No, she says nothing came.”

Are you sure? Did you check the old address?

“Excuse me?”

The old address. Have you checked there yet? It could have been delivered there.

A brief pause.

“The old address? You mean the old house?”

Yes.

“No, of course I haven’t checked there yet.”

Could you?

“I’m sorry?”

Could you check? It might be there.

“Uh, sure. We’ll check tomorrow. Won’t we, Ellie?”

If she answers I don’t hear.

I just want to make sure she gets it.

“I understand. Listen, are you okay?”

I don’t say anything.

“D.?”

Ja, yeah I’m fine. Just; just check. Please.

“We will do.”

Silence.

“Was there anything else?”

Could I speak to her?

Silence, this time on her part.

Just to wish her a happy birthday?

“D. ... Listen, we’ve got to go. Ellie’s got swim practice.”

More silence, so loud this time that I’m sure she can hear my heart break again.

“Bye.”


The world rushing in on me, edging in closer and closer until I can barely breathe and until I wish I couldn’t.


It’s Tuesday today and I’ve never felt happier.


The air outside is cold but the thermometer would have you believe differently; wind chill, it’s called, the biting whispers said to lower the temperature you feel by as much as 10 degrees; and when you get inside, out of the cold and the rain and the wet, the biting whispers stop all over again though they have serrated edges, this time, like some biblical plague and so they cut even deeper than they did when you were outside. Gathering together like some absurd ballet at the water-cooler they fling themselves at you, Japanese pilots with the funny headbands, the victorious but not the broken; never broken, those who were brave enough and who took it upon themselves; I’ve thought about the same (hasn’t everybody?) but it’s not that easy, it takes real strength and the dismal, gray, barely wet rain that tumbles incessantly down outside; the rain that falls from the tear-stained sky, broken promises and shattered dreams collecting together like some blasphemous parody of gravity; that rain saps it from you, taps you like a maple but leans its mouth straight up in lieu of a bucket, juvenile in its search for ill-advised instant gratification, harvests any strength you may have previously possessed more effectively than any man or machine ever could. It doesn’t even have to fall on you. All you have to do is look at it from inside the gray window of your gray office building and it’s all gone from you in one fell swoop, a big rush, an almost audible ‘whoosh’ as it is sucked straight out of you and you wonder how could the others not hear it? but there’s no strength left now to think, no fuel left to spare; you are left with the bare minimum: the absolute least you need to just about, hardly, not really at all function and that’s the cruelest punishment, really, isn’t it? the merciless, practiced but ultimately tired draining of your very essence, that which pushes you through each day and that which lets you sleep each night. When one glance is all it takes; who would ever look outside again? Would he who fears nothing publicly but everything quietly brave the briefest of snatched looks in that direction or that direction but never that direction?

Just breathe slowly now, relax, let it all wash over you and just inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale, Oasis in your head, crooning about getting high in somebody else’s fairytale; can you remember your first real party? Not the very young birthdays nor the middle-age hangouts; a party which makes full use of everything the word implies and then some more: hazy and dark so that nobody has to deal with anybody being able to see how drunk they are, so that nobody has to face a truth: not crucial, really, but a small release from the dreadful, exhausted monotony of the rest of your life and all the constant glances which don’t actually bother me, anyway, since I’m perpetually happy and forever lost. The music was too loud, too; was that deliberate? Did they simply not realize how uncomfortable it made the whole scene, instantly awful, and I was dancing with the punch-bowl and talking to my drink and nobody paid me any heed, hadn’t even really been invited but nor was I unwelcome, hadn’t I been welcomed in after all? Hey D., glad you could make it with just the slightest pause in between and it was the 90s in all its glory, the 90s for better or for worse and then it came on, Champagne Supernova, far too loud and the chorus hit hard and suddenly it just hit, impossible to describe, Someday you will find me, caught beneath the landsli-i-i-i-ide, in a champagne supernova in the sky, and I was standing dancing with my drink at the party I wasn’t invited to and the room stank of tension and of youth and I can’t remember why but suddenly I was crying, and I was sobbing and people were starting to notice but I couldn’t stop and the tears wouldn’t end and they just kept coming and coming as the guitar sailed upwards, onwards into the very upper reaches of the stratosphere and I imagined what it would be like to just be, no commitments, no obligations just to merely exist and nothing else and I can’t picture the events that led to my holding the microphone and screaming out the final chorus but there I was, elegant in innocence and more besides and I was still crying and now other people were too and then I’m gone and it’s Tuesday again, now, and I’m sat at my desk and I think I could be crying again, how could I know when I can’t see my hand in front of my face? and Liam Gallagher droning on and this needs to stop, something here needs to give and I’m exhaling louder than I ever have before, it’s like the harder I push out the more I get in, it can’t happen quickly enough; eyes again, turned this way but I either don’t care or can’t remember how to care; more likely to be the latter since I’m lost, gone far away, perhaps I’m in the ocean or maybe I haven’t moved anywhere at all but everything else has, absolutely everything else won’t stop changing and shifting and I’m sobbing so very loudly now to the beat of the hateful rainfall outside and something has to give, something must go, snap, the eaten timber must finally buckle and with a sudden lunge it does and there are a few moments of terrifying silence, scarier even than the deafening noise, and then everything is white and I’m being asked how I am by a lady in a white outfit and the bed I’ve found myself on is white too and now it’s quiet, and now it’s soft and I think that it could be over now. I think it could be over now.

I wouldn’t mind if it was over now.

Not one bit.