People Are Spacious Things, You Can Walk Around Inside Them

Glucose depletes during transit.

The time delay means testing centre results tend to under-estimate blood sugar levels.

In the endocrinology clinic, a nerdish consultant is telling me that the numbers fall within an acceptable margin of error and do not, in fact, indicate some sort of chronic hypoglycemia. I’m taking the good news well.

It’s embarrassing, how disappointed I am. I don’t want his clean bill of health.

I want a big compound Latin noun I can hang it all on: the fuzziness, the internal tumbling, the sensation of suddenly concaving in. I already got the pamphlets, doc. I’m good to go.

Something strange has been happening to me. It’s 11am and I’m reading in a cafe. Out of nowhere, the ice cracks and I am underwater.

I crunch my feet and slow my breathe, but there is a collapsing and a falling, and I have to tell myself very firmly that actually, no, you cannot drown in the middle of a city.

And as randomly as this visitor arrived, it departs. It slips out the back door while I’m busy with something else. The spells stop.

What was that?

Marxism says the ideas of the ruling class become the ideas of culture at large. It’s the same with metaphors.

The engineers and coders that guide the rhythms of electronic capitalism look at the world like a great, sprawling, whirring machine. And we have adopted their language.

We are upgraded, like mobile data plans. Optimised, like feeds. Soothing self-improvement content prescribes morning routines to get the engine revving.

You can lay all our parts out on a sheet of blue tarpaulin and trace the circuits and a man in overalls and clumped-up sleeves would say humph, there’s your problem right there and our strangeness would finally dissolve.

But what other metaphors might be useful?

Maybe a person isn’t a machine. Maybe they’re more like an old house.

A person has structures and Christmas trees in the attic and a rinky little food lift behind plaster. They have a boiler that shits itself and wooden floors and copper pipes that sing, at night, in the dark, for no reason.

They have dirty schoolbags in the cubby hole and lazy joins where the draft gets in and the accumulated sediment of paint on paint and a lonely phone ringing in the hallway. Houses have tenants and visitors and bay windows that open into the garden. Houses are haunted.

We are spacious things. We have high ceilings and skirting boards. You can take your shoes off and walk around inside.

There is a quirk in my brain. (A bug?)

I don’t know where it comes from.

When I wake up I have maybe 15 minutes to get up and start moving. If I hit snooze the Numbskulls start jamming the depression dials, and a chain reaction begins.

It settles in like a static behind the eyes. The scratchy separation, like I’ve been wrapped in clingfilm and set to the side.

I can sense almost immediately how the day’s going to go. Good mornings make me flush and buoyant and curious and quick to laugh. It’s the difference between nothing and everything.

Could the biggest things really turn on such small hinges? Could it be so simple? So silly?

For the longest thing I thought that happiness was a gift bestowed on the worthy by an external authority: a prize, a “yes”.

Joy and its opposite were obvious, discrete objects. But now I think they’re more like events. You can “have” and “receive” an object. But an event is something bigger then yourself that you participate in.

Sometimes, when the morning light broods in under the clouds, I leave my flat and go to the river and say a little prayer.

Please, please let me have today.

Oars slice the water and I cross my fingers.