this is it
this is
forty minutes into a workout when something buried takes over and the Forever Grey hovering just behind the eyes and two brown sugars in the best tea you’ve ever had and scheduling days around internal rhythms and making a clearing where you can be present, open and creative and never forgetting that this, this is the prize
and the soft, wicked fuuuck it of that second bottle of wine and hangovers as time machines back to the dead place and reading a lame sobriety memoir thinking hmmm and the joy centres of your brain revving back to life and it being so alien and unexpected you make a note to Google “manic episode symptoms” when you get home
and heaving in great gulps of gratitude on Nice Mornings and holding it in your sternum like a balloon and how blue the sky gets in January and squadrons of starlings murmuring above like a screensaver and
this is a hand up your shirt in a nightclub queue
and bare shoulders and the lean in and the galloping brain after a good first date and the *adjustments* on an okay second and sex as avoidance and chowder in a pub with an actress and contentment washing over in waves and being in her messy flat fighting the overwhelming urge to GET OUT and cracking open Deepak Chopra because you don’t know what to say to her
and upkeep costs and trying to untangle happiness from outcomes and forgetting it all when you see the read receipt and telling the councillor edited versions because even here, in the safest space in the city, you don’t want the nice older lady to think you’re a bad person and all the foncy reasons for keeping someone lovely at arm’s length and seeing the term “emotional self-sufficiency” for the first time and feeling like an Eisenhower Republican discovering the concept of the female orgasm and the only way to really change and the suspicion that your real life hasn’t started yet and wondering how often other people feel like that and buoyant returns to the world after afternoon naps
and helping people but not feeling pity because pity is a distancing emotion and being thankful every day that you don’t have a tiny person to keep alive and rationing political Youtube videos and remembering that time you were so far gone you told your girlfriend they were gonna start putting poor people in ovens and what on earth must’ve been going through her head when she heard that and the hiding, so much hiding
and sleeping to 3 in the afternoon but setting the scene so it looks like you’ve been up all day and an envelope addressed to the house where you would run down the stairs and yank the phone line out of the wall and that being so long ago and you’re
so
different now
this is cold hands on dark mornings and early bedtimes and one perfect sentence in the middle of fifty decent ones and the way John Mulaney pronounces “yes I do” and the steel drum in Fifth Harmony’s “Work From Home” you can’t shake and the Law & Order SVU theme tune and the shared hysteria of a lunchtime rush and a spotless kitchen at the end of a shift and eye contact without an agenda and the way brioche dough clings to a floured surface and forearms filling out and fires on the news and memes at the kitchen table and a writing desk by the window so you can see everyone going to work and how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives
and becoming and arriving and the hope that if you list it all one after the other it will sound important and mean something.
This is it.
This is the whole thing.
It is so
much it’s not enough
