What It Would Be Like

And she said:

It feels good to stretch

Man, music is good

I’m happy

I can’t wait for tomorrow

It feels awe-some… not having to sit behind a desk all day. Hunched over. To stretch.

The next morning:

Sunlight comes through the slats of the blinds; the bottom rung has snapped in two but it still does the job so no point in dwelling, she thinks. Carefully clamber over the body lying next to her in bed, the figure of Eleanor, darkly snoozing in to her day, how nice it was to have her here. To check the phone for well-wishers, messages of love rather than panics of stale realisation that this was it, again. And it would be like this forever. That feeling had flown. Well-wishers grasped in a phone hold away - look at the world outside! Today she would run again, look at the branches again and feel the foliage in the canopies above her rustling, for wind. Where would she have been last week? At an Overground station; a place where the sun never reaches the platform, waiting for delayed trains but longing for a chance, then bleep and bleep until the carcass was at the office doors.

Commuter times when it was dark with drizzle, a nondescript hour of some insignificant day, one may rise to the occasion - pomp of it all – the briefcase swinging prats and the ‘morning guv’nor’ smiles. She could trudge through the muck to reach the office doors. Get out of the rain. Upon entering the lights would be bright the temperature at a constant and she could fool the self in to feeling a sense of triumph at reaching the office. But once having sat down, turning on the computer and waiting for the screen to load, she felt like she had let herself down and swallowed a prickly lie. Then she could only apologetically login and go make herself a cup of coffee.

This is when I thought:

And that’s what it was like, an honest account. A shell of a man purposefully going through the motions and simultaneously not knowing why.  It was pathetic. And now it’s something else, which can only be described as total alleviation. What an absolute relief that I got out of that alive, I think I was worried I might not. And now, everything is set on course for something else.