Mad sad happy

I rode the train to to see my two friends in a park and that was liberating. If you curtail a person’s freedom, then the smallest acts take on the weight of something meaningful. Of course, it’s illegal to travel unnecessarily, but I needed to see my friends to discuss mainly death, otherwise I would have gone mad.

A friend calls my mobile phone and I let it ring out. Then I pick up a pen and paper and write her a letter. Postage First Class, so she’ll get it in the next couple days. It’s better than a wearisome week-old unanswered message. 

Tap tap tap; delete delete.

Screen time and online communication is a chore. I have to do it every day for work and speak every night with my mother. I give over so many waking hours to the Internet. I wish longingly for the dial-up modem tones of the past to fill the silence of my future. 

I check in the fridge. Scraps of lettuce and olives with pits. I have more time these days, so I can deal with pits in my fruit. 

I make egg mayonnaise for a party of ten – to discover no body likes egg mayonnaise and I labour through it over three consecutive days. I made egg mayo to use up the watercress I’m suddenly growing on my windowsill. I planted it on one of those days where I had endless time to kill, never expecting them to sprout with such gusto, I wish they’d calm down.

My entire world is my dog, my kitchen, my bathtub. I roll between the three, happy as Larry, until it gets too much. Then I cry. Then I finish and pick up where I left off. 

*

Today the sun shone on my face and I felt its warmth bloom in my body. 

The kitchen is the place where I make things happen and consume. Consumption used to be something I did on the fly, like on the way to work reading an advert, or at a theatre watching a show. I used to enjoy trying new things, like going to a different food stall for lunch on a Friday; or an altered walk cutting through Covent Garden to Leicester Square. Meeting friends for a drink in a place I’d walked past a dozen times but hadn’t been into. Chance encounters with ex-colleagues in a scrabbly pub in Soho. Beer gardens on the canal-side with a pale ale in a chunky glass. The kitchen is where I foster new experiences now, over a saucepan, or watching a fish grill in the oven. Cutting into a freshly baked loaf with a sharp knife and being excited to see air-bubbles small and consistent, or disappointed to find them deflated and flabby.

The bath tub is where I do my lounging. Luxuriating. Stopping thinking time. I sit there in the near dark with my wrinkly fingers, absorbed in the warmth and the not-doing-anything of it all. The bath is indifferent to the timetables of outside, even when life was at its most hectic, I stewed in bath tubs. All through my younger years until here I am again, gaining solace from being closed off from the world, truly private. Re-charging like a monster in the depths of her cave.

The dog gives me delight and spontaneity. The kind of thing that might happen when you’re closing down for work and a mate messages you to see if you wanna come to a gig because they’ve got a spare ticket. You scoff a Sainsbury's meal deal and get to the venue, queue, buy expensive beers in plastic cups and listen to a warm-up band and shout over them to chat to your friends. The small dog barks up at the sky when she sees an aeroplane. She farts when I’m trying to concentrate on an excel spreadsheet. She licks my face when I’m clouded in gloom and makes me laugh.