I have never been punched in my life. Never hit, never attacked. Never felt that sweet primal smack of skin on skin, that tangible buzz of such focused anger, misplaced understanding, or injustice. Somehow, I find this fact so romantic in its absence. And I think about it every time I am whacked in the guts.
Most mornings it happens. With the frantic chime of my morning alarm, my head wrenched from anxious sleep. The first moments of my conscious mornings come with a 150 heart-rate. Like a gun going off next to me on the pillow, this is your every morning absence.
Mornings, with my face waiting in front of a computer’s grey glow, the same grey out my window. Information. All that information. I fill my head with it. I read the same news stories over and over, background colour changing, but words staying the same. This miracle of modern life, being able to fill my head with distractions, without a lapse, from the moment I shoot awake to the moment I crash back gladly to nothingness.
At work, I spend my hours leaning over a painfully low desk, enabling, facilitating: some such action that allows me to stare creatively into space and be paid for it. A computer is there too, a large, window-sized whirring thing that completes tasks at a speed so far ahead of my meagre needs that it makes me laugh with that husking, scraping noise that I now allow to escape my throat.
I sit through meetings, nodding yes when I have to, rising from my chair at others. Pointing laser pens at a yet larger screen. Being able to read from the screen to a roomful of people who need no help reading it. In hallways, faces appear, firing buckshot pleasantries. These are my ever-less eventful, fruitless days. Gloriously empty. Every day, every fucking day, I wish my thoughts were just as blank.
No comments:
Post a Comment