Life.

I want to sit hunched over my desk, writing passionately by the light of my cosy lamp with the patchwork crocheted quilt my aunt made me as a wedding present draped comfortably over my shoulders. A steaming mug of strong, unsweetened green tea by my side as the words flow from my fingertips.

I can’t, though. Work calls to me, my hours of scheduled online teaching. My university course clamours for my attention, emails from tutors about weekly deadlines and complicated assignments setting alarm bells in my brain, forming a buzzing background noise which eats away my focus on anything else I might be doing.

I want to write all night then fall asleep in my bed, kept warm by a sleeping Damian. I want to wake up late and start writing again, or flick lazily through an interesting magazine, or have a gripping book in my hands, my fingernails squeezed white against the creamy grain of my novel.

I also want to curl up into a ball and cry about non existent characters, and contemplate life as it cycles slowly by.

I could lose everything in an instant. I am mourning losses which haven’t occurred. Imagining accidents which haven’t happened and may never happen. Worried daily and nightly about the people I love, thinking each time I say goodbye to them that it might be the last time I do so. Wondering, where is my catch? Is it my premature, rare female baldness? Is it my ability to feel so alone in a world full of people?

But life must go on. People must get out of bed on cold morning when they don’t want to, their bodied perfuming their morning rituals while their minds are still cozied up in their beds. People must tend to other people, complete their jobs, earn their living, else the world would come to a slow grinding halt, and things would fall apart. What is keeping this world together is the average, daily person, waking up each morning and forcing themselves to go to whatever it is they must go to. The mother to her child, the businessperson to their meetings, the builder to their construction site, the engineer to their factory or field or office. Men, women, young, old. All these cogs in the machine of earth. All these souls walking steadily to their destinations. Some may be struck down suddenly, others have become too weary to go on, their bodies withered and frail, their limbs trembling. And the smallest of us are still learning about the world, their minds an endless abyss of joy and wonder, laughter and fascination, feeding their minds so that one day they too can start the long weary walk to There.

Where is There? What are we all walking towards?

A feverish excitement has taken over my limbs, rendering them shaky and frightened, lost because they don’t know the source.

Well I can’t help them. I don’t know the source either.