At 9:00AM, some times 6:50AM if I have pulled the short straw of random alloted shift times, I wake up. I have work at 10:00AM, which leaves me fifteen minutes to get up, get changed, do something with my hair that doesn’t resemble a rat king, and brush my teeth. Another 25 to drive to work, and the remaining 20 to set up ready for the day. I open Twitter for fifteen minutes, panic, brush my teeth, get ‘changed’ into the shirt I slept in and some jeans on the floor that look…well, they’re not dirty, and brush my teeth for a total of twenty seconds, before hitting every known traffic jam known to man, trying to park on the newly made office car park (one which may I add, boasters enough spaces for everyone no matter the time of shift), not find a space, pay £8.00 for parking on the cinema across the street, and make it to work with 10 minutes to spare.
This was routine. Not comfortable, but known. Today though, a woman, tall, office attire with greying hair suprisingly not from stress, came by my seat. She smiled, asked how I was today, and handed me a note. ‘From what we discussed yesterday’ she said. It seemed genuine, the smile that is. You can never tell in office spaces, who’s smiling for empathy, or whose just showing their teeth. I smiled back and opened it. Verbatim it read:
SAMARTINS → 116 123
Right, I thought, that was the mental first aider. I worked until 18:30PM, and drove home.
What is it all for, do you think? Perhaps rhetorical is pointless when I can simply ask. Go on Facebook and get some answers of solidarity and ‘it will get better’s, or Twitter and have a mix of huiman emptahy, Team Fortress 2 GIFs and five new Direct Messages telling me to do it. I write this though not for an answer, hell I know the answer. Family, friends, love, money, books, how good sex feels and for the release of the Knights of the Old Republic remake, but is there something further? You see, I’m struggling with the more. Perhaps being trapped in a Customer Service office job has really dowered me to life. You talk to some…colourful people to put it mildly, and those who say it doesn’t affect them in the slightest are lying. That and the mudanity of the eight hour shift, of the get up’s and races to work. The strictness. The lack of soul. Sometimes I imagine I get up on my desk and shout over the typing and idle chit chat of the weather and say ‘We’re all mad! Can’t you see we need help? Anyone?!’. I don’t know what the response would be, perhaps there wouldn’t be one. Maybe mundainity would drown me in a sea of keyboard keys and black coffee.
Right at the beginning of my Penguin Classics version of White Nights, there is this quote:
‘My God! A whole minute of bliss! Is that really so little for the whole of a man’s life?’
When I read that, I just sat and thought about how all I really wanted out of all of this, is one minute to catch up. A minute to write again, for poetry and articles on everything under the sun. A minute to walk under the sun. A minute to speak in the mirror and fill my reflection with the confidence needed. A minute of joy. Of sorrow. A minute for one last word with my grandmother. A minute where I am 35, married to my partner with a child, in a house covered in personality. A minute as four years old, on that moving walkway underneath the fishes in that one aqaurium (you know the one). Just one single minute, so I stop lagging behind. A minute of motivation.
Perhaps I have been yearning for simplicity too long, and have become to hoplessly romanticised to the idea of being able to live.
Be safe and happy, one and all.
Joshua Ray
The fog settled over the city like an unspoken promise.
No one noticed, not even the pigeons.
I breathed it in anyway.