Cold Day

 A man jolts upright, his day not having intended to start so abruptly. Instantly he rises. Unable to conventionally breathe, he makes a dash for the toilet, raiding the tissue to empty his nose and wipe his face from the muck that has gathered from the hours of previously laying in bed. The immediate struggle to breathe, heightened by the excessive brightness of the toilet light, kicks too many wheels into motion. Only upon checking his watch to see the clock strike three does the adrenaline of the day subside into a slow sense of delirium. 

Groaning for branded eucalyptus oil, he lumbers back to his bed. Immediately he is too warm under the covers, his body already beginning the brutal spin cycle of awakening before the mind could cancel such a typically cheap transaction. Soon he is too cold, left exposed to the room's unheated temperature. A headache pounds, though not heavily enough to stop his mind from endlessly whirring. Tonight the mind's theme of imagination was an attempt to translate imagined Swedish news broadcasts speculating on the perilous health of a recently demised sovereign. The attempts were failing miserably, and harboured a level of frustration that typically would never reach such consciousness, instead resigning themselves to the inner dream box, unlikely to ever face the hot, then cold light of a day. Except now they were.

Here lay a pretentiously creative mind, endlessly spoon-feeding drivel to its poor soul of a body. A body which, unable to shutdown voluntarily, instead lay helpless beneath duvet, only able to freeze time around the failing exercises of an inescapably active mind. A short paraphrasing of that final sentence would form the outline of a post-it note, scrawled on in the dark with surprisingly robust hand-writing. In that moment, an outline of an article would appear, potentially a narrative of a short story that could (conditionality is key) one day reach a vaguely respectable outlet. If nothing else there would always be the blog. 

Yet for the man in that moment, minutes ached by, accentuated by occasional voyages to stick tissue up his nose to stem the future nasal muck raking. In these moments, increasingly of desperation, he thinks of a solution, to distract the autonomy of his raging mind, to temper it's racing pulse into something abstract enough to put issues of fictional news translation to bed.

That temperance came from another soul whose life recently graduated from its physical form. Yet his voice lingered on, echoing and manifesting humour from his story-telling for multiple generations alike. In Bernard Cribbins there sat a calm. A slow, caring voice to move time on one's behalf as you anchor yourself to his tales of (in this case) the Hundred Acre Wood. It was the temporary antidote for the man's mind, if not for his body's raging battle against a cold.

Sleep, upon eventual arrival, was deep; distancing the struggles of reality for precious hours more. It eventually deprived the man of a struggle entirely, sleeping him in past his morning class, inviting his day to be considered a write-off. Instead it offered time. Time for wasting, reflecting and eventually articulating. A demonstration perhaps, that even days written off can be written of.

See also:

A vuelta of incidence - my most recent commission for Derailleur, reviewing the first half of La Vuelta a España