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You haven’t started your work. You have so much to do, so much, that even thinking about it seems to clutter your mind. It feels like entering a house and not even being able to walk through the front door because the garbage is piling up so high inside that you can't really open the door. You’d have to squeeze in, and start grabbing. But it feels just so overwhelming, and you sit down outside on the porch, putting your garbage bag down beside you to have a smoke. Even though you don’t smoke, but it’s a thing people do, and it’s better than doing nothing, it's better than just sting there and waiting for your life to begin.

Sometimes you dream about somebody coming by, seeing you sit there on your poach, and stop to ask how you’re doing. The house looks good from the outside, the facade is kept quite nicely, and you made sure to keep up with the current colouring trends and spend your last income on the perfect window blinds. From the outside, everything looks great. But even if people come by, and stop for a chat, you know that you can't invite them in. No matter how much you dream of somebody, walking in there and offering to clean up, you just cant bear the idea of them seeing all that garbage. You don’t even know where it will lead and what is buried, so how can you risk anybody seeing that?

So you just lit up another cigarette and ask them to come by some other day. And as you watch their back grow smaller, you feel resentment grow in your chest. You want to go inside and set the whole place on fire, you can't understand how your house could be so nice from the outside and so horrible from within. But deep down you know. You glance down at the empty garbage bag to your side, nothing in it but the empty package of cigs, smoked each one after the other.

It's your responsibility, your own. It’s worse than anything else, if it were somebody else’s you wouldn’t have to feel like this, this hateful, this loathsome. Hating yourself is so much worse than hating anybody else because it’s the only way to truly deteriorate, to rot.

Sometimes you wish you could just let go completely, have your facade rot away, the plants die in the garden, tear down the shutters and smash in the glass. Have everybody see what’s in there, push the broken wreck in their faces. See them shake their heads as they pass by. Maybe then you would feel more complete, less broken apart, maybe you could make peace with living in your trash.

But you can’t. Even the thought makes you nauseous. You are just like everybody else, pretending to live their perfect live in their perfect little house, hoping that you can just trick your mind as well. No, not really, only hoping that at least you can trick everybody else and that somehow will give you any grounding in this world.

No matter how much garbage there is inside. You won't be kicked off your street as long as the facade is clean. People will be stopping by to tell you about the weather as long as the shutters are the newest model. They’ll come by to your garden parties even though they’ll leave before the sun sets, but it will feel alright.

Like a cup of water for a man in the dessert. You will take anything, any interaction, any smile, and you are so so afraid that you will lose even that. Even the most shallow of interactions. If only one person would see the garbage that is piled up inside, the way the walls are rotting the stench of a wasted life, they would all turn away.