Small Packages

There are flashes, momentary slices of time when I can understand, utterly, the urge to jump into death. If I were somehow standing atop the steely curve of a bridge or on the ledge of a tall building when that quick burn in my core fires up all of my doubts and pains, I'd easily step into the air and drop, float and fall into oblivion. Luckily, those brief moments usually occur, like last night, when I'm curled up in a fetal position in my safe bed. All panda-eyed, my red pillow scarred with the day's black lashes wept into them. They are dark, intense hours when I have only my weak ego to keep me company. She isn't very helpful.

I'm sat here writing about my own darkness while I watch a small privileged girl play with paper, crayons and Lego bricks. She makes me smile. Surrounded by every expensive toy, gadget and games console available, she consistently chooses instead to draw and build colourful things, spreading her imagination all over the playroom, and, this small girl, lost in wonder, draws my mind away from bridges and ledges. She's very helpful.

I.  Simply.  Cannot.  Do.  It.

Whilst commuting home from work on the bus a song came on in my headphones and brought on the first real, soul-deep, heart-fired, smile in months. I almost cried. I had, perhaps a minute of pure, unadulterated, bliss. Something inside woke up, stretching and yawning, coming out of hibernation. 

Since the fire, my life has just been six months of stress, work, hotels, stress, work, couch-surfing, stress, work, home, stress, work. An endless hamster wheel of drudgery. I've become the nightmare I've tried to avoid for most of adult my life... a minimum wage-slave for a soulless mega-corporation. I've forgotten who I am and all the things that make me really happy are so absolutely missing from my daily life that my soul has been asleep... dormant... dying. A simple, beautiful, song distracted me from all the... bullshit... made my spirit stir and made me realise why I've been feeling so cheerless and dejected recently. 

I miss mountains, cuddles, sunshine on my face, kisses, wind in my hair, horizon-wide vistas, late night heart-talks, hill-top sunsets, butterflies (both real and stomach-churning), the sound of hiking boots on gravel, friends, impromptu road-trips, drunken conversations, holding hands, trees, pins in maps, cloud and star-gazing, ‘singing’ along in the car, sore thighs from the climb, heart-melting smiles. Freedom. Nature. Love. 

My 'life' feels vaccuous, shallow, soulless and empty without those things. 

My body is rebelling. Screaming at me to stop giving in to the windowless world where I work with it’s cheap distractions and temptations. It's growing and expanding at an alarming rate, stuffed full of sugary, addictive, poisons. An attempt to pad itself in protection from the unnatural world I've made it inhabit... for money. Artificial light and air, plastic plants, mass produced 'food'. Not a nourishing environment for the mind or the body. We become our mood. I am unhealthy. I want my me back. I miss her. I miss her humour and her gladness and I suspect my friends do too.