Ed note: I had this scary "corporate sharecropping" job at a Credit Union for just over seven years. I think I used every day before heading in. Going in straight would have caused irreparable damage to the psyche so I am sure I never missed a day. Anyways, to keep myself awake during the bountiful times, I used to write all sorts of shite. For example.....
I was bobbing in water. It was dark, like tar, oily and thick. And cold. A cold you could feel in your bones, deep deep inside. I’d heard that you only lasted a few minutes in such cold waters, that you passed out and drowned. But I’d been bobbing out here for years now, my whole life in fact, and nothing as blissful as unconsciousness had ever visited me. I’d fainted a few times, always in the compulsory Friday mass at primary school, it’d got so I was excused from Mass. But there had been no lasting escapes, detours from this ocean.
There was nothing in the sky either, just a menacing grey pallor, like some small industrial town’s sunset, hanging over me all day. I just bobbed up and down on the current. I was not to know if I was drifting anywhere - the nights were as featureless as the days, the same fetid grey skin obscuring any possible stars I could navigate by. So I just bobbed and bobbed, and accepted that this was my life, that no others had any different lives.
So I grew older in the murky water, changing above and below the surface. I started to think about my situation. I deduced that this did not have to be. I tensed all my muscles and struck out in the direction that felt the best. What instinct guided me I do not know? Either fear, or panic, or maybe just dumb luck pointed me in that direction. Whatever it was, I kept swimming, never getting tired, never seeing any change in the overhanging pallor. Years went by. I grew taller, willowy. I grew stronger from the swim. I was happy I was no longer just bobbing.
And one day whilst swimming, I sensed a minute change in the water’s temperature. A change only felt in my body’s short hairs covering my legs and arms. As I went to look up and around, my knees hit something solid yet soft. Small grains of white crystals stretching up out of the water. At first I thought it was some kind of large animal, but by the time I’d struggled unsteadily upright and run away from the water, I knew this was no temporary refuge. Despite the unsteadiness I felt, I knew this was my real home, my destined sanctuary.
I crawled slowly up the beach. For years I only looked ahead, at the vast expanse of white powder in front. I found that if I tasted some of the “sand” it would give me a warm feeling, a cocooned fuzzy happiness. For several years, nay ten, I lay in one spot just licking the sand, afraid to look back at the dark oily sea whose bubbling still invaded my dreams. I was happy on the sand, in my own world I’d created.
When a large patch of sand around me had been cleared and ten years of happiness was starting to fade, I decided it was time to stand up and look around. I felt I had grown strong enough to look back at the sea, but as I turned slowly around I realised I had only become weaker by lying on the sand for so long. The sight of that black bubbling gargantuan reminded me of Nietzsche. “And if you gaze into the abyss, remember the abyss gazes back”. I had been too long in that sea, and thrown up onto the shore I thought I'd escaped it. But no, it was just a mirage of my own creating. I was still in the sea, kicking, bobbing freezing. The sand was not real sand, it was just a crutch created by a tired mind, a mind that had wandered off into the dream realms and forged a dreamscape from some forgotten memories.
I was wet again. Turning around, on the whole, had not been a good idea. I should have got further up the beach. But instead, like Lot’s wife, i’d turned back to gaze one last time at my nemesis, and it’d reached up a glistening black paw to pull me back into its embrace.
Bobbing. There was no escape, that I now knew. And there was no drowning either. If I tried to submerge myself, some callous physics pushed my head up above, like the dull Chinese intern who pumps your stomach free of the pills against your will. People just trying to help.
There was no sleep, no day or night, no
Ed again: That's where I stopped writing. Probably answered the phone or got held up by some junkies (this did actually happen once, but only once in 1400 work days)
back.