oneword.com

This is not procrastination, I am only taking a minute out to do this. Do not shrug your shoulder at me like that, in a free world I can choose to act and I do not have to justify my behaviour to you.

“Where is it?” she asked. “The shoe with the clasp, the other one? Have you seen it? The right one. I have to find the other one and need to get to work.” She was sorting through a pile of clothes heaped on the floor between the bed and window.
“Wear the other pair, the blue ones you wore the other day,” I replied.
“They don’t match.” she snapped.
“Don’t blame me for trying to help. If you kept your clothes tidy you wouldn’t have this problem.”
“I don’t know how it gets in this state,” she said having finally gotten to the bottom of the pile.
“Again,don”t blame me. I don’t wear them when you are out. Your things are where you left them.”
“You are right, the front door. I would have taken them off at the front door,” she said as she left the room. “See you tonight.”

And it is cold. I want to move but have settled with blankets and slippers, with everything in arms reach. The chair acts like planter pot from which my arms escape like the waving fronds of an exotic plant to drop words from these pale my stalks onto a pale screen.

The word is do nothing, or do something, I can’t remember. Sitting in a cafe drinking coffee and reading the paper used to be fun, now it is like wading through a thick dream where you are being wrapped in seaweed and pulled under water. The purpose of ever action seems to be to avoid something worse, or escape some terminal social crisis.

Sunshine, and the wind in my face, that is what I want. Just creature comforts. I want to feel warm and soothed by the world as though time does not exist and I am wrapped in the here and now.

All I have at three forty-three in the morning is a minute so this must be good. How can I leverage my last energy, using it to turn on the lights behind my eyes and rattle my finger bones to send these words scattering across the page. They skitter and scatter like dice. The flame of a story flickers and it is time to say goodnight.

Well, just one more. That will not bring down a reign of plague or pestilence, in fact the universe will be largely untouched. It is only my willpower that will break, my self-esteem that will disappear, the hope for my future that will blur and become just like today. And then, the worst effect, this will become a habit. I will not fail from choice, but from habit.

“And another thing,” she said. “What you say isn’t cast in bronze. It is not something to bet the house on, it is not even real, just wishful thinking most of the time.” I still didn’t know what I had done to trigger this rant. People shouldn’t bottle up their grudges and then spill them out like warm jelly, as though their brains had popped open and were leaking.

“Where would you get that idea and why are you telling me this. No-one is destined to have bad luck. That is just superstitious nonsense.”

She sounded so certain that I thought she knew what she was talking about. She spoke as though I was the only one walking around with a cloud over my head, the only one being rained on.

“I don’t want to eat pecan crusted anything, it makes me think of braised peacocks, or quails poached in brandy with their tiny bones.” I was listening to her as she prattled along. Her voice sounded like the car bumping over the uneven dirt track and what she said was as aimless as the path we were taking. We were moving up into the mountains, into the mist.