W I P - 4

She prefers thinking about the past, or focusing on the external abstractions of water and light in perpetually shifting patterns. It stops her thinking about the other things, the things that seep in whenever her mind is stilled, when the external stimuli stop coming, or when she lets her internal focus shift away from the colourful, concrete past. Work. That's the thing that comes relentlessly to mind.

Work. Which she doesn’t even enjoy. Which she hates, actually, and which even so seems to monopolise all her waking hours and all of her energy. She always gets up extra early, and skips breakfast mostly, and is in the office before anyone else, but it doesn’t make any difference: however many hours she puts in, however many lunches she misses, however late she leaves – whatever she does, there’s always too much work to do, and no sense that it will ever end or ever get better. So she feels weak, and defeated, and destroyed, and she comes home with her mind spinning and her emotions roiling and boiling in her stomach and chest, and her breathing uneven and her thinking twisted and acid. And she can’t sleep because of the irresolvable circular problems she keeps rehearsing in her mind, and even her dreams are suffused with echoes of workplace tensions, frustrations and confrontations.

Sometimes she can barely remember the drive home. One day last week, when things at work were so ridiculously chaotic, and so many people were obstructive or stupid or inept, she’d almost gone head on into a truck as she drove home when, furious and aggressive, she committed herself to a blind bend at inappropriate speed. Instead of sobering her, it had just made her more angry, sweeping her into a swirling vortex of self-disgust and self-criticism: You’re too weak and stupid to cope with work. And you’re too cowardly to do anything about it – too scared and useless to quit and risk doing something else. So why don’t you put up or shut up? Because you’re weak. Fraudulent. Stupid. Useless. Fucking useless.

The car headlights on the opposite bank flicker and fade back up as the driver starts the engine, and exhaust gas farts into the glow of the taillights. Then the headlights withdraw from the embankment, swing sideways across water, bollards, tree trunks and brickwork, and sweep off towards the city centre.

The night settles back down into the deeper canal side darkness. She puts the mug down on the hard gloss paint of the window sill, twitches her dressing gown closed, and heads back to bed, where she hopes she can sleep and not dream about work.