Sick Day

Overnight, sickness has flooded my body like ink. I can feel it in my aching calves, coarse throat and sunken eyes. Like pathetic fallacy, rain and wind gushed through London this morning with a whistling that tightened my flat and left my body sore. I stop regularly to crash, closing my eyes for a few seconds to recharge, irritably. Part of me thinks last night is to blame as I lay alone, ears pricked for noise with a racing mind: I watched Pretty Woman and lay restlessly in bright lights. 

My face feels heavy, like lead weights beneath my flesh. I am stripped clean of motivation and, at 14.10, lay still and pure in the bath with my eyes underwater just being. Really, I should be focusing on the essay that is due on the 7th, but all I can do is write snippets of - what I can only speculate to be - nonsensical droning. Even though the sky has cleared and the days are not eternal, I find is frustratingly hard to shake myself from this foul mood. It hangs over my thoughts like thick fog, sticky and suffocating. I'm staying off the irish cream today, thinking absentmindedly that it would send me into a soft slumber last night, I was wrong. The television is on mute and my sinuses ring with exhaustion. My only respite has been losing myself in warm waters to Mumford and Son's Tesselate cover. 

I know that January blues are seeping into my skin like poison, and I can feel it. It is akin to the sinking of your stomach when you forget something important. If only I could write so freely and effortlessly as this for my assignment, but words that come straight from inside aren't ones that warrant a grade at the end of semester. Which rattles me a little as I write this,because I can't help but scoff at the irony of it all: The beauty of natural writing as opposed to forced, researched and rehearsed articles that decide my grade and label me, therefore, as such.  

  It is hard to keep reminding myself that life is uncontrolled, that, if I wanted to, I could board a flight now and be somewhere else. But this deadline looms over me and makes my hours black. The pointlessness of it all is rather grating after a while. Then it's back to working - modules and commuting, coursework and dissertation proposals and the strict rigor of life's routine. It is ultimately up to me, of course, to make plans and write notes and, well. Live.

 I have to remind myself I am only twenty one.

This aching afternoon drags and I don't welcome darkness kindly. But soon, like each night, it shall pass. I have filled my head with inspiring stories of california sunshine and motherhood, and it is so reassuring to know that we are not alone in sweet, lost lonliness. As my bones creak with coldness and I wish fruitlessly for the soft hands of my boy to lull me into childish dreams. It is humbling to know that we are all extraordinarily human in this strange and scary world. To be reminded that in this huge world of differences, the same raw emotions pulse through the same people miles and miles apart. That happiness doesn't spur from things, but is generated somewhere unknown, within us. Importantly, that we are all lost and still finding out feet. 

"I want to see the world like I did when I was a child, full of wonder and magic. It’s still the same world after all, it’s just my perception that has changed." - Nirrimi, The Road is Home

 

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