Tag: memoir

poetry

~ A Moment in Time ~

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~ A Moment in Time ~

In my heart I’ll always be there
Dancing with you on a rooftop in Palermo
Holding your hand while walking by the river
Throwing that frisbee to you in the summer sun.

In my heart I’ll always be there
Cuddling with you on a Sunday morning
Staring into your eyes and your soul
Getting lost in that starry universe.

In my heart I’ll always be there
Running my fingers through your hair
Feeling the light burst through me
As my lips touch yours.

I guess I’m never gonna truly let you go
A part of you will exist within me always
And when my last step is taken
And I fall to the floor of this earth
I will look up to the grand sky above
Feeling your love still flowing through me
And I’ll remember those times of pure joy
When everything was perfectly in place
Hoping I could stay in that moment forever

Dancing with you on a rooftop in Palermo.

poetry

~ Doubt ~

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~ Doubt ~

Not so sure anymore
Of myself
And everything I thought
To be true.

I guess we all go through this
So sure of everything
Then life blows us away
To a new place
Where we don’t recognise
Much at all.

I search for the sight of something
That speaks to my confused soul
The same thing I’ve always done
On this strange journey of mine.

I don’t know how to do this life too well at all
Plans and positions are not for me
My best efforts are often not enough
And I can’t seem to see things through.

I’m a malfunctioning machine
That shouldn’t have been manufactured
I’m a disorientated pilgrim
Wandering in a desert.

No chance it seems to ever straighten myself out
And have some final clarity about it all.

But still,
Something within demands an answer
And like a lost animal
I crawl forward to it

But I only move in circles
Returning to the same old place
Of tiredness and confusion.

That confusion grows
Life seems like a dream
My eyes look up to the sky
A sad wonder fills my head.

articles · how to kill time while waiting to die

New Book: ‘How To Kill Time While Waiting To Die’

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My second short novel, How To Kill Time While Waiting To Die follows an alcoholic writer meandering through life with little to no direction. It is dark, existential, and sprinkled with humour to add some light to the otherwise bleak story. A short synopsis and sample chapter feature below, and the book is now available to purchase on Amazon in Kindle and paperback now through this link. It is available for free to download on Kindle up until March 31st.

‘Bryan has just turned 30 and is trying to survive in a world to which he feels he doesn’t belong. He still has no career, no path, no purpose, no partner, and no particular interest in anything apart from drinking and writing stories he expects no one to read. Things get worse as the Covid-19 lockdown sees him moving back in with his parents, quickly causing him to plot his escape in no specific direction other than ‘heading south’. Drifting from place to place, job to job, beer to beer, woman to woman, and failure to failure – all the while seeing no meaning to what he or anyone else around him is doing – Bryan’s life spirals increasingly out of control in this existential and dark-humoured novel.’

“No doubt my writings would never be read by anyone – my manuscript gathering dust in some dark, forgotten corner – but it at least gave me something to do while stuck here on this earth. This was it, essentially, the bargain of human existence. Every man or woman had to find something, no matter how trivial, to give their life some fundamental meaning. Kids, careers, travelling, gardening, music, art, football, vinyl collections…. hell, even something as stupid as taking pictures of trains. The important thing was finding something to do to help pass the days and weeks and years. At the end of the day, we were all killing time while waiting to die.”

One line description: ‘An existential black comedy centred around the misadventures of an alcoholic writer.’

Sample chapter:

The next day, after a terrible night’s sleep in a field of noisy sheep, I rode into the town of Newquay. It was a place I had been to before on family holidays as a child. Despite how much I had changed in the intermediate years, the place was more or less how I remembered it: a touristic surf town with a rough underbelly; the sort of place where misfits ended up living alongside working-class people on cheap and tacky getaways to the coast. I cycled into the centre along the main street, looking at all the bars and souvenir shops and hotels. I went past families on their summer getaways, as well as the stag and hen parties drinking in the mid-afternoon. Soon the ocean was in view and I carried my bike down a steep series of steps that led to the beach. I walked over to the shoreline and there I was: finally at the bottom of the country, almost as far as I could be from home now that I was trapped on this island due to international travel being banned. I looked out at the Atlantic Ocean, at the waves crashing before me, at the surfers doing their thing. I watched the seagulls circling in the sky above and distant boats sailing along the horizon. For some reason, in that moment, I felt as alone as a man could be. Even though I was in a busy tourist town, I felt that I may as well have been marooned on some distant island. I had nowhere else to go and no one in the world knew where I was – not my parents, not my sister, not Louise, not Ginevra, not Jake or Jorge. It was a surreal circumstance and I let my feet sink into the sand as I felt myself dissociate from my surroundings. I was some sort of ghost, feeling the wind against my skin while wishing that I would disintegrate into dust and be swept away into the ocean, never to be seen or thought of again. My morbid daydreaming was brought to a sudden halt by some excited children running around me. They started asking why I had a tent and a load of bags on my bike. I told them I was on a great adventure to someplace far away. Their questions continued so I decided to retreat from the beach which was unnervingly busy with new members of the human race.

Hearing the kids talk about my bike, I had to stare back at it and realise that I was actually staring at the total contents of my life. Truly, I had nothing in the world at that moment but that bike and the bags attached to the back of it. I also had nowhere else to really go besides backwards. Well, that wasn’t an option so I figured I’d just stay put for the time being. I thought about pitching my tent on the beach until I spotted a ‘No Camping’ sign that warned of the strong tides that occurred in this part of the country. I was drowning in enough ways already, so I figured I’d go get some dinner before working out where I was gonna shelter myself for the night.

I bought some fish and chips from a nearby chippy and ate them on a bench atop a cliff. After that, I walked aimlessly around the streets, pushing my bike along, looking like a hobo beside everyone else on their summer holidays. I was in desperate need of a shave and little kids stared at me while holding their parents’ hands and eating ice cream. On top of my dishevelled appearance, I also stunk given the fact I hadn’t showered in two days while constantly cycling up and down hills. What I needed was to treat myself to a nice Bed and Breakfast – some sort of luxurious abode in which I could take shelter and try to clean the dirt off my skin and soul. I quickly realised this wasn’t going to be possible; ‘No Vacancies’ signs lay in windows as it seemed everywhere was fully booked on account of foreign travel being banned. One place did actually have a ‘Vacancies’ sign out the front, but the woman at reception looked me over and told me it was full anyway. There was a vivid look of dismissal in her eyes – one that deemed me unsuitable to take abode among the clean and civilised people of the world. I didn’t blame her as I walked off sniffing my armpits and looking at the oil stains on my legs. After all the years of lingering on the edge of destitution, it appeared that I had finally tipped over the edge; I was now one of the homeless people on the streets that people went out of their way to avoid. Accepting my impoverished fate, I began eyeing up alleyways and hidden spots to pitch my tent, searching for some dark corner like a rat being driven underground into the sewers.

I stopped feeling sorry for myself when I remembered that I actually had some savings to my name. The whopping £3500 in my bank account gave me a boost of morale as I continued wandering around town with my bike. The search continued until I finally went by a hostel on some rough-looking backstreet. Like the one in Exeter, it was another rundown old building with a look of depression and defeat. The windows were dirty, overfilled rubbish bins lay outside the front, and rotting surfboards were attached to the front wall. I stood there in front of the building which looked like how I felt. It appeared luxury was not to be an option, but I at least had a place to try that probably had space for someone of my calibre.

I went in and spoke to the manager, a 50-year-old, skinny guy who was erratically going around and vacuuming the hallway. “One moment!” he kept saying as flung the vacuum around in a violent motion. When he was finally done, I asked him if he had any room. He didn’t answer me but instead started talking about how he used to be an alcoholic. “Alcohol is the devil’s blood. I’ve been clean for three years now and I don’t like people drinking in this hostel, so if you’re looking to party here then you want to look somewhere else, do you understand me?” I told him that was fine and I just wanted a bed for at least a couple of days. He then checked me in and took me to my room, which was naturally as terrible as I anticipated. It was a four-bed dormitory that probably should have been accommodating more than two people. Clothes littered the floor and there was a young guy with a sullen look sitting with his back against the wall. He had the saddest eyes I’d ever seen – sadder than sad – with a degree of hopelessness that I hadn’t even seen in my own eyes when looking into the mirror. He got chatting with me, mumbling in a deflated tone about how he had just moved to town and was looking for work here but couldn’t find any. He told me how he didn’t like it here anyway and just wanted to leave the country whenever it was next possible. The poor bastard was barely nineteen but already looked like he had had way too much of this life already. I wondered where he’d be in a few years’ time when the true horror of reality had made itself known to him.

Well, at that moment the last thing I needed was another person as wretched and miserable as myself, so I went to shower and finally get myself looking like someone who wouldn’t scare away children. I then headed to the supermarket to get some beers before going back to the spot where I had eaten my dinner. The sun was now setting and I stared at the red clouds while contemplating my situation. This was it: my summer holiday, drinking beers alone, listening to music and laughing at the ever-worsening plight of my life. I determined I was the only person in that vicinity who had zero clue about what the next day or week would bring me. There was simply nothing else to busy myself with at this point: no job, no writing, no cycling, no friends or girlfriend. Hell, I didn’t even have any privacy to masturbate. Naturally, I knew that I was going to fall into the pit of another bender, after barely having sobered up from the last one. I considered that this was to be my lifelong routine from now on – drifting from reckless bender to reckless bender, with brief periods of sobering up in between. It at least gave me some sort of structure and routine, I guess.

Soon I was tipsy and started to think back to the past family holidays. I looked down at a specific spot on the beach and recalled a memory of building sandcastles there with my sister. The smiling photo of that occasion was still hanging up somewhere in my parents’ house – a visual representation of the happiness I had once felt as a child. It was true that there was a time when some joy for life was there, but inevitably it had been blown away. I looked at the children playing down on the beach and knew that the majority of them awaited the same fate. All our memories eventually end up being sad as we grow old, the world no longer holding the same light that it once did as our sandcastles of joy are destroyed by the winds of change. They slowly disintegrate under the weight of all the disillusion and dissatisfaction, the unfulfilled dreams, the squashed desires, the broken promises, the failed romances, the silent struggles, the hopeless situations, the empty days and empty nights that leave you struggling to put your shoes on in the morning. If such a downfall had occurred in twenty years, I wondered where the hell I’d be after another twenty had drifted by. Surely there was only so much desolation a man could experience before his total demise and destruction. Would I even make it to thirty-one? Thirty-five? Forty? At that point just going forward to anything was hard enough. I was a man frozen in time, not knowing what to even think anymore. My brain stalled and stuttered. I could feel the internal sparks flying. I didn’t know what to do with myself and I could feel a panic attack coming on. For a brief moment, I considered ringing my sister and talking through the problems that plagued my mind. Maybe I could try and get hold of the therapist I had spoken to that time? Hell, maybe my parents were even missing me and just wanted to talk without arguing about every single thing we mentioned? In the end, I knew their lack of understanding would only make me feel more alone than what the solitude and silence was offering me. It would be the same old story of people only exacerbating your problems, whether intentional or not, and compounding your misery that inevitably became more and more a part of who you were as the years went by.

Ahhh, but what is a man to do when even the most basic things in life seem pointless? I asked myself. Even things like getting out of bed and getting dressed and showering and eating required some sort of faith in the future. I was now getting to the point where I didn’t even see enough sense to do anything at all. And yet, this is the core necessity of existence: one must see something of some value out there to keep on keeping on; even if they are fooling themselves, the deception is necessary to put one foot in front of the other and carry-on trudging through the swamp of time. The people working terrible jobs did it for their families; the people serving time in prison did it for their freedom; the people fighting in wars did it for the freedom of others – all of these people had something that made their suffering shakeable. But at that moment, however, I couldn’t even bring myself to move or stand up, let alone keep on trudging through the months and years. Where would I go? What would I do? What was the point of it all? The pressure of this meaningless existence was building and I felt as though I was about to implode, to finally break down and scream out loud so this world finally knew of the incurable insanity that ravaged my manic mind. 

In the end, I managed to calm myself down the same old way. I simply poured more beer down my throat to drown all the feelings inside that were trying to get out. After that, I got up and went to find a bar to go and make a fool of myself.

thoughts

~ Simple Joy ~

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~ Simple Joy ~

“I can’t force it. And I won’t force it. If it takes me ten years to write my next book, then so be it. All the effort of trying has escaped me. I’m happy – happy to let the streams flow and the clouds drift and buds blossom at their own pace. I’ve reached a point of total contentment with the natural course of things. All the nagging voices of teachers and parents have long but left my mind. I never cared for jumping through their hoops and I’m happy to have found inner peace at a relatively young age. I’m happy to sit and meditate; to write a couple of poems a week; to run the same track along the river continuously. I understand that I may not be seen as ambitious, but that’s okay. I believe there is a rare joy in my heart that will never be experienced by those millionaires who sit in mansions counting their money. Oh, what a thing it is to realise you are the maker of your own happiness; that life is simple and not complicated at all. It’s certainly saved me a lot of trouble and toil. It may have even saved my life. And now this life has been saved, I intend to live it totally in line with my inner flow. Right now that inner flow tells me to stop writing these words. It tells me to look up from my laptop and outside my bedroom window. The sun is setting and its last rays of light are beaming through the trees. The birds sing their song as they hop from branch to branch. Excuse me, I’ve got something I need to see. Excuse me, I’ve got some happiness to feel.”

poetry

~ Finally ~

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~ Finally ~

Here she is, finally
Standing before me
Something I only ever dreamt of
In some deluded way
During times of darkness
And defeat.

A quiet humbleness comes over me
Like standing before a natural force
With a depth and beauty
I just can’t understand.

I always felt about the age of thirty
I’d stop my rampage
And meet the woman
Who would finally straighten me out.

Dylan called it ‘shelter from the storm’
And it certainly feels that way
As the warmth of her 
Causes puddles of pain
To form at my feet.

In the morning I lie with her in bed
Her dog lays beside it
His head rested on the carpet 
Eyes staring up at me
With a knowing look of recognition.

I say goodbye, kiss her
Walk out into the day
And suddenly things are different
The little things don’t matter
Trivial troubles are nothing.

I smile and say hello to the people I pass
I hold the shop door open for the person behind me
Everything is okay;
Life is not so bad after all.

I know that this feeling probably won’t last
But for now, it’s enough
To know that a single soul can shine so brightly
Like sunlight coming through the forest canopy
Breathing life into my world
Blooming my flowers
Turning me into a dreamer

And if this is just another delusion
Then let me stay deluded
For my world has never looked so good
Now that I know
She’s in it.

thoughts

~ The Hidden Cracks ~

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~ The Hidden Cracks ~

‘Appearances can be deceiving, so they say. And you look at those cities from above and what do you see? You see everything standing straight and upright. Everything is organised, cemented down, and fixed into its correct place. There is a perfectly-engineered quality to it all. But appearances can be deceiving and in those neatly-lined houses what do you find? You find people. You find people who are not as strong and sturdy as the cities they live in. You find people who are slowly breaking down, disintegrating, being held together by the smallest things; little vices that get them through each day without collapsing. Drugs. Alcohol. Therapy. Violence. Many of those people on the surface, just like those cities, look stable on the surface. Their clothes are neat, their shoes polished, and their hair straight. But take a careful look and you’ll often see the hidden cuts and cracks behind those shiny appearances. Open your eyes and you’ll see the self-harm scars of the girl serving you coffee in the cafe; you’ll see the trembling hand of the alcoholic businessman on the train; you’ll see the bloodshot eyes of the smiling mother at the school gates. Wipe off the makeup of the modern world and you’ll see that under its surface, many people are slowly crumbling under the pressure of it. Every day the slow demolition of many people’s souls is happening all around us. Meanwhile, the city stands strong; the traffic lights flick from red to green, the bins are emptied, everything is in order and running smoothly. But as this civilisation continues to do its thing, a continual sickness pervades among its populace. This empire of sand is somehow held together by hoards of people suffering in whatever way imaginable. From one week to the next, they are slowly going on while dealing with their demons, fighting their battles, journeying through their darkness. In workplaces. In homes. In spaces so lonely that even with a million people around them, they still feel like they’re marooned on some distant planet.’

short stories

~ Cold Thoughts ~

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~ Cold Thoughts ~

I watched my breath in front of my face as I lay frozen in pain. Shivering uncontrollably, I reflected back to the time seven years previously when I had got lost on the mountain in New Zealand – my sorry ass eventually salvaged by a rescue team before hypothermia had set in. This time I was not lost on a mountain on the other side of the world from home; this time I was home – in the comfort of my own bedroom, to be exact. It had so far been the coldest weather in years and some parts of the country were even experiencing their lowest-ever recorded temperatures. Outside it was minus five degrees, which isn’t too bad if you have central heating, but unfortunately mine had decided to break in conjunction with this cold snap. My bedroom hadn’t received any warmth in two days now – the same amount of time I had been confined to my bed. Four blankets covered me, along with my thermal clothing and jumper – but it still wasn’t enough to keep my body warm. Not only was I fighting off the cold, but also a bad bout of the flu.

Yes, I had also managed to come down with one of the worst sicknesses of my life during this tragic heating malfunction. It was a pitiful situation – the sort of situation where you had to question whether the universe was out to get you. I was drained and defeated in almost every way; my head pounded with a headache, my throat felt like it had razor blades in it, and my whole body ached with a fever. I didn’t even have the energy to get out of bed, let alone go to the toilet, so I used a plastic bottle beside my bed to piss in whenever the time came. It seemed like it would be a good time to sleep and try to fast-forward to a time when I was feeling better and the heating had been fixed, but unfortunately my insomnia had come on strong too. I had barely slept in two days now. With not even enough energy to reach for my laptop and put a film on, I simply stared trance-like into space like a wounded soldier, letting whatever thoughts drift through my delirious and dying mind. 

None of them were cheery thoughts, naturally. I considered that I actually was a dying soldier and this is how my eventual demise played out. It would have been a somewhat underwhelming exit from this earth if that was the case, but at that point, I’m not even sure I would have even fought it off too much. Whenever one is consumed by such intense illness and pain, it’s almost a nice feeling to surrender yourself to the darkness. It was that darkness where you could rest in peace, free from existence and all its traumatic struggles – pain, sickness, depression, loneliness, taxes and tiredness. At that point, I reminded myself that I had come down with the flu before, and, as bad as it got, you were usually up and kicking a few days later. No, I was admittedly being slightly somewhat melodramatic about things. I was going to make it out of this one, but what was I making it out into? What was my life looking like on the other side of this sickness? 

In a way, this did feel like the universe was punishing me and putting me in a place where I had nothing else to do but reflect on the plight of my life. I knew almost certainly when I had got this flu – the previous Saturday night when I had gone out on my own and drank myself into oblivion. That was the night I had managed to buy over twenty drinks and go to four different nightclubs until 7am in the morning. This was the latest reckless bender in a series of benders where I had been destroying my health and finances. I had tried to curb my drinking a couple of months before, but that had backfired and now I was drinking even heavier than before. I knew I was heading down a dark path and perhaps this was life’s way of forcing me to stop and reflect on my ruinous behaviour. I had nothing else to do after all, and that’s exactly what I was doing – reflecting on why I was a self-destructive idiot who got myself into terrible states such as the one I was in. 

I knew exactly where some of this self-destructive behaviour was stemming from; an underlying feeling that had been growing inside of me for a while. I looked out at the current state of the world and saw little hope in anything. Society was becoming more ridiculous by the day and it was harder to find the strength to take part in the circus at all – especially when sober. There was a cost of living crisis, a climate crisis, a nuclear war crisis, a mental health crisis, a physical health crisis, and my own personal ageing crisis. I also now knew I lived in a world where people would quite happily throw away their freedoms in response to whatever hysteria the media created. Things went from one low to the next, and it was now looking like working a full-time job soon wouldn’t be enough to even feed yourself or heat your house (if the heating was even working that is). Myself and a friend had recently coined our catchphrase ‘The Collapse is Coming’ and this was now embedded into our doomed worldview. Because everything was clearly going to total shit, it seemed that nothing was worth it so you might as well just get drunk and live like there was no tomorrow. This was the new-age nihilism, I recognised – a feeling which had been sending me those reckless benders and ultimately helping me end up in this pitiful situation. 

I continued watching my breath and aching in pain as such reflections drifted through my sleep-deprived mind. I realised that if this was the universe challenging me to put myself under the microscope, I had to recognise that I couldn’t just blame it all on these external factors. In particular, I recognised that there was just an internal wild-side inside of me that had always been there. It was like a stallion in my soul – a beast that would cause me to consistently charge off into the wilderness and have no concern for anything other than the pure thrill of being alive. Its aim was to live daringly and thrash about in a way that it could never be caught and tamed. That stallion had been a part of me all my life; it had taken me to some great places and helped me to experience some wonderful things. I was happy to say that I was someone who had definitely made the most of his youth. And if this flu and cold weather were to see me off, then I could check out from the game content with my score. I had experienced life – gotten to know it to its blood and bones.

However, while I was content with what I had done with my younger years, a part of me knew I couldn’t keep living like this – at least if I wanted to have a normal lifespan, that was. I had known this for a while, but perhaps this situation was the moment where I needed to take the time to really accept that something in my personality had to change. It was time to finally start taming the stallion inside of me, or to keep letting it run wild until I died an early death. This wasn’t even me being dramatic, I deemed – something inside of me knew deeply that if I didn’t get a grip of this runaway horse, then I would end up dead and buried at a young age like so many of the writers and artists I idolised (not to forget my uncle who also died of alcoholism in his forties). When I really thought about it, in some ways I felt lucky to even be alive now. The alcohol, the drugs, the adventures, the reckless behaviour and excessive revelry – a bit more misfortune and I could have already died before my time. How much longer could I keep getting away with such a way of living? The general consequences of living so wildly were getting worse, after all. It was just a few months before when I had woken up in a town in Mexico with cuts and grazes covering my face. I had no idea what had happened and, with this mishap taking place in a particularly dangerous area, I thought myself lucky to just have a bloody face. Yes, there was no denying my reckless behaviour was getting worse and worse and it wouldn’t be long until I went too far. The edge would be found and crossed. And never recrossed. 

Oh, but what is a man like me to do when he tames the stallion within him? Especially when that stallion had brought him so many unforgettable thrills and sensations? Especially when that way of being was all he knew? I had to accept it was either to watch my life end in premature wreck and ruin, or to evolve into something else. But what was that something else, exactly? A steady career?A suburban lifestyle with a wife and kids? A life of monk-like contentment? It was hard to imagine living the rest of my life in a subdued state from what I had known, but this was what had to be done in order to have a ‘rest of my life.’ It was a confronting realisation, one that was maybe worth chatting to a therapist about. Well, for now it was just me and the cold and this flu ripping my insides apart.

I reached over in pain and took a sip of Lemsip that one of my housemates had brought me. I felt that warm liquid run down my throat as I gazed around my lair. My eyes met a picture of my family and it was then that I suddenly started thinking about my dad and my brother. Although on the surface they seemed the complete opposite to me, when I thought about it, I recognised that they, too, also once had this craziness inside of them. My brother was six years older and I recalled all the trouble he’d get into when I was a teenager. I thought of his absinthe-fuelled nights-out which could result in the police turning up at our door the next day, or even him returning with a bloody head like that one time on the morning of Christmas Day. And even my dad (a now relatively dull and ordinary man by most measures), had his stories of debauchery and anarchy from his youth as a punk. I knew what the key difference was between me and them though: a woman. A wife, even. They had eventually quietened and settled down into a sensible and sane life. Set straight by marriage, they had packed away such hedonistic tendencies and set off on a life of peace and stability. My dad had done it by the age of twenty, and my brother by the age of twenty-seven. Yet here I was now past the age of thirty, and I had barely even been in a proper relationship. All I had done was travel the world and slept with as many women as I could, all the while being uninterested in forming any real lasting bond. I dipped into dating but again it was never with a serious intent of getting a long-term partner – rather just another impulsive thing to keep myself entertained – an unhealthy vice in which I didn’t even intend to get anything out of other than momentary thrills and pleasures. 

All these thoughts whirled around my mind as a sudden fever came on. Suddenly the shivers stopped and I started sweating profusely instead. My heart palpitated, almost as if I had some bug or creature inside of me pounding at my chest to get out. At that moment, I felt like some sort of terrible bug myself, and the thoughts of why I had never been in a relationship began to make sense. A terrible feeling of self-loathing came over me. I felt that I really had something hideous inside of me and that I put this shield up against love and relationships because deep down I knew that I was someone that no woman deserved to get entangled with. I wasn’t worthy of love or affection or someone sharing their life with me. I was a ghastly insect, an unwholesome creature like Frankenstein’s monster that belonged banished from civilisation, wandering alone in the barren wilderness. Perhaps this is why I so frequently pushed others away? Perhaps this is why I poured so much poison inside myself? Perhaps this is why the world was apparently trying to kill me?

The thoughts continued to get heavier and heavier as the sweat poured from me. My headache was now at the point where I felt like I had an axe embedded in my brain. I yearned deeply for sleep to take me away from myself, but that wasn’t going to happen. My mind kept racing and I wanted to be anywhere but there, but it was no use – I was stranded with myself in one of the coldest times of my life. It was a winter of discontent and even the thought of my one regular escape, alcohol, made me feel sick. There was nothing to do but dwell in my own solitary suffering. To make it even worse, outside the sun was shining. Rays of light entered through the curtains. I heard birds chirping. I could even hear the hearty laughs of my housemate in the garden while on the phone. 

Although at first such sounds and sights compounded my misery, they eventually reminded me that there was something bright in this world. It wasn’t all the doom and gloom I had been living in within my own mind. There was light and there was victory. There were moments of great triumph and joy. There were birds jumping out of nests and tasting flight for the first time. There were baby turtles crawling courageously towards the ocean. There were little children standing up to bullies. There were shy loners creating beautiful music to be played in concert halls. There were poor kids growing up to be doctors and saving people’s lives. There were flowers growing through gaps in concrete streets. Yes, if you kept your eyes open, there were moments of pure universal triumph bursting and blooming and blossoming all around you. I knew this; I had seen these things with my own eyes. And yet I had forgotten them. Time and time again, I let the darkness of the world drive out the light, even when I had seen the glory in life and felt true bliss. I thought of those moments of standing on those sunset shorelines, staring out at the sea, watching the seagulls dancing in the sky as the daylight faded out and the light of distant stars was slowly revealed. I saw that sight again there in my room one more time as the pain faded for just a second.

Immediately, I wondered whether I was on my deathbed. This is how I imagined it to be on your deathbed, after all. You’d see all these visions of all the wonder your eyes had set sight upon throughout their long journey. I smiled to myself as I saw the other visions: bright faces in moments of joy; tender kisses on lips; the laughs of people free from their struggles. Yes, I knew things were bad – there was no denying that – and there was also some light on the other side of this sickness and my general struggles. I couldn’t feel it now but I knew it was there, and the only thing left to do was to own my suffering. This was my suffering that was currently taking place, and yet with it, I was finding something useful with it. It was a time to lie down, stare into space, and reflect. This was the purpose of my life at the moment. And I knew it was going to pass and that in a few days, I’d be back out on those streets with my mind in a different space. I’d be back at work, or running along the river, or shopping at the supermarket, or talking with friends in the pub. It would be time to re-enter the circus again and do my best to get through to the next day. In sickness and in health, fighting to go on and survive. The neverending battle. The only thing that we were all united on – trying to keep it together and finding the air to breathe and searching for the sunlight as the storm of life shakes us to the core.

thoughts

~ And Now What? ~

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~ And Now What? ~

It was sometime around my 31st birthday when my youth came to a natural conclusion just as I knew it always would. Suddenly the idea of jumping on a plane halfway around the world to go backpacking seemed beyond me. I couldn’t imagine having the same needs and desires as I had just a few years previously. That life now seemed like a foreign thing to me. The disappearance of enthusiasm had left me like a walking shrug of the shoulders. And standing on those nightclub dancefloors was now a sobering affair; I listened to the music and looked at the bright young faces with an ache in my heart. They were people that I now didn’t belong to. Their eyes were full of wonder and they were walking a path I had already walked; living a life I had already lived; feeling things I had already felt. But now in my 30s what was I supposed to be doing? These were the years when you settled down and established some sort of base and routine. Mortgages and marriages; contracts and careers; security and stability. All of that was just as foreign as those young people now seemed to me. I was a man caught in nowhere and I knew the next stage of my life would be a bewildering one. All stages of my life had been bewildering to some degree – and I guess I was used to sailing through some sort of foggy sea – but at least my ship was powered by some sort of existential fuel. That inner fire was now almost completely out and I had nothing to throw on it to make it burn again. My vigour was gone and I was now at the mercy of the indifferent current of life’s great ocean – a waiting shipwreck drifting towards the jagged rocks of inevitability.

Such thoughts can almost be too much to bear, so naturally I tried to console myself by considering that things in my life weren’t so bad. I told myself that I had now reached some sort of important intersection where I simply needed to reset and recalibrate. I considered that for once having someone else to share my journey with could be the way forward. Twelve years into adulthood, I had still never really shared my life path with anyone else for more than a few months. Maybe sharing this human experience was what I finally needed to find some meaning in my life again? Perhaps even dedicating myself to a singular task in one place would get my inner fire burning again? The more I thought about it, the more I couldn’t shake the thought that this was just the tiredness talking. Such weariness was what I figured got many people sinking into the grooves of middle-aged mediocrity. Pretty soon you’d be sucked into all the usual traps: putting on weight, loss of creativity, consumerism, bad cholesterol, aches, pains, stress, road rage, credit cards, and close-minded thinking. I imagined sitting on a sofa and staring blankly at a television screen, my belly protruding out ever further year by year as my mind became stale. It seemed to me that so many people seeped out in this middle stage of life; wounded or exhausted by the first part of their lives, they settled down into a space where their spirit slowly seeped out of them until all that was left was a hollow shell. I didn’t determine myself to be melodramatic when I thought of the same thing happening to me. In fact, at that moment in time, it seemed the most likely outcome.

No, if these things weren’t the way either, then what was? Buddhism? Stoicism? Adventure sports? I wanted to keep my soul full of fire, but I just wasn’t sure of the ‘how’ now that my interests were waning. In a time of perpetual confusion, I returned to the keyboard to strike out a few sentences. Something about it was pleasurable – like spitting in the face of someone trying to kill you. Although my connection to other things in my life was fading, writing was still always there like a constant companion in a world of transients. I guess every man had his one medicine that he could always turn to. But when I thought about it, it was even true that the amount I wrote now had dropped drastically in the last couple of years. I recalled the moment after publishing my first book at twenty-six – me telling myself that I was going to publish book after book, at least once a year for the rest of my life. I’d travel and write and chase my desires until the setting of my sun. Now such a feeling seemed like blind optimism. Worst of all, it just seemed like plain hard work. Things I once did for fun, or because I simply couldn’t stop myself, now seemed like work. It was that very feeling which spelt out the enormity of the spiritual crisis I was facing. 

Indeed, it’s a constant spiritual battle. Living a life worth living and staying true to yourself in this world, in this society, is something that does not come easily. I knew from what I had observed that living without will or conviction will very quickly result in you being lured into places where you will be lessened down. The temptations, escapisms and addictions find you quickly. Such things lure the passive man into a trap from which he may never escape throughout his whole journey upon this earth. In some way, I knew who I was and what I stood for. But maintaining that self always and existing in society was a perpetual battle – especially when my mind was in this foggy and confusing state. I knew solitude served me well from experience; in that sanctuary of isolation, one could not be corrupted by the voices of others and gradually tune into the inner voice. But as always, the human desire for interaction would force me back out onto the streets, into the bars, into the beds of women who would twist my mind up. They would make me lose whatever self-assurance I had and leave me once again a confused dumb kid with pain in his heart, looking for something to alleviate the eternal sadness.

On top of this, I knew at the age of thirty I was not even halfway through this struggle of living a life worth living. But I found some solace in the memories of the past; the fact that I had walked my own path after university, that I travelled to the places I wanted to travel, wrote in a way I wanted to write, that I had experienced blissful states of consciousness and found some deep inner truths. But yes, finally the wave had crashed and I lay dazed in the sand wondering ‘and now what?’ Oh god, I didn’t want to end up this way. I always thought I was strong enough not to be slain by the pitfalls of older age. I always thought the fire would flicker forever in my heart, laughing its flames outward in defiance of ever being snuffed out. But it appears to be dwindling. The only thing for me to do right now is to face the issue and recognise that something has to change. 

Something,

Has to change.

poetry

~ Something Has to Change ~

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~ Something Has to Change ~

Out on the streets, I see them
The drunk students partying
The skaters flipping their boards
The young people doing their thing

It only seems like a couple of years ago
That I was one of them
Wide-eyed and reckless
Careless and confused
Excited to be alive

Well now the years have gone by
And I approach the age of thirty-one
By no means an old age
But for some reason, I feel old
Older than one should feel at this age
Looking at them jovial kids
I just can’t help but wonder
What has happened to me

Nowadays I don’t dream of something ridiculous
Nowadays I’m not bursting with vigour
Nowadays I don’t get hurt like I used to
I don’t feel the thrill like I used to
I don’t chase desires like I used to

A mist has descended; the hunger fades
The fire that I thought would roar forever wanes

I guess this is what they call growing up
I always knew it would have its downfalls
But this total apathy with existence
Is something I didn’t quite anticipate.

I know the story:
Getting older
Losing the spark,
Your energy dwindling
As the quiet desperation of
Middle-age sets in.

Is this what awaits us all?
Is this why they say youth is wasted on the young?
Is this why we have children?
To give ourselves another chance?

Naturally, I consider the alternative: not growing old.

Most say growing old is better than dying young
But who can be sure?
At the very least,
Checking out early feels like a cop-out
Although I understand how such weariness
Can turn a person toward it.

I can’t keep fading out like this anyway
I’ve decided that something needs to change
I won’t try to force myself to be young again
But something needs shaking up

I’m not hoping for angels or epiphanies
Or to feel excitement like I once did
Or to dance on dancefloors like I once did
Or to flip skateboards like I once did

But something has to change

Something,

Has to change.

thoughts

~ I Don’t Care Anymore ~

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~ I Don’t Care Anymore~

Like many young people growing up, I was once full of inner conflict and at odds with the world. Resentful of my surroundings and feeling misunderstood, I sought to set things straight and take back some ground for myself. My blood was full of fury and a war raged constantly inside of me. The pain in my heart meant I was willing to go to extreme lengths to slay down everything I felt was wrong with the world. Maybe it’s me getting softer in older age, but the truth is I don’t care anymore. I’ve set down my sword. And thrown away my shield. I’m no longer charging into any battle, or craving some sort of victory. Things I once fought were worth killing myself for now seem meaningless. Something has changed inside of me. A stillness comes over me. Points of tension begin to relax. And feelings of anger begin to finally fade. After all these years, it seems this soul has found some salvation from the storm. I now find myself in a state of calmness, where I find that I have obtained the victory I always wanted – a victory where I can now rest and relax, because really it was just me stopping myself from living in the lands of peace anyway. And as the smoke of the battle begins to clear, I begin to see the sun shine, and the birds sing, and my soul smile.

 I don’t care anymore.