Interview in Spring

By Jay, 26 March 2023

Red-tinged catkins on the wet asphalt path, besides the flowing mead. Blossom and magnolia flares burn in recent memory. Spring makes its way, in the buffeting wind and rain. Warm mornings surprise open doors, only for the rain to shut them again.

A journey to an interview that was a journey beyond the past. You were not going to go but you did. Traveling to a town beyond a university city, out into the countryside. It was too far but maybe it would be a hybrid role. Maybe, you would finally move, even though, you cannot conceive of it. At the station, an expensive tea and stodgy muffin, carried onto the waiting train.

You stop at the city that you studied in in the far off past. At this train station, you came and went. It is a memory of loss – waiting and performance. You try not to look or feel, in case you see yourself. 

Living

by JAZD, 24 October 2023

Do you ever take a second and realise you’re living what you used to want?

I do. Every day.

I wanted to be free. I wanted to sleep well, eat well, walk places, and feel like I was living.

And now I’m free. I put off University to live first, but I’m not living the way I thought I would.

I thought I would sleep without the stress of having to remember, but now there’s nothing to memorise, I can only recall stress each night, worry myself into sleep, daydream instead of dreaming because I can’t control those ones.

“How do you sleep at night?” asks the Hero to the Villain.

This implies you need to have peace of mind, a clear conscience, to sleep.

“To sleep, to sleep, perchance to dream” wonders Hamlet, who cannot sleep while there is revenge to plot.

To awaken.

I didn’t think it was hard. But it got harder recently. Maybe because the day is spent waiting for tomorrow, though tomorrow won’t be new, but at least it will be tomorrow. “I must start living, I must start living.”

And each night I realise the day passed me by, whilst I sat and sat and wondered why time goes so fast. I thought that living was something you just did. That once I wasn’t busy trying to achieve, I would be able to easily live.

I didn’t know you had to learn it. No one tells us, as children, when we dream of adulthood freedom, that life needs practise. That rehearsal is necessary for the acting you must do each day.