11/05/2022
Sometimes I think I died and didn’t notice. My room is filled with pervasive grey. It washes across the monochrome furniture. The toilet in the adjoining wet room reeks of piss. Stains cover the sides of the bowl. I allow the stench to fill the room. The only window in the room lets in a sliver of light. The street above filled with traffic causes the room to rattle. I am confined to my bed. I wanked earlier, the cum remains in my underwear. Trinkets adorn the room around me they’ve lost their meaning in the mire of the present.
BANG
BANG
BANG
A fist crashes into the firmly locked door to the room. I get up to make sure it truly is locked. I’m safe. I noticed my breathing has become heavy. I go back to laying on my bed. My roommates are having a house party outside in the kitchen/living room. A week ago, they slid a pamphlet under my door telling me it's okay to ask for help. It’s not.
The ceiling becomes concaved in my delirium. I’ve been awake since 5am on my trip to the nearby Tesco for my sustenance for the day. A meal deal and a loaf of bread to keep me going. Everyone morning I go I check the flat’s bins. The only time I enter the kitchen and the only communication with those I live with is emptying their bins. Four bin bags leak a foul sludge onto the floor. I lift them up and creep along the hall and exit the flat. The brisk winter air is refreshitng to my deeply stale body. I drop the bags into the large bin in the car park. The morning announcements at the train station next door begin to play. I must return soon before someone else wakes up. Time has lost its meaning in this life.
Emails scare me. Things I fully willingly signed up try to intrude my solitude with a kindly written email. They want to help me. They don’t understand that I’ve decided that I’m beyond help. One day I decide to change, upon removing the objects from my room a flatmate catches me:
“Are you leaving?”
“Yes”
I lived with them for 6 months.
I sent myself home, back to my mother. I am failed. The familiar walls of my childhood bedroom begin to grow old with mould. I waste my time here. I pretend for apply to jobs. A year goes by, I barely notice. A man moves in with my mother. Living with a terrorist can dull you into a sense of calm derangement. It was ok though because I had learnt to live in my room alone. One meal days, cowering in the safety of odd hours. When the world was locked in I was given a job. I pushed a trolley around a supermarket. I was given an offer to have a life I wanted to take it, I paid for it. I built beliefs to keep me in my prison.
Now I find myself living in the ruins of my life. A post-apocalyptic vision of my childhood bedroom. 5 years on from whatever event caused my statue of liberty to be buried in the beaches of my soul. I begin to pull back the vines and shrubbery and search for places to begin my settlement. Akin to the Anglo-Saxons living amongst Roman villas. I don’t know how this land was constructed but I will endeavour to build what I can in its grounds.