Boredom. Anxiety. A Day in the Life.

Words: Charles Hay

 

I don't deal well with being alone, so these jobs which put me in unexplored territory, on my own... They're not so great.

It is an uncomfortable sort of trapped, to have so few of your things around you and to be so far from your loved ones. It lends a stifling blankness to existence that is extremely difficult to overcome. That is the primary reason for me writing this piece, in fact. This is an attempt to beat blandness by engendering it; forcing it into being something, and therefore destroying its ability to numb me.

It becomes almost like a hum, or something like a thrum. Like an unavoidable existential tinitus. It saps away vitality, and stretches seconds into hours whilst paradoxically making days seem like seconds. It becomes invasive; louder than thought. Decisions have too much inertia to tackle. They stumble before boredom.

I have spent a huge part of the last two years in rooms like this. Vaguely identikit bed and breakfasts. Sometimes there brilliant ones. Sometimes there are spectacularly awful ones. But by their context, they all become the same. They all become a room which is fundamentally not home. The telly goes on for fear of silence. The phone comes out for fear of loneliness.

 

Phonecalls are made and echo against flat, rigid silence when they end. The walls stare inwards. The door is locked. The world is locked. The world seems so far away.

Powerless.