Six forty-eight sixteen degrees sunny intervals

I just went to see if the pair of coo­ing, love­sick pigeons who have been rent­ing space on my bal­cony were up with the lark. As I am. When did I start envy­ing birds that so many con­sider to be little more than trouble­some ver­min, riddled with dis­ease and pestilence?

I just went to see if life was still twitch­ing its feath­ers out­side my par­tic­u­lar gold­fish bowl — the glass sphere that I find myself car­ry­ing with increas­ing care­less­ness, so much so that the water is slop­ping, splash­ing and spill­ing over the sides. Evid­ently, I kill harm­less fish in the same way that I murder harm­less plants. The nat­ural world is my unnat­ural home, it seems.

I am not a viol­ent per­son. No, not a viol­ent intent or a viol­ent bone in my body. And yet. As each sixty second spurt passes, I want to take that minute by the scruff of its neck, dig my pudgy fin­gers into its creep­ing, sweaty, heat-stung skin, grasp and twist a hand­ful of scraggy hair, and then smash its head clean into the table top until it bleeds. I want to render it immob­ile, leav­ing it jud­der­ing its last gasps on the unswept tiles. I har­bour an insane desire to kick it in the chest for good meas­ure. Are you win­ded yet? Do you relent? Do you give in? Plead for mercy, you poor fucker. Plead for fuck­ing mercy.

I am not a sens­ible per­son. I am not a rational per­son. I am not a breath­ing per­son. I am a mere grain of exist­ence, a moment­ary aber­ra­tion on the tired face of this long and ‘will it ever end?’ day. I have turned this infernal egg-timer on its axis, and am wait­ing to slip through its tight gul­let. I live in hope, I breathe in poten­tial lost, even if poten­tial found eludes me.

You never know. You never know if the way back into your ima­gin­a­tion — our ima­gin­a­tion, my ima­gin­a­tion — into that yearned-for pause for thought, might linger and gleam in the sandy peaks and troughs that are slowly gath­er­ing below. So far below. Not too far below. Not so far now, not so far.

Down, down, let me fall down and out. Through and gone. Merged and emerged. It’s just dead­ness to you, maybe. It looks like noth­ing but dust to the unbe­liev­ers who circle me dur­ing my wak­ing hours, as I wrench my eyes open with an end­less sup­ply of match­sticks. But to these weird, feared and blurry eyes, each grain of passing sand holds all the prom­ise of life hereafter.