i don't leave the house often enough
The days meld and mould themselves into one another, fueled by nothing else but time itself passing. Except the occasional punctuation of a work meeting or some other appointment, there is not much to them or to distinguish them from one another. The sun is always in the same place, the loud sound of construction, traffic, and people going to work are coming from the same place, and as I get up and out of bed, and I go to the same place.
What accentuates the loop is the consistent feeling of not doing enough, not having enough to do, or needing to do something I don't want to do. The boredom alongside it, binds it, chained in a parallel flux with ennui. That grey eyed monster, siege weapon, that wrecks the walls to let the forces of self-deprecation rumble in. From an objective standpoint I do everything I need to do, the fortifications are designed in a specific geometry that allows the control of flux, I am very aware of the the forces it can hold, I was not born yesterday. These 36 years of living thought me a lot about myself... and yet, in the fog of those undifferentiated days, those mornings tinged with the bitter aftertaste of loss, both of time and opportunities, I wake up to immediately forget.
I picture myself as though a darkly, mirrored version of Prometheus. He, punished to the infinity of immortal time, always in the consistent and everlasting pain, waking up to the feel the same wound over and over. Yet the difference between him and I, is that the device of his torture relies on his remembrance, his accumulation of an embodied knowledge of consecutive suffering, primal and literally within him. In his suffering, from my perspective, there is the solace of a knowing, grim as it may be, but of a potential where a lesson may be learned, made manifest perhaps by the scar itself, carved in.
What sort of Jovian torture is mine then? Where one must remember, the other, a mere mortal, must be doomed to forget. Forgetting in the context of a time-bound life might be the device of my particular torture. When one forgets, one is also aware of the void. I need to remember at one point in order to feel the suffering of forgetting. When I fight this feeling of never ending homogeneity and loss of time, I remember in the process that this is not new, and along with it, the crows pecks the wounded organ. Time has passed and there is nothing to do about it. Every evening it grows back, and the cycle of seeming powerlessness.
The tactician, the strategist, would suggest a process based approach to a methodical remembering. I have been there, and I do not claim that I do not have any. I have, and they work. Yet they are not consistent, they change, and they have different potencies. Mundane life has its own complexities which shred these structures; maintenance is constant. Like any other chore, because yes, this must be the ultimate chore, it is procrastinated until its accomplishment is paramount lest it becomes an obstacle to dignified living. Having to maintain it, to let it go so far is another torture in itself akin to Sisyphus' boulder.
Today I remembered early. Reading on the floor of my living room, I felt the urge to leave, to go. I refuse to work today, the little I do which doesn't bore me doesn't need doing today. I left the house. Outside I find the joy of slowly walking in the usual places, transformed by the specific time of the day. I buy a cheap protein shake and a croquette. The clouds burst wide, and as the rain slashes at the trees, I stand comfortable under a balcony savouring the flavours of artificial sweetener and the soggy pastie. I am cold as the wind buffets me, finding me in an ideal funnel, I shift to a different corner. I am enjoying myself.
I don't leave the house often enough.