Turtleneck Wail
O Phone Rock Me Asleep
You open your eyes; rub them, and curl up your arms like you probably did when you were born, except now there’s less crying. Get up, look down at your feet, ponder which one is best, and put it forward. Check your phone: you’ve been invited to your third google workspace of the year—Winning! Feel your mind take shape like water across a tile.
Look in the mirror. Your life, as it stands, is wearing a turtleneck. Last month it was wearing a kaftan and letting it all hang out, but things have changed so it squeezed into a turtleneck and now it is a little bit harder to breath all the time. But hey, you look great.
Coffee Shop Time! A man sits on his phone while his girlfriend stares ahead, and you are completely beside yourself. Give her a kiss for God’s sake. You see your side profile in a shadow and any nice thing you thought about yourself is washed away with bleach. But yours is a mind that, when thrown into the air, comes back down happily with a thud, and a piece of bejewelled wall art of two flamingos reminds you of your mum.
Phone Time! Feedback on your story from the writing course: “I didn’t understand what was going on all the time”. Feels crucial. You’ll have to stop going to the classes anyway because there is no time, and briefly that question flickers across the screen of your mind, which is What Did I Want to Do Again?
Leave, born again into the drizzle. It is time to work with the people inside your computer.
Scrunch up for four hours in service of modern things. Think about your friend Molly but tell yourself you can think about Molly in 25 minutes when the online pomodoro timer goes off. Spend the afternoon wound tight like a coil and when you are done you want a Big Drink. You really want a Big Drink so you go to a bar and get one and then you do a Big Sigh.
The day has wilted and flowered more times than seems possible, and you thought a lot of things like: does my body look the way that’ll make people like me? What did the sign that read 100% DIY VEGAN RIOT FOOD actually mean? And is my life; the pile of pieces of time— the one that is always diminishing and disappearing, being filled with the right sort of things?
Some things you are proud of, and others— well, others.
✤
So the days pass, & I ask myself sometimes whether one is not hypnotised, as a child by a silver globe, by life; & whether this is living. Its very quick, bright, exciting. But superficial perhaps. I should like to take the globe in my hands & feel it quietly, round, smooth, heavy. & so hold it, day after day. I will read proust I think. I will go backwards and forwards.
The Diary of Virginia Woolf Vol. III, p209