Another Day of Playing by the Book

At seven-thirty he wakes with a jolt to the disingenuous ditty of the alarm

Blaring pitilessly to signal the start of a new day; skin gleaming with a film of sweat; heart

Cla-cla-clattering through him like a battered window-frame in a furious storm. The sense of

Duty to function, to overcome, to partake - a boulder pinning him to the mattress. Vision

Eclipsed with shadows; thumping beat of panic drumming through his head as he tries

Furtively to lift it.

Got to go to work he thinks stop being so pathetic, so weak.

Haven't you learnt by now the world has no time for sad cripples like you and rightly so?

Inside the thumping and clattering and drumming and pounding and

Jittering clamours louder and faster against the baleful voice and he sh-shakes and sh-shivers but he's not cold and it won't stop yet he

Knows that if he doesn't get up now he'll be late and that will make things worse still.

*

Like he always does, driven by will alone, he pulls himself up and staggers shakily to the bathroom,

Mechanically twisting on the shower and watching as thick steam fills the air with sticky,

Nauseating clouds that swallow him, and he relishes the sensation of disappearing into them.

Once the scalding water pelts his skin until it is red raw his muscles relax themselves and the breathing. Steadies. Out.

Please, let me stay here under this blistering surge, this oblivion he begs silently, before dragging his glowing pink body - which now resembles a newborn rodent, squashed and deformed and blank - out from behind the curtain.

Quivering, but not from cold, he drapes a towel around himself and dutifully dresses for the day ahead,

Running his nails sharply across his wrists as he has learnt to do to keep the

Simmering

Terror at bay. Breathe. Scratch. Breathe. Scratch. Breathe.

*

Upstairs in his office building he slips a cup under the coffee machine and selects decaf, listening candidly to the clamour of his colleagues fretting about this and that before making his

Way to his desk where he sits and sips and recalibrates. And recalibrates. And recalibrates. Until he is well enough to

Xerox the document he neglected to yesterday afternoon. He works industriously through the morning, barely looking up as the hours build up to the

Zenith of the day, all the time chanting his silent mantra:

A few more hours and you can go back to bed.