The Graduate (part 2)

"I'm doing it to learn", I told her. "I want to study, to learn about the world, to learn to think about the world. It's not about anything else". The conversation had gone on for a while, and I knew where it was heading if I didn't round it off. "I know I need to get a job, I know how important it is. I'm not gonna sit around. But I love learning, that's what I enjoy and that's why I went in the first place."

"Good. That's all fine. Just make sure you remember that at the end of the day, you're there to help you get a job. Above anything else".

***

"It's about time you started paying your way and living out in the real world!"


My third night moderating focus groups in row, was t'nite. I finished work at 11pm and returned to my flat by midnight. I eat, try to wind down. 5 hours sleep at least man, come on, I've learned this the hard way. I try to sleep but my mind finds itself racing round and round and round, circling and biting through gusty, tattered memories of the evening before. It's now 3.30am. I need to be up for 8 at the latest.

I wake and drag myself through a mud of tear-mounting anger, into the office, into my seat, before my desk: ready to count down the hours once more. As time has worn on, I have felt as though that my drawings on those walls all those months ago have been blanked off with a few furious clicks of the "CTRL ALL + DELETE" buttons; while behind my back the walls were disassembled, compressed and then archived to some squeezed, cobwebbed file on the shelf of my life.

Work Eat Sleep. Work Eat Sleep. Drink. Work Eat Sleep. Work Eat Sleep. Drink. Drink.Work eat sleep. workeatsleep.drink.worksweatdrink.sleepworkeat.dreepsweatwrink. Here I sit. Before a computer screen, typing away a document for the aims of a client, thread-trapped into the roll of working life. Evenings worked away for unpaid wages, filling profits I never see nor want. At the start it wasn't too bad. I had a job. I had money. But the rolling rhythms snatched away the thing which once completed me: time. Time to think, time to explore, time to read, time to write, time to chat shit. time to monkey upon streets at 3am. Time to produce absolutely fuck all. The rhythms plugged the holes with distractions: working for bosses and shiny clients, purchasing shiny clothes and shiny shoes, eating shiny food in the sugary haze of an evening metropolis.

***

"I'm going to quit" I told him, the tears rushing to the edge of my eyelids and my voice waning to a croak. 

"Don't leave till you find something else. You're going to leave yourself in a really sticky situation if you're living down there without any earnings"

"I just hate it. I'm going to quit, I don't care about any of that, I can't do this any more"

"Ha. Well let's see how you get on when you're not bringing any money in"

***

"You coming out mate?", he asks me. "How many beans you after?"

Floundering arms, questionable cloth chopped out of some online magazine and whipped across my back, I stand in a haze of flashing light and dark. Sound crashes down to the floor around me, it feels as though my cranium is being boiled inside a kettle, with splashes of discharged stress jumping and frying up over the outer edges. 

The music I hate, truly hate, on these types of nights. I've found that once you've swallowed a pill it can be bearable, after you've reached that small peak of introverted happiness, your senses exploded uncontrollably across your entire being and everything else simply funnelled off into the small distance. 

And it's these cold Monday mornings, these are the beat of the horror. Frost-eyed gaze up into the grey clouds, drowning in scenes of offices and hours smoked in keyboard dust. the mornings where i stand by the train track edge and focus: where the untouched darkness laps up against living's feet. 

"You coming out mate?", he asks me. "How many beans you after?"