Not so much a love letter

I can’t remember the last time 07:30 filled me with the urgency to write; it’s easy to imagine that this is a first. The cup of coffee next to me pleads for a cigarette, but I question its intentions. It will leave me sluggish; almost drugged at this hour in which I need my mind. Yet, I think I already know that I am giving in to it. Coffee and cigarettes, and my weakness to romanticism…

It’s 07:47 now and the smoke takes to my nose whilst I type with both hands. I can curl in to a ball - my knees tucked in to my chest- and face the ceiling whilst I execute fifteen pull-ups. Sarah is running late for work again, but I’m not so sure it can be classified as running late when it happens every morning; I think it is just that the end of her morning routine calls for rapidity and urgency. I am trying to slow things down.

I am trying to not be so bothered by these recurring images. I try and let them dance with me without too much internal monologue, yet I find myself hoping that they will take a cruel serpent’s form. I no longer find myself with a lost erection, but instead I just accommodate the self-pitying sense of being plagued by something. I am in the midst of a journey as we should all be: I am allowing each thought to pass through me and taking notes. I want to learn what connects everything to everything. There are reasons why Sarah spends the last five minutes of her mornings cursing the absence of another ten minutes; her curse words growing harsher and more frequent. Just as there is no doubt a reason why someone is looking at me from the corner of a room, refusing to take the serpent’s form.

I will plunge in to a hot bath and concentrate on my breathing. Taking note of each breath out until I count to four and then starting again. I will keep going. My mind will stay blank for around ten repetitions of this until it is there again; staring at me from the corner of a room. The cigarette has jarred my chest at half empty and filled my stomach with air. I have the taste of menthol on my lips; it’s a gentle burning sensation the area of the wrong filter tip.

Now, the house is empty; all but the slamming of the front door. Done.

I spent a long time wondering just how one individual could spend so much time upstairs. I have learnt to accept that it was my romanticism fighting against reality. It is what you represent. I hope that you can take it as a complement that you represent what you do. I have too much anxiety over it to ever impress you the way I would have liked to. There will be others, I tell myself. It is 08:08, and I should really take the plunge. My mind is unwinding. My drama and my emotive language are bouncing around beautifully as they often do when I allow them to breathe. The fruits of creativity.

I hope you managed to read the book I gave you. Not because I care for any further romantic attachment to what you represent, but because I am working on that, and more people should be reading ‘good’ literature. Have a good week. In, hold, out, 1. In, hold, out, 2. In, hold, out, 3. In, hold, out, 4… There you are again, but it’s not really you. Funny really.