January 2025

I don't think I was made for the corporate world.

Every day at work feels like standing in a room slowly filling with water. While it is gently lapping at my feet, I can focus on the tasks at hand, even if my feet fill the resistance of the water when I walk. By noon, it is waist high. There is a chill deep in my bones and my clothes are soaked. Around four o’clock, I start wondering if this is the day I will finally drown. All thoughts of work have escaped my mind, and I can only focus on the steady stream of the water coming in, convinced it is rising faster than it did yesterday and this time, this time, it will submerge me completely before five o’clock rings and I can clock out. I feel it circling my throat, the cold pressure of it that feels like a chokehold. I feel it rising to my mouth, watery fingers pressing against my lips, pushing to pry them open.

Five o’clock rings and I clock out. I do not feel like I have won.

At night, I dream of the sea. Of the immensity of it.

On Thursday, I can’t take it anymore. I book an appointment with my psychiatrist, and I try to explain to her that my lungs are filled with water. She prescribes me two days of leave. Two days on solid ground. Trying to prevent a full-blown burn out, she said.

And like a mariner who has been at sea for the last eight months, and whose ship finally anchors down, I come home to my flat on legs still unsteady from being used to the waves. The ship will depart once more in a few days, so I gorge myself on the little freedom I have. I read fifty pages of Camus while drinking half a bottle of sweet white wine, and then I remember a poem about a blue bird, and I search my whole flat for my book of Bukowski. By then, the buzz has settled in. I flirt with a girl I don’t want but who could really want me. I read more poetry. I think of picking up the pen. I don’t. I eat cheese and potatoes and drink more wine. I chastise myself for not writing since I have the time for once. Bukowski whispers in my ear:

“Baby, air and light and time and space / have nothing to do with it / and don’t create anything / except maybe a longer life to find / new excuses/ for.”

I hate him a little for it. I pour myself another drink, the one that tips the scale from hedonism to existentialism. I can hear the laps of the waves coming through the window, the sea calling to me once more. I can feel them crashing against the walls of my building and I see the wine shaking in my glass. Two days of freedom, the haven of my flat, and yet soon the sea will shatter my windows and drown out everything.

I feel my hands start to shake with the need to find a meaning, to create it if need be. There needs to be a trace of this freedom before it is taken away. A graffiti carved onto the wood of the desk, or a tattoo deep into my liver. I pick up the pills. Too many of them. There is a meaning in death, isn’t there? It’s a destination at least, some place where the sea won’t be able to take me anymore. I take a few but not enough to find my way to the other side. Just enough that I am now working on limited time before sleep takes me. Most of it I won’t remember, I know. I’ve taken enough I’ll black out. Enough that what comes next is primal.

My head is swimming when I finally pick up the pen and write words that I won’t remember in the morning. I wonder if art remains art if it is written unacknowledged, even by its own writer. I wonder if art can only truly be written like this. On stolen time. Did Hemingway feel the ticking clock in the back of his mind before the inebriation would subside or take him completely, rushing through this grace period where the words’ sharp edges cut at the page and make it bleed in just the right way?

There are a few pages of a short story stored on the computer at my office, written drunk on a certain kind of adrenaline, hoping no one barges in to check if I am working. There is the first draft of this, written at two AM waiting for the drugs to take me, a part of me convinced I wasn’t truly sick enough to call off work and that I should have gone. There is a poem in my phone, jotted down in the metro and forgotten soon after. And each and every one of them, I seal in a bottle for when the sea will come.

I put down the pen and realise it has turned into a blade, and there’s blood dripping down my sigh. The sea is roaring now but I had time. I had time. I can feel the salt burning at my throat, the water bubbling up and creeping into my nose. It’s streaming from my eyes. I had time. I choked on writers and poets and cheap wine, and I gasp through my last clean breath. The clock is ticking and ticking. The sea reigns supreme again. I am biding my time until the next glimpse of land