58.

I wake to bleary sunlight, a clogged head, and a dry mouth.

And, for several moments, I’m just nothing – an empty body, a blank memory, an unformed mind. I used to experience these instances – as well as fleeting terror – when I first battled anxiety, this fear that perhaps I’d lose myself to oblivion, and never find my way back.

But then everything snaps back: the cluttered, manic thoughts; the doubt, insecurity, and self-loathing about where I am in the world; the tiredness that aches in every muscle, and the cramping in my back; the heaviness in my eyelids, like I still can’t drag myself entirely from sleep; and it all coagulates into a singular pulsing malaise that is distinctly me.

And then overriding that is the simple need to kickstart the day.

Grabbing my phone from where it sits on the bedside drawer, I see Autumn’s messaged me: How’re you doing?

Better, I tell her.

That’s good, she responds almost immediately, although I see the time’s just after ten, and I can imagine her sitting in her office, sorting through emails. Do you think you’ll come in tomorrow? she asks.

Let’s see how I go, I write back.

Okay. X.

I hate the morning after a big drinking session, because it takes a while to ease into the day. But once breakfast is done, and I’ve showered and swilled down maybe half a liter of water, I’m starting to feel some facsimile of normalcy, which is fine with me, because I think that’s been my whole life: some facsimile of normalcy. It should probably be the title of a book.

The Facsimile of Normalcy

Life When It’s Not.

There’s something I file away, some idea to be pursued later. I used to write these conceptual fragments down and stick them in an alphabetized folder. A few years ago, I went through the folder, stunned that I had no memory of some of the stuff I’d written down just ten years earlier, but there’s so much shit that goes through my head it’s impossible to track it all.

For now, though, I sit at my computer and trawl through my emails. Tonight, I should be meeting Ethan, or Quinn – well, one of the authors I mentor. But it’s neither of them. It’s changed to Olivia, the author I edit privately who’s writing about nutrition, diet, and the benefits healthy eating produces.

This has changed again.

That triggers another bit of anxiety – a reminder how malleable my life is.

And foreign.

Looking back through our emails, I see Olivia and I have been talking, on and off, for the last fortnight, although I don’t remember any of it. Usually, Olivia’s manic in her activity, although she has so much going on in her life she’s always jumping from one project to another and to another, and then back again.

When Tuesday evening changed the first time and I found I was meeting Quinn instead of Ethan, the changed emails didn’t go this far back –whatever changes are happening are winnowing further back, although maybe that’s just my paranoia.

Sitting back in my chair, I think I should meet her. I need something solid, even though this is only solid in that it’s something I would usually do, although it’s not something I’m meant to be doing tonight. But maybe this will get me back into whatever course I’m taking.

Then again, to what end? It’s no different to meeting Ethan or Quinn – my life’s not hinging on it; it’s not impacting who I am, or where I’m trying to get. It’s stable, the thing I would always do, and given where I am, I know the thing I always do isn’t so fruitful, as my attempts to escape the state illustrate.

I pull up my phone with the intention of texting Olivia and cancelling, but then see the link that Stan sent me for speed dating. That’s different. Totally different. If I try to sign up for that – something so different to what I did in the last cycles, and different to what I’d usually do – would I be thwarted?

There’s only one way to find it.

Click the link. Goes to a website. Sign up. Have to create an account, register my name and an email. Done. Also have to pay a small fee, which seems a rort, although I guess they’re hosting this fucking thing. I halt sticking in my credit card details, waiting for this to trip me up somewhere. Nope. The registration processes. Moments later, I get a confirmation email.

I stare at it – well, I’ve gotten this far, which is much further than the trip, but it’s still not all the way, so maybe something will happen in the interim.

But it doesn’t. I bounce around my flat, try futilely to write, text Olivia that unfortunately I have to cancel, check my work emails, masturbate, play a game on my PC, then continue to wait impatiently, feeling that typical growing anxiousness that always shows up when you’re eager to get underway.

Around five, I shower, then I force a sandwich down, and then get into my car, driving to a small bar in Fitzroy, Brandy’s. Traffic’s no worse than it usually is; it’s not harder finding a parking than it usually is. Walking to the bar, I expect to be mugged or arrive and find the bar’s closed due to termites or something, but nope, it’s open.

Everything in Fitzroy is old – old red bricks and gray stone and cement, with a feeling like the area belongs in some period piece centered around the Great War, but there’s a charm to it that we don’t get in contemporary mass production architecture, this feeling that things were built to further a society, rather than to accommodate the growing masses.

Once I step inside, the bar’s immediately there – this big U-shaped thing, stools with cracked leather upholstery around it, and tables scattered around the various narrow windows. On each side is a promenade – the one to my immediate right heads out to a beer garden, but I find the one to the left goes to a function room, a small sign out front that says “SPEED DATING”.

I haven’t been stopped.

So this is okay, apparently, and typically I read too much into it – maybe the point of this is not to escape, but to embrace it, to find the partner I long for, that perfect person so many people fantasize about, but once my thinking goes deeper than that (and it does, because my thinking always does), I think this is subject to some set of rules I still don’t fully understand.

Taking a deep breath, I step forward.