50.

I don’t sleep, because although I’m tired, even unnaturally drowsy, sleeping’s for the contented, and all I can think about now is what I do with myself.

Lana’s done. I tried the relationship thing. Gone. It’s not her fault – it’s mine, more than anybody’s, because I’ve grown so intolerant, so bedded in expectation of what won’t work. I can’t do that again, can’t try that again. Hopefully, Lana can find somebody who fills her needs.

Work? Blah. I should be encouraged that the CEO, Victoria Ellis, considered me to fill in for Autumn. I should. But it’s not gratifying, which tells me it’s not for me, although some nagging part of my mind suggests I’m being too lofty in my aspirations. But why not? Why not grasp for stars? What else is there to grasp? Dirt? That’s not so hard.

That leaves my writing. What an insanely inexorable exercise in futility, and yet I still cling to that – cling until I hear it screeching in my ears. What is this thing that I’ve pursued at the sacrifice of everything else? I think of the movie Amadeus, about Mozart; his rival composer, Salieri, lamented he could recognize Mozart’s genius, but never come close to capturing it himself. That’s how I feel, although in truth Salieri was plenty successful.

Then there’s the film stuff. If I could move past this fucking week, well, maybe – it’s connected to my writing, so that satisfies that desire in me. The problem is that a book’s a solitary journey until an editor gets involved. A film’s collaborative. This has lots of moving parts, and all it takes is one faulty part for the whole thing to break down. Dom. Obviously. It’s always Dom.

Come the morning, I haven’t slept a single moment, and drag myself out of bed to this raging emptiness. I should do it again – take my own life, then choose one of the doors. Autumn’s here now, Autumn’s alive … although  I worry that there’ll be some adaptation that kills her. Do I stick around for that? I can’t be with her all the time. Outside of work, I can barely be with her.

One thing I do, though, is text Dom, and tell him I’ve got a bug, so I can’t make our get together, but ask him to please, please, please read the script, although there’s something to be said about his unreliability, and about how reliable that is regardless of what else is going on around me.

He texts me back almost immediately, Ok mate will read. There. That’s settled. See?

But I can’t get out of the visit to my mum, as horrific as that is – I don’t visit enough as it is, and this weekly trip is really just some pisspoor means to ameliorate my guilt. I should do better. I will do better. This is something I vow as I walk down the corridor to her room.

“So you’re back,” she says, after I’ve given her a kiss, and sit in the bedside chair.

“Here every week,” I say. “Do you want me to come more? I have time now. Lana and me broke up.”

Mum snorts. “I meant back.”

“Yeah, here I am.”

“From that place.”

“What place?”

“Where you go.”

I lean forward in the chair. “What do you mean?”

“You know. That place.”

Mum grins – she’s never grinned in her life. She smiles. But this is a grin, and it’s sadistic. I’ve never considered her malicious. She’s done some shit things, and they’ve come from rage, but that speaks more to her own pathology and whatever made her the way she is. As far as I’ve been concerned, she’s never been malicious as in premeditating any of her vitriol with the intent of doing harm.

“I’m close there,” she says. “You know. Real close. But I’ll go through. Not like you. You want to fix things. Fix yourself. Like you want to fix me. Locking me in here, waiting for me to die.”

I can’t process any of this – that she’d have any insight into what I’ve been doing, and I’m sure I’m not interpreting one of her typical rants into something personal, but then she beckons me in, so I lean closer.

“They want you to fail,” she tells me. “Don’t fail.”

“What do you mean?”

I’m grasping for some bigger meaning – does she mean don’t fail, as in don’t fail in relationships, don’t fail in my job, don’t fail at writing, or does she mean don’t fail in life, as in don’t give up?

She slaps me on the top of my head, although slap’s not the right word. It’s a BONK. She bonks me with the ball of my palm, her intention not an actual slap, but a prod to sit me back in my chair. It’s the way you’d bang an overstuffed suitcase that won’t close. That’s me. Overstuffed.

“I’m tired,” she says. “Go.”

“You can’t just say go.”

“I just did.”

“You have to tell me what you know.”

Mum shakes her head. “I don’t know anything more. I hear things,” she waves her hand, as if to encompass voices in the room, “and they talk about you. They talk about everything. But lately they’ve been talking about you.” She sniffles, then cries, and places a hand on mine. “I don’t want you to fail. I just want you to be happy. You just have to work out how. Now go.”

I don’t want to go, but—

“GO!”

So I get up, because she’s done this sort of thing before – shouted at me until nurses come in, and then they’re politely but sympathetically suggesting I should go because staying around is upsetting her. Of course, staying around upsets everybody – her, me, and the nurses.

I head for the door, but she calls out to me.

“What?” I say.

“Good you got rid of that cunt,” she says, then rolls onto her side to stare out the window.

Then that’s it – I’m done here.

51.

I suffered mental health shit through my teens, never knowing exactly what was going on. It wasn’t like now, where there’s understanding of mental health, literature, and the internet. Back then, if you had problems in the head, you were crazy. You didn’t talk about it because people ostracised you – especially in high school. They’d label you crazy. That’s where I thought I was going.

Driving home, I think about that first public hospital psychiatrist – describing my symptoms, he misdiagnosed me as psychotic, rather than neurotic. He told me I’d lose touch with reality. When panic attacks buried me under so much anxiety I didn’t know what else was there for me, he suggested that I check into a mental health hospital. I agreed, but they couldn’t find a bed for me, so I went it alone.

Once I get home, I think about choices, and how they determine the shape of our lives. I’ve already seen that firsthand, already experienced that, but then wonder if reality’s so malleable that sometimes, we can will our way through it to some different place, and conversely, whether some other place can determine what we see, although we’re none the smarter about the shift.

I have no idea what to do. There’s no lighthouse, nothing telling me which way to go, other than maybe I’ll hang around to see if Autumn’s okay. Judging by the last cycle, she’ll be okay for the next week. But how can I be sure when things might change around me? And how can that be my purpose? Is that what I’ve become? Guilt? Indebtedness?

So here I am at home, ill-fitting in a place that I’ve lived the last ten years, incongruent to whatever life I’ve wanted to build, only knowing the things I don’t want, but unclear how to navigate them into something where I’ll be content. It’s a self-pitying bitchfest, but one that feels like it’s gained such weight that it holds me down and exhausts me.

Come the night, I’m no clearer, and feel even unsteadier, when I get Stan’s message: What’re you up to?

Nothing, I tell him.

Wanna do a drink? he asks.

Out of habit, I almost decline, but decide this is as far removed as anything I can do, and it’s also a throwback to when we used to get up to shit when we were teens, and the future was only a statement on everything that might be, rather than a declamation on everything that tried to be.

Sure, I say.

Come down, he tells me.

So I order an Uber, my first challenge bracing myself for conversation with the driver. I always love when I get a recalcitrant driver. Then I don’t have to talk. Nothing against the driver – when I do talk, they’re always lovely. But I’m retaining the service for the ride, not the repartee. It should be an option in their app – like a rating out of ten – just how chatty a drive I want.

I try to be preoccupied by taking out my phone, and going through things that look official, like my emails. But they’re the same batch I saw last cycle. And at the bottom is the email from Veracity Publishing. First time round, it was a rejection. Then in the next cycle, it was an acceptance.

Who knows what energy I’m putting out, what thoughts infect the world around me, changing things I’ve always believed I have no control over? But right now, I like the purity of the uncertainty over what this email contains. Right now, it is a rejection and an acceptance, and there’s something unsullied about that, so I stick my phone in standby, and shove it back in my pocket.

Perhaps emboldened by that, my driver decides he is going to be chatty, and we talk about meaningless things like how long he’s been driving, when he finishes, what else he does, and then sport, because sport’s always the lowest common denominator when it comes to males. He’s pleasant enough, and when he drops me off I thank him, wish him the best, give him a five-star rating, and tip him $5.00 because I always feel guilty if I don’t include a gratuity, although it’s not mandatory.

A recent divorcee, Stan has found himself a small flat which he’s adorned with all the necessities for single life – television, couch, bed, fridge, washing machine, and beer. He has plenty of beer. Opening the fridge, the beers are lined up on three shelves, like children at assembly.

Stan himself is unremarkable – not much different to me, although he’s lived more of a life, pushing extremes, whereas I’ve hibernated with the only thing I’ve pushed being my writing, and maybe that suggests I haven’t pushed enough, or haven’t pushed enough because I haven’t pushed life enough to afford me experiences worth writing about.

“Thought you’d be out with Lana tonight,” he says, as we settle on the couch. He has the football on TV, the volume muted.

“We broke up,” I say.

“Oh, sorry to hear that.”

“I’m not.”

Stan chuckles. “Sleep all day. Party all night.”

“Never grow old, never die,” I say.

“It’s fun to be a vampire.”

It’s a quote from The Lost Boys, which was one of those movies we idolised when we were younger as being stylish and cool. Given it’s become a cult classic, a lot of others have obviously felt similarly.

“Don’t know about the never growing old,” I say.

“Or never dying.”

“Yeah.”

We fall quiet, and flick our attention to the football as the half-time siren sounds . One of the interviewers, a pregnant redhead in an oversized coat, accosts one of the players for an interview.

“Pregnant women shouldn’t be allowed on TV,” Stan says.

“What?” The statement surprises me.

“Pregnant women,” Stan says, pointing.

“She’s doing her job.”

“For her to be pregnant, she has to have banged some guy, and if she banged some guy, she probably had his cock in her mouth at some stage,” Stan says. “Now she’s holding this microphone up – I don’t need this imagery. They should really think about who they put on TV.”

“You could be about the only person with that imagery,” I say.

“Yeah,” Stan says, rising to get another beer. “I’m an idiot savant that way.”

“You’re half right.”

He chuckles as he grabs two more beers from the fridge. I take the opportunity to grab his remote, and flick the TV onto its YouTube app.

As we watch music videos, we reminisce about high school, then graduate to talking about mutual friends and how they’re going – it’s all the nothing talk that only costs time, but leaves you melancholy and nostalgic afterward.

It’s only about six beers in that we start getting philosophical. Beer’s good at bringing that out in people. Beer – and alcohol in general – convinces you that you’re some poet aspiring to identify and define life’s biggest secrets.

“So what else has been going on?” Stan says. “How’ve you been?”

That’s not a meaningless how’ve you been ether. That’s taking the conversation to a different level. Growing up, Stan and I were close. We shared pretty much everything. And drank a lot, just as we’re doing now. But, as happens in life, we drifted apart, and would only exchange a phone call here and there, and catch up sporadically. We’d still drink lots. But there’s a rhythm to our conversations that we immediately fall into.

I tell him a lot of stuff, just talking about frustration with a lack of progress in my career, and staleness in my job, and saying that when I was young, I never thought this is where I’d be at closing in on fifty. It sounds more like a whine than it is – it’s just pensiveness.

“You think I thought I’d be here?” he says. Then he laughs uproariously. “Yep! This is it. Fuck it.”

“You don’t want more?”

“Everybody wants more,” Stan says. “Look at what you have – respected in your field, a couple of books out.”

“The books thing isn’t as glamorous as people think.”

“But they’re out there.”

“Read by twelve people.”

“Twelve people’s more than none.”

“I just think there has to be something else.”

“Like?” Stan asks.

“I don’t know,” I say.

“Get another job.”

“That’s something that’s been on my mind.”

“Or go travel. Or go on a binge. Do anything. You know, there are choices.”

I think about how a lifetime of anxiety curbs those choices. They don’t seem as possible. Autumn and I used to talk about this. She’d say feel the fear and do it anyway – that’s how she lives. But anxiety isn’t about feeling the fear, but living it so it’s this beast you’re always contending, like that mangy, angry dog in a neighbour’s yard that urban legends deify so you never risk jumping the fence to fetch an errant ball.

“We should go out,” Stan says. “Like we used to.”

This spontaneous suggestion was a frequent popper-upper when we were young – we might feel ensconced in whatever we were doing, and then it was like, nope, let’s totally change it up. But, of course, we were young and stupid, as opposed to old and stupid.

“Fuck it,” I say. “Let’s go.”

Stan chuckles. “Order an Uber,” he says.