• Contemporaneous: A Living Novel

    Contemporaneous: Chapter 58

    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…

  • Contemporaneous: A Living Novel

    Contemporaneous: Chapters 56 – 57

    56. I’ll skim through all the stuff that it took me six hours to do: battle traffic to get to the airport find it impossible to get parking, so I leave the airport, drive out to Tullamarine, and get some street parking try to hail a taxi and, then summon an Uber – neither app worked, and the phone for the taxi was never answered walk an hour back to the airport, then try to buy a domestic ticket there. Their system went down. I waited five minutes, but then panicked that I was disrupting everybody’s else’s lives once I walked back to my car, traffic was clear all the…