The Other Me
‘Shut In’ vii. It was like yesterday when I was in my early twenties, playing indoor cricket, socialising, bartending, and trying to make a writing career for myself. Now I was in my late twenties, with little social activity, still writing, and still living at home. Still locked away in my fortress of solitude. Everybody accepted me as a hermit. Everybody saw me as too fragile for the real world. So I just lived the way I knew how. Stan and I still caught up, although not as much we used to. As had occurred with my other friends, he’d moved to a house well outside my sphere of comfort.…
The Other Me
‘Shut In’ vi. Do things long enough, and they become your routine. Get stuck in a routine, and you don’t think about what else there is. Your routine becomes your life – your world. For most who work, the break in the routine is the weekend, when they might go out, unwind; for me, the weekend was just another two days. So when a cousin’s wedding approached, I advised my mum months in advance that I wouldn’t be going. This was unlike the couple of times I’d been out, chaperoned in a controlled environment to buy Wolf, or see Mike – two excursions that were brief and which, if worse…