• Contemporaneous: A Living Novel

    Contemporaneous: Chapters 68 – 69

    68. Over breakfast of cereal, I text Dom: Hey, mate, I have to cancel today. Sorry about the late notice. Some stuff’s come up. Please read the script. I know you haven’t, and I don’t want to get into an argument but I know you just bluff your way through these meetings all the time. Be prepared come Thursday. I want to succeed. I want you to succeed. But you really have to do this for me and for yourself. It’s a shit, passive-aggressive message, but I think of being straight out with Lana last night, and that worked. Well, sorta. Well, until the morning. Dom texts back immediately: Ok…

  • Contemporaneous: A Living Novel

    Contemporaneous: Chapters 62 – 63

    62. A terrifying fear strikes me on the train ride home. I didn’t take my own life. I didn’t reset. I haven’t relived the last week three times in a row. All of that is fanciful bullshit, the product of an unrestricted imagination – and imaginations should be fenced in somewhere. That’s how you define reality. But mine’s gone. I remember when I first went through anxiety, having a public hospital psychiatrist telling me that because I was a writer I was prone to losing touch with reality – he actually told me that. Then, when the panic reared, I’d tell myself I’d be okay, I’d try coping, but I…