29th september 2022

[Over a year ago now I had an idea, the first actual idea I'd had in years, and I've been trying that central idea in a bunch of different constructions. This is the start of version five, which I've been working on for a week or so. I don't intend to serially publish the entire thing, mostly because I have no idea whether I'll get more than 10k words in before coming up with a better setup, but I'm feeling good about this at the moment so here it is.]

It was cold, colder than I'd been prepared for, but I stepped determinedly away from my front door. This was the closest I'd been to the walk I desperately needed in days, and if I went back inside for another layer I knew I wouldn't come out again. I huddled inside my insubstantial jacket as best as I could, already imagining the hot chocolate I'd decided I would have as a reward. 
"It doesn't have to be far," I said aloud, watching the words steam into nothingness against the biting air. "Just needs to be out. Just to move a bit."
One small achievement every day. I had promised myself. Getting dressed, cleaning my teeth, a proper dinner, a phone call. Whatever I could manage to separate the current day from the months of mush that preceded it. Yesterday I had thrown away two weeks' worth of empty crisp packets, the day before I had washed my hair. And now I was outside, remembering the world that had continued to spin as I'd stopped moving, grey and orange and oddly comforting despite its starkness. I remembered belonging here. 
I heard three voices as I walked. The loudest and most ever-present expressed, as it always did, its disgust for me and my pathetic celebrations of the unremarkable, pointing out strangers on the street who almost certainly did everything I could manage in one week of concerted effort every single day. Plus, it reminded me, they had real responsibilities too, and probably actual, real achievements, such that another person might care about. It sneered at me, pushing me to imagine the contempt I would receive and deserve were I to tell one of these people of my pride at being out of the house for the first time since last Thursday. What kind of useless human being gets out of bed at 4pm and pats herself on the back for taking a walk round the block? The voice was mine, but sharper, and cold as the wind. 
The second voice belonged to Andrea, with counters to everything the first had said. Metaphors and mantras and the occasional light scratch at the surface of science. Guilt and shame are not your motivators, April, I could hear her say. You can't rebuild a house by standing in front of it and arguing that it shouldn't have fallen down in the first place. Would you speak to your sister the way you're speaking to yourself right now? Would you expect that to help her? Andrea's voice had not silenced or even diminished the first, but did provide me some small resistance, a brief delay in which to do things before the fog set in. 
Then there was the third voice, unfamiliar to me and so quiet as to be barely perceptible. It seemed to have no information to impart or opinion to sway me toward, but it called out to me with urgency and something like grief. I could do no more than be aware of it; if I turned my attention that way it would dissipate under the scrutiny, so thoroughly as to make me question its ever having been there. I felt it like a scratch, a kiss, a drop of water onto thirst, a reaction from my body and my instincts far beyond the control of my mind. Contact you could never truly prepare for, the gasp of a need exposed. Adrenaline and softness and tears. 
I had thought about it too much. It was gone. I glanced my focus across the other two voices, bickering away unconcerned as to whether or not I was listening, and then sent it out as far as it would go to fetch me a fantasy, somewhere to breathe into for just a moment and sustain me through another restless night. I rounded the final corner to return home, and fed my soul on the promise of a real dream again, soon. 

Home and chilled through to the marrow, I honoured my commitment to myself by getting the milk pan out of the cupboard and turning on the stove. The microwave was right there and would have been much easier, but I preferred this way; it reminded me of my grandmother and her insistence that no child in her house should be drinking cold milk on a winter's night. The milk pan had been hers. Everyone had laughed at me when I'd asked to take it from her effects, and my sister still did her best not to touch it, as though only the milk pan separated us from the other side of the grave. I encouraged her to think that. Ali destroyed kitchen equipment at about the rate that I killed plants, and I was glad not to have to hide it from her the way she hid her peace lily in her room. 
Ali wasn't home tonight, and I was glad to sit at the table and have my hot chocolate alone. Another half an hour out of bed would do me good, but I had no energy left to communicate and Ali was harder work the more she tried not to be. I was grateful for her love and her good intentions, and less grateful for her firm belief that only my brokenness kept the two of us from being exactly alike. Assured of no distractions, I let my mind drift, momentarily calm enough for thoughts to pass by quietly without getting caught on a spike of my psyche. Plans for tomorrow, plans for a lottery win, questions without answers and answers to questions nobody had ever asked. Old recollections of filling a kettle, frost on the street, my old school backpack, tiny memories I had no use for but that persisted like crumpled receipts in a handbag. A song lyric, a murmur, the feel of my heartbeat in my feet. For a moment, everything flowed, and I understood how it might feel to be okay again.  
The moment passed. I rinsed my mug and went back upstairs, feeling embarrassed by the sharpness of the world outside my mind. Dirty carpets and cracks in the window frames and a whistling draught that followed me everywhere, a bed with stale and wrinkled sheets, tissues and crumbs and silence. I climbed back into my nest with relief and revulsion in equal measure.