Life in a Bucket

Some days – and there have been lots of them lately – I wake and feel intimidated at the day ahead. At its elastic hours which will tease themselves out for far longer than I need them to. Two would do. 24 are overwhelming.  

Some days, like today, I want to scream. Some days I do. I retreat to a quiet corner and disquiet it, with a shrill piercing, living here is like living in a fucking bucket, I rant: nothing to do, nowhere to go, sheer sided so that I cannot escape.   My horizons blocked and unchanging. Rattling. Rattled.

Some days I wonder will I go mad. Some days I consider that the isolation, the dislocation, may drive me right over the edge of the precious sanity that I cling to tenaciously – white knuckled, cliff-hanging. I’m going to run through the Outpost naked. And spitting, I threaten. Nobody cares though: nobody can hear.  Even if they could, they’d only laugh. Daft cow, they’d say.

Some days I wonder how long I can keep my counsel. When, I question, will it be acceptable to sit Husband gently down and say, ‘Right. I’ve had enough. I want to go now’.

But I am not the bread-winner. I can offer no sensible solution, just now, to Outpost living. 

So I admit defeat. And skulk off to the corner of a corridor that masquerades as a Studio (the capital letter is there for a reason:  it lends purpose to days and places and tasks that have none: Writing. Working. Studio) and I conjure something with wire or glass or beads. It’s amateurish. But it doesn’t matter. For the half hour immersion in something approximating toil is balm to a troubled, rushing, flailing soul.

Something pretty emerges with something like peace of mind. Not quite. But something akin to quiet. Until tomorrow.

And when Husband comes home I hold up my small prize for admiration, for I seek his valuable endorsement that I did not waste my too-long stretched-to-taut-limit day. And then I open us both a beer. And I do not say, ‘Right. I’ve had enough. I want to go now’.

I say, ‘So how was your day?’