Excerpt: Ink

My coffee almost gone, I scraped the last of the foam off of the sides of the cup with the spoon. I let the foam dissolve on my tongue, and I brushed my hair out of my face with my hand. Everything felt intense that day. My skin seemed to prickle beneath my clothes. The lingering smell of coffee filled my nostrils, and made my head swim. I wanted to escape from my own body.

The barista came over to take my empty coffee cup away, and she smiled at me, because she recognised me. I smiled back, wondering how long it would be acceptable to remain sitting here at this table with no drink. In my experience, the coffee shop usually got much busier around six o’clock, and it was nearly six already. I decided that it wasn’t really fair to deprive someone of a table, but I held on just a little bit longer before I finally left. Another thought had come back to me, a thought that had been bothering me for three months – not so much a thought, as a worry, bordering on anxiety. And the thought was: What am I going to do?

I knew that living in the hostel couldn’t work out forever. I had some money, but it was running out rapidly, and I didn’t have any job prospects on the horizon. I needed to find somewhere more permanent to settle down, where I could feel like I had a home again, and where I could begin to untangle the rest of my life. When I had left, I left everything. School, work, family, my swimming practice – all of those things were now out of my life, and without those things to define me, who was I? Was I anyone at all? And where could I go from here? I had come to the city because I thought I could build a new life, put the past behind me, and finally forget about the anger and the pain. But three months on, the terrible feelings were still inside my head and my heart, and I was feeling directionless and almost empty. I was managing to live day to day, and had built up something of a routine to keep myself sane: breakfast at the hostel (I was getting extremely tired of limp white toast and rock hard scrambled eggs), walking through the park, coffee house, book shops, hostel, read, sleep. At that time, I wasn’t lonely. I wanted to people to keep away, and I didn’t want to know them. I only wanted to know about the fantasy lives they were all leading in my head. This, I resolved, was something else that would have to change. I couldn’t be a hermit forever. I needed to learn to be brave enough to uncloak my heart just a little, and let someone into my life. But as yet, I had not met the person it was worth risking my emotions for.

Looking back at that time now, I feel that maybe I was going a little mad. I suppose that is an inevitably consequence of choosing to live your life solely inside your own head. It worries me how close I came to losing my mind, because my mind has always been my most prized possession. But in some ways, I still look back on those days with fondness, because of that little coffee shop. The place I could come and just be me, where I could dream and imagine and stop panicking, if only for a few hours a day. Somehow, that place became the one place where I could feel a little less lost.