Why

Every tick feels like a choice I haven’t made yet,

every second a question hanging in the air: why?

I. The Ticking

Half past one. The lamp is on. The rest of the flat is dark.

I came to write something. I am not writing.

The clock on the microwave changes. I watch it happen. I have never watched it happen on purpose before. 01:29. Then 01:30. A minute ends. My chest does something.

There is a candle on the windowsill. I bought it from the market on the Headrow six months ago and kept it unlit because it was too nice to use up. Because using it up felt like admitting something. Now I watch the wax go.

It is going.

It will be gone.

There is a notebook. There is a crossed-out line. There is a second attempt at the same line, also crossed out. Underneath both crossings-out I can still read the words. I can always still read the words.

Time is not just passing. It is being spent. Every hour costs something whether I do anything with it or not.

I put my head in my hands. Not despair. Just the need to feel the weight of my own skull. The need to be sure I am here.

The clock changes again.

II. The Divide

I carry two images around like stones in my coat pockets and sometimes I think the weight of them is why I walk the way I do, slightly hunched, slightly braced, like something is always about to happen that I am not ready for.

The first image: a spreadsheet. A beige office on a business park outside Leeds where the car park is bigger than the building and there is always a birthday cake in the kitchen that is always slightly dry, and I was good there, I was actually good, good enough that they asked me to stay, to think about the team leader role, to consider my trajectory, and I sat in that car park for three months eating a Greggs and looking at the edge of the city like it was something I’d lost, like I could see from there the outline of a life I wasn’t living, and eventually I left and I told myself it was a choice and some days I still believe that.

The second image: a notebook full of handwriting nobody has read. A story half-finished for two years. A folder on my laptop called Things That Might Be Something, which is the saddest folder I have ever made, because of what it says about how I see my own work, which is: not quite real yet, not quite worthy of a better name, waiting to be confirmed by something or someone I cannot identify.

I know which one pays rent.

I know which one I am, underneath, or want to be, or am frightened I will spend my whole life almost being and never quite getting there.

My mum says: you’re so talented, love, but talent doesn’t pay the gas bill, and she is right, she is completely right, and she is also so far from the point that I don’t know how to start explaining the distance, the gap between what she is saying and what I need someone to understand, and so I say I know, Mum and I put the kettle on and we talk about something else.

We talk about something else.

We always talk about something else.

III. The Gap

Saturday afternoon. The coffee shop on Call Lane is packed. Bass from somewhere. Wet coats. Oat milk. Something sweet burning.

You are with friends, or people you call friends because you went to school together and have not yet got around to stopping. They are talking about a hen do. Ibiza. A new gym. You are nodding. You are making the right sounds.

You try, once, to say the thing. The thing about time. The thing about the notebook. The feeling that lives just under your ribs without a name. You get as far as: I’ve been having this feeling like—

A phone goes. The conversation moves. Nobody notices you didn’t finish.

You stir your coffee. You look at the grain of the wood. You do not say the rest of it.

This is not new. This is the same not-saying you have been practising for years, the careful management of yourself in rooms where the full version of you would be too much or too strange or simply beside the point. You have become very good at it. You are not sure whether to be proud of that or not.

Later, at the till, you catch the eye of a woman who is maybe twenty, maybe younger. She is looking at the room the way you look at rooms. That watchfulness. That elsewhere-ness. You recognise it the way you recognise your own handwriting on an envelope.

She looks away first. You button your coat.

Neither of you says anything.

But for a moment, in the doorway, with the cold coming in: something.

IV. The Empty Hand

There is a box under your bed.

A train ticket to Edinburgh. Three years ago. You got to the platform and sat on a bench and felt the specific terror of something you actually want, the way wanting something real is so much more frightening than wanting something safe, and then you went home and you told yourself next time, next time, and there have been four or five next times since and you have not been back to that platform.

Two notebooks, full. Unread.

A letter. Unsent.

A prospectus for a creative writing MA, spine gone from handling.

You open the box and feel the grief of things that never happened, which is different from ordinary grief because ordinary grief had something to lose and this is the grief of an absence that was always there, a space in the shape of a life you didn’t quite dare, and the awful thing, the thing you can’t say out loud, is that you put the absence there yourself, with your own hands, one small decision at a time, one not-yet and maybe-later and I’m not ready until the pile of them got so high you couldn’t see over it.

The closing date for the MA was January. It is March.

There will be another year.

There will be another year and then another and then you will be forty and the door will be a different door but it will be this same door, this same standing in front of it, this same not going through.

You put the prospectus back. You close the box.

You sit on the edge of the bed for a long time.

Then you open the box again. You take the prospectus out. You put it on the desk.

Not to do anything with.

Just so it is in the room.

V. The Answer

Six in the morning. I got up without meaning to.

I make tea. I take it to the window.

The city is doing what it does before the rest of it wakes: bins, a fox, a man with a dog, the low groan of a lorry on the ring road. The sky is the colour it goes just before it decides to be blue. I know this colour. I have seen it before, on mornings when I couldn’t sleep, and every time it feels like a small proof of something I can’t name.

I open the notebook. I pick up a pen.

Not the piece I’ve been half-writing for two years. Something else. Something small and just for now: the sky, the fox, the weight of the mug in both hands.

I write for twenty minutes.

Nothing important. Nothing that will change anything.

It is the best twenty minutes I have had in months.

The questions don’t go anywhere. I still don’t know why time moves the way it does, or what I am supposed to do with myself, or why it is so hard to be fully known by another person, or whether any of the risks are worth it. I probably won’t know. You probably won’t either. That is not a comforting thought but it is an honest one, and I am learning that honest thoughts, even the ones that offer nothing to hold on to, are better than the comfortable kind.

What I know, right now, at this window: I ask because I care. I care because I am alive. And being alive, with all its cost and uncertainty and the terrible speed of it, is the only condition under which any of it means anything at all.

The tea goes cold. I let it.

I turn to a new page.

I don’t know why.

But I want to find out.

And that is enough, for now.

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