Picking Stones Chapter 10

"Exhausted"

My butthole itches.

It is Monday morning.

Out late last night. I’ll pay for it all week.

My eyes weigh a thousand pounds.

Head searing in pain.

Fog envelops brain.

I can’t see.

My eyes burn.

There is no thought.

I’ve wished for bed as soon as the eyes opened.

Why did I do this to myself?

O brave new world that forces me at this desk against my will.

A will that isn’t free—that’s me.

It’s true.

I couldn’t see. The office is a haze. Plastic smiles all around me. I hate them.

They all must be just as miserable as I.

They must be.

I’m not very interesting. You knew that already.

My brain screams for sleep as I leave the house.

My body begs for sleep as I board the subway.

My heart begs for sleep as I sit at my desk.

My soul begs for an end as I float through life without aim.

It’s six at night. I’m on the way home.

Crippled body clicks into apartment.

Nothing I wish for more than head hitting pillow.

Click after click on phone. Sleep.

But the mind is wired.

Heart is numb.

Soul is fractured.

Bite after bite of dinner. Want.

There is no taste.

There is no laughter.

There is no love.

Step after step to the bedroom. Sleep.

It’s an endless cycle. Never to cease until the end.

Once I finally arrive to the mystical fairy tale land I have prayed for, I crawl in.

After begging all day, elbow digs into soft mattress.

Flips over, lands on back.

The comforting embrace of unwashed sheets.

Head rests on pillow in glory.

Ecstasy washes over me as I close my eyes.

Inky blackness envelopes my soul.

The eternal darkness has finally taken me.

I’m at peace.

Seconds later, the alarm clock rings.

I have materialized again.

The time reads six.

It is Tuesday morning.

I am late for work.

Desperation. Dread. Terror. Agony. The senses swarm and overcome me all at once.

A growl escapes my throat.

“No!”

The endless cycle repeats.

I drag myself out of bed.

The only thing left to do is to beg for sleep once again.

---

It’s that same Tuesday now.

The pain of staying up Sunday haunted me as it still lingered on day two. The exhaustion was crippling. The excel sheet beaming from the computer in front of me radiated blue light into my eyeballs. Extreme dryness, intense pain. Musk grew under me. The third day in a row I wore those jeans. I shoved my hand in my left pocket to scratch an itch. When the hand came out, something dropped onto the floor. The black matchbook. The one Peter had tossed to me Sunday night, with the ying yang symbol printed on it. I opened the matchbook book. It was fully stocked save for the match he had struck to light his cigarette. I was already down one match. Again.

I couldn’t think of that nonsense. Too tired for it. The thought slipped my mind and floated off somewhere to the land of nonexistence. Signals sent to fingers and tried to get them to type, but the messages were going unreceived. There was simply not enough energy for that.

Zombified.

It was the best way to put it. How many days until the weekend? Till I wouldn’t need to wake up early for two whole days? Spending every single day prior in prayer, begging for the day to end a little quicker than the last. Just day in and day out waiting for it all to be over. Three more days after this one. Then two to enjoy. That’s one hundred four days a year that we get to ourselves. Well, cut that by a third since that feeling of dread hits me like clockwork in the late afternoon every Sunday, when it hits me that my sentence resumes in the upcoming morning.

By that math it’s sixty-nine days of enjoyment a year. A good number, I’ll give you that, but that doesn’t make me feel any better. Sixty-nine days. If I live to see eighty that’s three-thousand five-hundred eighty-eight days of bliss, while the other thirteen-thousand five-hundred seventy-two are just spent begging for the rest. That’s seventy-four percent of your life just waiting for the other twenty-six percent. Besides the fact that half of those days will be had when I’m far too old and far too useless to do anything of import, which I pretty much already am. So. Out of that number, maybe I have a thousand good days left. That’s ten years. Then it’s over. No matter how shot I am, or how bad I need sleep, my brain always makes room for that math. I’m praying for the next weekend and the next. One day they’ll be no more weekends. What will I be praying for then?

Palms massaged sore eyeballs. Poor humans. We must be the only organisms in the animal kingdom who wish for their lives to end sooner without realizing it. In the end, an end is the only guarantee. At that moment, there in my chair a million miles away from myself, if death came knocking, I’d have signed the dotted line.

“Hey, Will.”

“Haha, hey, Tim. How’s it going?”

Plastic smile set on my face. A great big grin plastered on his as he rested his elbow on the gray plastic wall of my cubicle. He was searching for an answer. He couldn’t have actually been happy like this, could he? More mindless small talk.

“Alright, I’ll catch you later, dude!”

“Sounds good!”

Poor bastard. I shook my head and swiveled back into my hole. Head tucked into glowing computer where I felt most safe. I silently hoped that no one else would bother me. I couldn’t recall a single word Tim said over the struggle to keep my eyes open. I wondered if he’d noticed. It probably wasn’t important anyway.

The matchbook flipped back and forth over my mouse. I noticed a little crease in the bottom right corner. An imperfection rippled over the black half of the symbol. Was there a game being played? Was the Mogwai staring at me at that moment, as I sat in my chair. I didn’t want to be the shoemaker in Peter’s story, scared to death. There was no need to prolong it.

“Just do it now.” Take me, please.

Nothing answered me. Not nothing. Just nothing.

The fluorescent light over my head was making an incredibly frustrating buzzing sound.

“Don’t be the one stuck taking the last match,” Peter had said yesterday.

“I’m so excited to go to Bar Harbor.”

My entire body flinched. Wild eyes sought refuge, found none. It was no mogwai. The woman in the cubicle next to me, Orla, was on the phone with her daughter, planning a family trip. Good for them.

I always wanted to go to Maine, but never seemed to find the time. Beth reminded me that before she left. I wondered how she was doing. Did she really have another guy ready to swoop her off her feet? Would he take her to Maine? Why should I care? Waste of precious brain power. Who has the time for vacations (besides Orla, anyway)?

The light flickered. My tie was loosened around my neck; I picked the green and blue one that morning. Chair pushed away from desk. I needed a coffee.

The attempt to avert my eyes from a wall-mounted digital clock failed. Only half past ten. Torture.

Clark threw up a peace sign as I sailed past his desk trying not to say hi. I reciprocated the sign. Coward. Wading through a sea of awkward nods and hellos, I made it to the blue-tiled break room. How quaint. Two coworkers standing at the water cooler caught sight of me and promptly headed out of the room. Was I that bad? Good riddance either way.

Coffee machine turned on, gears churning, water heating. This time I remembered to put a cup underneath. As the two escaped I heard rumblings of a hundred million-dollar lottery coming up. I couldn’t think of a bigger waste of time, besides going back to Imperial Szechuan Sunday night. What an idiot. At least my time wasn’t wasted worrying about a lottery ticket.

The machine hissed. Coffee squirted. I scanned the room in wait. A black speck caught my eye at the far end of the gray counter, right next to the sink. Stepping closer, it was revealed to be a black matchbook with a yin yang symbol at its center, the same one that was burning a hole in my jeans pocket. Heat flashed across face. I grabbed the matchbook and tore it open. It was missing a single match. I smushed it closed and noticed a crease on the bottom right corner, rippling over the black half of the symbol. Matchbook dropped to the counter. I grabbed my coffee and zoomed out. Strange coincidence.

Back at the desk, I let exhaustion take over me, wiping that matchbook from my present state. There was nothing to do but pretend like nothing had happened. In totality. No ghosts. No games. No coincidences. No nothing.

Day was a quarter way through. Coffee sipped and eyelids hung lower, grew heavier…

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