Two months without work. I’ve sent dozens of applications. I apply to AI training sites. The gigs are overcrowded. One involves listening to spoken and written sentences and rating whether they seem human. It takes half an hour and pays three pounds. It’s a strange, tetherless feeling, I tell Rob. I’ll need to start over somehow. I feel like a teenager again. I’ve applied for cleaning jobs, I’m not proud.
Du musst dein Leben ändern, he says.
It looks like it, I say, though he was talking about something else. He was a drifter who relied on women. I’m not sure I ever learned how to live in the real world either. These serious office job descriptions I get in my inbox make me want to top myself. I need a woman to sort me out!
He laughs. You know how that sounds, right? I don’t need to tell you what a woman would say to that. These are attachment problems, grief problems. They come from stuff to do with mum and dad when you were a baby, like your God thing does. We all have them – me too. You should see some of the people I work with. Their whole lives are bad attachments. They’re grieving something they never really had. You’d count yourself lucky if you met them. You’re privileged: you won the lottery. Stop whingeing.
*
Please God let this emptiness end. Why did you make me like this? What use can I possibly be? I’m tired, I’m breaking up. I can’t stand this longing for your love. I need the fire of the apostles, fire that goes down far enough to last past the moods, not this misery waiting for me at every turn.
Notes from a Room 