Notes from a Room

Sleepy pubs in the afternoon. Soft drafts, light through the leaves, through the windows. Heat. I seep out of myself, float in the air.

I sit with the jobless and old-timers. Workers in splattered overalls filter in. Soon the suits will arrive and it’ll be time to leave.

But there comes a point, after a few pubs, when I can gather myself in and sit still, where I am, in my own skin.

And then I can sit for what seems like hours, in the slanting light, hardly moving, hardly thinking, half-listening to the muffled chatter in the background.

– Frenet, Journal

The old man whose acquaintance I once made in a pub, I who never talk to strangers, who am never spoken to. His lips moved as he sat on his own, a type I always ignore. The old man who became my drinking acquaintance during my heavy drinking days, in the days when I knew no one, spoke to no one, simply by virtue of us sitting in our customary seats some distance apart in the empty afternoons, who muttered soft banal words that I barely heard, and barely responded to, who was neither happy nor unhappy but just sat there day in day out, living out his time – a condition I aspired to in those days, which are not so far away, which in fact are always close behind me.

– Frenet, Journal

The concept of dignity has long since lost all meaning for me. I’m a desperate man. I live for the days of calm, between the black waves, when I can read and my soul expands.

– Frenet, Journal

Why this journal in the first place? I delete as I type, meanings disappear as the words appear on the screen.

A fat black fly buzzes back and forth between me and the computer. I wave it away and it returns. A perfect start.

– Frenet, Journal

Time to confess, I tell myself as I sit down at the computer. Time to tell the whole truth at last. But about what? The lack of truths to confess?

– Frenet, Journal