It had all been going so well. Feverishly searching for a straw to clutch onto, salvation – and this will come as no surprise to anyone who knows me – came in musical form. Whenever I’ve been feeling down or worse, music has always managed to take me to another place mentally. I don’t know how it happens, I’m just glad it does, and yesterday it really did. As my post of yesterday will attest, I was so not the laughing queen of jollity farm. Sat in what was my former bedroom, with just a heater, a wicker sofa to sit on while I wrote my blog on my computer, and a Bluetooth speaker.

Hold on, a Bluetooth speaker? Didn’t that I could play music through that via my computer? And with the room being devoid of all furniture, didn’t that mean that the acoustics were good? No. They were great! Trying to convey in mere words how much better they were – and how I could tell it they were – would be like trying to describe the colour blue to a blind man.

So I went on a bit of a Ryuichi Sakamoto journey, with pit stops from Maxence Cyrin, some brass bands, the ‘La la land’ soundtrack and of course Michael Nyman.

 

I felt a bit better after all that. And then.

 

Then I popped into my chemist to pick up some eye-drops that had been missing from my prescription. No fuss there. It was all ready for me to collect. Bingo. Then the pharmacist gave me a present of a box of chocolates as a thank you for being such a good customer. Now I’m sure they meant well and everything, but really? Your life must’ve taken a seriously wrong turning if the pharmacy is giving you presents as a reward for your loyalty.

 

Mulling on this I returned home and waited for my scheduled therapy appointment. Usually, these sessions bring up unwelcome or unhelpful incidents that I’d long forgotten about, or else I make unwanted connections between events years apart. If you’ve ever been in therapy, you’ll know what I mean, how condensing so much into so little can be rather something. Thankfully this session wasn’t like that.

 

She never called. Talk about a confidence boost! Really affirming, the positivity is almost palpable. It’s not like I asked her at during our last session to call me and not do it via Zoom because I wanted privacy or anything. Nor have I repeatedly mentioned how difficult I’m finding the whole move. I sat in the dark for quite some time, thinking rather too much. I remembered lying awake in bed as a boy, staring really, really hard, at the dark trying to imagine what death was like. So in order to ward off these thoughts and to stop me going down the labyrinth I did what I knew would make me feel better.

Like this.

And this.

And, and, and..