Turn your alarm off because it’s a non-working day and you can. Stretch like cat and fall back into that delicious dozing phase where you’re asleep enough to dream but awake enough to gloat because you’re in bed and the birds aren’t. Look at the clock and curse yourself. Wonder which item on the list of things you were going to do today to miss off. Decide not to miss any. Run. You’re slow and it’s hard but the air feels like a clean drink and your muscles like being used. Eat a thoroughly un-nutricious breakfast and get two buses. Go to a gorgeous library. Make a hot chocolate. Write. Read. Suddenly feel inspired and emotional and write more. Read a bit about Sappho and learn that people have been a) homophobic b) fond of bitchy gossip, for thousands of years. Take solace in the fact that, if these have always been traits of certain humans, it probably means that humanity is not getting significantly worse. Walk to the shopping centre to get free wifi. Use the wifi to find out how to get to the venue of a Nottingham Poetry Festival event. Spend several hours wages on reading materials because that’s just how edgy your life decisions are. Successfully navigate your way to the poetry event venue and feel like Christopher Columbus. Go to the room where the poetry performance is happening and find that it’s not a performance, it’s a workshop. Your brain runs screaming out of the door because you’ve got writer’s fatigue, but your bum remains planted on your seat because your parents raised you to be polite. Surprise yourself by writing two first drafts with potential. Get a snapshot into some other interesting minds. Walk to the bus stop with poems jangling in your backpack. Decide that maybe, you can actually handle life. Read poems from an anthology about refugees. Your tummy rumbles and although you’re embarassed you realise that your tummy has never rumbled at a time when food wasn’t going to be available, sooner or later. Feel angry and in love with the world. Fall asleep on the bus home like a little kid. But at least you read and wrote and heard today. Today, you were really alive.
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