Caring for Carers - Minizerk

Chapter 6

A fortnight slips by, each day peeling away like layers, moving seamlessly into the next. It's so quick Josh doesn't even feel it.

Time is weird, really. When you think about it, there's seconds gone by in which you'll never feel the same way you did back then. Your life is gradually shortening, and there's those precious moments you're never going to get back, and you're only using more of them to reminisce. It's strange looking at it, especially in retrospective.

Ethan's happily settled, and Simon is now fully capable of being on one-to-one, so Josh gets a bit more time to think, which isn't necessarily a good thing. He's been so used to throwing himself wholeheartedly into his work that being able to sit in his lonely flat on a Thursday feels daunting. It's a time his insecurities can get the better of him, a time his philosophical thoughts can take a turn for the worse and leave him detached from his own body, desperately clawing at any memories to bring himself back down to Earth. It doesn't always work.

He'd sign up to work overtime, or do another job around the school for a bit, but they won't let him. They always say he's there too much, he needs to get out there, make friends, find a girl who he can bring along to staff parties at Christmas (provided he's not working) and live the closest life to a picket fence one you can, when you're a carer.

It's difficult to do that when you're terrified of the unknown, terrified of the inside of your head.

Josh exhales out of his nose, a recognition of the fact he sounds like some angst-ridden teenager right now, but, he muses, no one is going to read those thoughts of his. He flicks through the channels on TV, coming to rest on old reruns of Top Gear on Dave. Against his better judgement, he loads up Facebook on his phone and proceeds to scroll through.

Fuck, if Josh was feeling low beforehand, it's probably not being helped by this. Girls he knew in school, pregnant or with young kids, guys he knew way back when with little ones too flash past his eyes. Wedding photos, graduations, shitty stolen memes with white borders and such thought-provoking captions as 'omg who did this' with laugh-crying emojis displayed oh-so artistically on either side of the obnoxious font chosen fly by too.

He's definitely not salty about the stolen memes.

Anyway, Josh's eyes come to rest on a recent update from Sarah, the music therapist at Yew Tree. Working in a special needs school in a bog-standard town in England doesn't exactly give you much time or expenses to branch out your music career, so she's taken to uploading her song covers on YouTube, posting a link on her Facebook. Josh smiles, she's a lovely girl, and deserves to make it. She's got the voice of an angel and the personality to match.

She and Cal are also fucking adorable, although Cal has been reprimanded a number of times for 'inappropriate behaviour at work', but the guy is good at what he does, so everyone tries to cover his tracks, including Sarah, who can often be heard after hours as she packs up yelling at him jokingly that she "doesn't like PDA".

He recalls Sarah and Ethan's first meeting that happened a couple of days ago, while Ethan was at school. He had a therapy session with Sarah, and got rather attached to her fluffy pink coat and the sounds it made when he rubbed his face against it, of course, Sarah took no issue with this, supporting it, but Ethan didn't want to leave Sarah or her sensory overload of a coat by the end of the hour, so kicked up a bit of a fuss, one that was quickly diffused by cuddles (at Ruth's request) and promises of returning next week. Josh's heart warms slightly at the memory of Simon telling him this upon his and Ethan's arrival back at the house, his blue eyes shining and a lilt in his voice, as the two look fondly on at the boy as he gripped one of Josh's arms and used the other hand to lightly pat the man's face.