Drip, drip, drip.
That tap's been dripping ever since I moved into this place. It's the sort of thing you always say you'll fix but never get around to it. Anyway, it's been a kind of constant companion over the past year or so.
I moved into this place just over a year ago, about November or December I think. My first place all of my own. Of course, it was only supposed to be temporary, a stop-gap until we got our own place together, but things don't usually run as planned do they? Anyway, I was house-proud...of a bedsit! Sometimes I can be so easy to please.
I can remember looking around the place. Well, turning 360 degrees in the middle of the room. Then it looked wonderful. Shit, I know now. How quickly can a romantic, tortured artists' passion pad turn into the piss poor hovel it always was? I may have had fonder memories of the place if things had turned out better. But I know it's a damp, bug infested, dilapidated, freezing cold shit hole. And it always will be.
I suppose I ought to describe my little abode. Well, it's about 15 feet square, intruded upon by two 2 foot by 5 foot blocks, one of which is a bricked up fireplace and the other a hallway cupboard. The furniture consists of one single bed (slightly wonky), a wardrobe (oak, scratched to hell), a TV unit (housing a TV that gets no signal) and a pointless free standing cupboard (empty). Also, there is a highly inefficient heater, which doubles as a shelf when not in use.
In one corner of the room is a shower which refuses to drain, which means I can only allow myself a maximum of about 10 minutes daydreaming before it threatens to flood the room. In the other corner is a kitchenette. Now, 'kitchenette' is a term invented by wankers to bamboozle feckless, naive wankers (like me at the time). To me 'Kitchenette' conjured up images of me whisking, boiling, grilling and generally poncing about in a bijou cooking area, before presenting a suitably impressed (and of course attractive) girl so much that she couldn't help but fall in love with me. Or have sex, at least.
In reality, this piss poor excuse for a kitchen consists of a mini oven and hotplate, a fridge with a broken freezer door, two grotty cupboards and no work space to prepare any food on. It had gained the rather grand title of 'kitchenette' by virtue of being separated from the rest of the room by two badly constructed plywood walls, which stop two feet from the ceiling, thus rendering any attempts at segregation redundant. The 'door', such as it is, is a gap between the two walls covered by a thin curtain. Which, incidentally, has a very similar pattern to one of my shirts.
Oh, yeah, and the tap drips.
Drip, drip, drip.
As I said, it's a constant companion. Ever since I moved in here it's been there, dripping every second, as if it's keeping time, linking me to a real world. It's at times like these that I'm happy that it's there.
You see, I can feel one of THEM coming along. It's hard to explain just what THEY are and what THEY do to me. THEY just happen every so often, usually with little warning or trigger event, no reason, THEY just happen. And one is coming on; I can feel it starting to build.
It's starting as it always does, with butterflies in my stomach, a slight agoraphobia and a feeling impending doom. A need for silence and solitude. I can already feel the dark introspection creeping up on me. So, it's time to prepare.
I pull on my boots and put on my long coat, leaving my glasses on top of the TV. I won't be needing those anyway; I don't intend to look at anybody or anything for any length of time anyway. I know exactly where I'm going and what I want to do. I'm on auto-pilot.
Now is the time where I could pull myself out of it, give myself a good talking to and come to my senses. But I won't. I can't. In some kind of masochistic, self abusive way, I want this to happen. I need it to happen. It's natural.
