Nothing

If there is one good thing to keeping a diary, that’s the memories it gifts. Skimming to my first few entries from the beginning of last year, I have very vivid recollections of everything I wrote about and of everything I photographed, of where I was and how I felt, of how I was coping with work and writing and even of how hopeful I was for my knitting, especially after having blown a sizeable buck-budget while in America. And yet, for all of those days without entries I feel like I haven’t lived. Who knows what I was doing just after New York? Who knows what happened at the beginning of March? Where was I at the beginning of April? What was I thinking? Was I happy, narky, worried, serene? No clue, no journal entry, no remembrance. It’s like I skipped right through those months. I have no idea.



Despite the lack of entries, I will remember this week as The One When Nothing Happened, when nothing was planned, nothing got done, nothing, nothing, nothing. I just picked up my paper diary and, look, there was nothing at all for this week, not even a shopping list scribbled on the sidelines, not even a PAY COUNCIL TAX in red letters, not even wedding anniversary. How sad of me. It rather depresses me slightly, for I know that I spent fruitless days wrestling with the same damn piece of writing, a chapter that, it is evident, I just cannot be asked to write. Vague ideas peek into my head and then scurry off into the woods leaving no breadcrumbs behind. And so my days are glassy-eyed shells of their former selves, million of figurative miles from everything I used to do and everything I had hoped my life would be like at this stage.

Yet, there is something exciting on the horizon, for I have a meeting later this week which may signal the end of hardship, whatever that is. Quite frankly, I don’t even know what this meeting is for, and isn’t it a bit weird that I have such great expectations for it when it ain’t even a job interview, but as time ticks away, as my funds continue to deplete and as I’ve already started to live in a hypothetical post-PhD future, I feel fossilised if at all possible, looking at life racing by as I am wading into a black-treacled limbo where hope springs eternal.