this is the day

today is the day. you don’t know what’s sent you overboard, what’s pushed the lingering thought into action. it’s been a pretty normal day, all told, rather overcast, with the sky a nondescript mishmash of grey, slipping into its winter clothes while in the midst of spring. the walk to work wasn’t too bad, the detritus kicked up from your rapidly disintegrating insoles noticeable but not piercing — you looked inside the shoes yesterday and weren’t a fan of what you saw. you’ve had these shoes for years, reliably comfortable and steadfastly ugly. sometimes you slip into a more fashionable pair at work, kitten-heeled with a hint of fuchsia amongst the black, but these would kill you if you did anything more exertive than skulk about the office. anyway, those are only for when you’re pitching something — spending a week drawing and re-drawing the same slogan for new low-fat vegan cheese doesn’t necessitate beauty of any form, the constant emails about whether you could make the font less noticeable (???) able to be LLMed into oblivion from the comfort of the second-worst pair of trousers you could feasibly leave the house in. someone had forgotten to empty the coffee filter, but someone usually forgets to do this once a week, and besides, you quite like the ritual of actually making the coffee. better to have an excuse to spend a couple minutes away from your desk, vaguely groggy, than to be sat at it, whiling away your life with a slightly sludgy cup of coffee, sat in the jug for too long, the burnt taste masked by more sugar than is good for you. janine wasn’t there today, her judging eyes thankfully not singing a hole in your sternum, and her usual snarky teams reacts even-more-thankfully missing. in fact, you got to remark to andy on how cluttered her desk is — one of the few advantages of an open-plan office, the amount of highlighters and kitkat packets your most annoying colleague leaves strewn about is something you can levy to finally get an In with the tuesday-night-pub-quizzers, who are not to be confused with the thursday-night-quizzers, who seem much too into things intended for children. why would you bring a sonic screwdriver to the christmas do if not in extremely arrested development (then again, when was the last time you were that passionate about anything? maybe the grass is greener?)

you were meant to have a meeting with chris today, he said something about difficulties with cancelling your season ticket loan. you put the request in months ago, even the spam mail you’d get at your old house comes to your new one (although disconcertingly still addressed to anna? how’d that happen?) and gwr were fine with you refunding it. but then chris, chris of all fucking people, chris from accounts who thinks wearing a stripy tie gives him a personality and makes up for his sunflower-yellow teeth, says that he’s too busy and can we reschedule? you don’t tell him that you have issues with his office door’s kerning and then say oh can we reschedule i’m too busy redrawing the fucking vegan cheese brief again. but this is fine, you take a minute to recompose yourself on a vape break — you’ve taken up smoking again, but actual cigarettes don’t seem to gel with early-thirties melancholia particularly well. you think it’s rather counter-cultural to enjoy one of the rechargeable vapes, doing your bit for the environment through intermittent puffs of so-called strawberry lace, yet like every other vape, it smells rather saccharine and little else. the difference between this and pineapple sunset is a secret reserved for only the most nicotine-addled, like adam c in sixth form (there were two adams. one got kicked out halfway through year twelve, but everyone still called adam adam c) who’d get nicotine shakes walking out the exam hall. what’s he up to, you wonder — usually, you’d covertly switch between illustrator and facebook to conduct a fun stalk on the company’s time, but you deleted all social media a while back (one of your many self-improvement kicks) and think it’s more embarrassing to shamefully sulk back onto any of the platforms. your imagination can fill in the details, anyway. he probably failed all his exams (you don’t remember seeing him at results day, and it was a small sixth form!), went into work — probably in construction, his dad had a company (cresswell and co or something like that) so probably went to work bricklaying, arsecrack now on full display to the world. a life of tesco meal deals and last orders at the pub followed, constricting his bank account and expanding his waistline. he almost definitely has more money than you despite this, most of it now going to his girlfriend (or fiancée, maybe; wife is a stretch too far)’s obsession with crushed velvet everything. his living room would be a swathe of grey; the tv mounted too high, every peaky blinders rewatch slowly ruining his posture, every late-night wank sesh on the sofa spaffing both his cum and his chances at avoiding sciatica all over the throw blanket. the girlfriend, probably called something like mollie or melodie, some stupid spelling of an m-name, and newly pregnant (she doesn’t know how to tell adam, she cries on the phone to her mum, who is closer to adam in age than poor mychelle) assumes the blanket mysteriously ending up in the wash after a night out is due to incontinence and not her lovely’s penchant for SEXY BBW BOUNCES ON IT CUMPILATION NO. SIX while absolutely sozzled. good word, sozzled. your mum would use the word twatted, and the first time you heard this being applied to your dad, you went to school the very next day and asked your teacher what it means if your dad is twatted. the shade of vermillion poor mrs. rhiannon turned has never left your memory — for your second-year portfolio, you spent an hour trying to find the exact shade for the contour of a red panda. even if your supervisor called it really quite uncanny, you still liked that piece: a cavalcade of your favourite animals swarming a big yellow taxi — it was so fucking on the nose, but this was when you’d just came out as a lesbian and you thought that you could be one of the ones who listens to joni mitchell all the time and drinks iced coffees and wears long, flowy white dresses. you couldn’t sustain that, you enjoyed walking about in the worst jogging bottoms ever and a smiths t-shirt much too much. you feel a sense of resentment because, were you to have nicked your brother’s litany of old TNS shirts (some from back when they still had network in their name!), you would have pre-empted what appears to be the new style for nineteen-year-olds who think drinking aperol spritzes gives them a personality. but you can’t let the past get to you like that, you’re moving onwards and upwards — or if your grandma is to be believed, living in sin means you’re going down. and so be it, as long as you’re going somewhere, anywhere. katie’s favourite song starts off with something like take me for a ride away from places we have known, her blasting this while you were revising for your a-levels leading to a housewide war against shoegaze. you, your mum, and james on one side (james didn’t like music, the weirdo, and your mum enjoyed sade exclusively), with your dad and katie on the other (these two liked to joke they were real rock-and-rollers, in their words, but if you asked them about cleaners from venus they’d look at you like you were crazy). eventually everyone agreed that the hi-fi remote remains in the possession of whoever was revising, margaret on the guillotine crooning at a low-ish volume for your durkheim revision, and a couple years later, you could faintly hear my bloody valentine in the background of your mum’s thursday phone calls for a while.

the soggy ham and cheese sandwich you’ve packed sparks no joy in you, your new year’s resolution to eat cheaper (rather than healthier, which you’d stick to for about a week and then abandon) still vaguely adhered to. no meal-deal mise-en-place for you, your quote unquote motivational water bottle and a nectar-price twix the only accompaniment to perhaps the third or fourth worst sandwich you’ve ever had in your life. the cheese is stale, the ham is disconcertingly glue-like, and the seventy-five pence white bread from sainsburys is so tasteless you’re not even sure you’re actually eating something real. a simulacrum of nutrition, plain and untoasted, with only the shittiest of shit margarines (what’s the name? stamford street or something like that?) adding anything to it. anna would always toast her sandwich bread, she said that leaving it for a bit makes it nice and chewy. for you, raised on the ninety-nine pence warburtons white bread, sandwiches should not have any form of texture apart from filling. your mum wasn’t a chef, she was a homemaker and too fucking proud of it (as your dad liked to joke), but there was always breakfast on the table. who were you to ask for your marmite sandwiches to be toasted in year four, you once told her, to which she replied if you were asking for marmite sandwiches i’d send you to school without any lunch to learn a lesson. you hate this about her, she’d always just take a fucking joke a bit too far and never in a funny way. she didn’t know how to riff in the slightest, even jimmy carr has better joke tailoring than you and on hearing this, she just went oh well FUCK YOU and stormed out. that was your… second fight? or somewhere around that, definitely before you moved in. the years don’t really seem real anymore, but at one’s impending death being cliché is acceptable, so you can follow this with a does anything? and have this not be a permanent black mark on your turn-of-phrase record, which you assume whatever presence there is outside of this keeps for future perusal. your best ripostes written in gold ink, jumping off the page and hauling you back to the moment where you managed to tell gracie in year two that you’re rubber, she’s glue, and whatever she says (she was calling you a fatty, which always makes you giggle because andrea told you that her mysterious absence in year ten wasn’t an abortion gone wrong but time in an eating disorder clinic. it really did stick to her!) bounces off of you and sticks to her. works better in the first person but the st. peter of witty remarks notes everything down in the best voice for it, even if the remark wasn’t particularly original and stolen from an episode of arthur you saw before anybody else. your lunch break passes without note, the twenty minutes spent after the sandwich-and-twix one-two punch wiled away on instagram reels (the slop du jour), of which none even passed muster for sending to james, who will accept anything remotely interesting as a chance to witter over how this really shows that the social contract has degraded or whatever. he used to say this in a ukip way but recently he’s gotten surprisingly into gary’s economics, and he was surprisingly receptive to anna. then again, who couldn’t be, she told you that her great aunt (sadly not called greta) once said that she could charm the trousers off an iguana. to this very day, you have no idea what that means, or why she told you about it.

the rest of the workday progresses pretty normally, your brand new brief arriving in the vegan cheese company’s inbox at half four, the blue slightly more cornflower and the font a bit more compressed. you spend the last half hour looking at anna’s new gallery, which you’ve been to on your work thinkpad far more often than you should have been, but which is much more explainable to janine skulking about behind you for her ritualised quarter past tea break than askreddit and passes the time in a similarly self-loathing fashion. by the sixth or seventh time going on the website, you’ve become inured to its barrage of tastefully-untasteful images of vulvas strewn about with images from persona arranged haphazardly and what you imagine is some random baroque composer playing at ear-deafening volumes in the background, which one reviewer described as amplifying the gallery’s toeing of the line between beauty and grotesquerie, and which you would describe as more horseshite than tesco’s ready-made spag bol. but you’re the one who has the review scrawled inside whatever corridor of your brain leads to annamania, so more fool you. that reviewer has a kitchen that they don’t have to share with three others, and isn’t admonished for leaving a bottle of wine on what isn’t your shelf we all have very clearly delineated areas of the fridge to use, even if they ended up drinking the whole bottle and wanking sunday afternoon away. they’ve probably never seen the depths of the SQUIRTER VS CREAM TEAM series, TASTEFULLY NUDE PROFESSOR SEDUCES STUDENT AND SCISSORS FOR HOURS not having even made a dent in their psyche. it’s lodged all the way up yours, providing beautiful inspiration to your vegan cheese design, drawing those potential customers who love the absolutely abhorrent taste of vaguely-creamy nutslop with subconscious images of extremely-creamy nutslop. this is veering much too close to psychoanalysis, the last time you went (at the behest of your father, funnily enough) providing little recourse to the promised land of Real Mental Health, with much too much probing into the worst dream you’ve ever had. you don’t think going into why crashing into a motorway sign would cause you to combust a particularly profitable line of mental inquiry. they will probably carry out an inquiry into your mental health after you’re gone, but that will be fun. someone showing an interest in your life has always titillated you, your year-ten stalker not ever really causing much worry to you until he, well. you’re not going to go into that now, because you’re going somewhere else. downstairs, up the escalator to heaven like that one futurama episode, or even sideways to Planet Nowhere, you’re off. farewell to this land’s cheerless marshes…