Kid-o-logy
Thursday
The bender started on Thursday.
I had gone into work at my menial, low-paid office job, dressed in my cheap charity shop suit. Later that day, I had a job interview lined up. I hated job interviews and, halfway through the morning, was beginning to feel slightly nervous. The familiar knot in the stomach, the slight nausea. So I went into a part of the office where I wouldn�t be overheard and rang the number of my new, prospective employers.
�Hello, may I speak to Ms Crawford, please?�
�Certainly, sir. Can I ask who�s calling?�
I told the female receptionist my name and was put through to Ms Crawford.
�Hi, Ms Crawford, I�m terribly sorry, but I�m afraid that I won�t be able to attend this afternoon�s interview. Several people at work have rang in sick today and I just can�t get away.�
I expected her to tell me to fuck off and die, but instead, she said, �Oh, that�s quite alright. Why don�t we just meet up for a coffee sometime next week and we can discuss the job then?�
I was slightly taken aback, but happily agreed to meet Ms Crawford the following week in town for a coffee.
Later, I told my boss that I was going on my lunch break and would not be back, as I had a job interview to attend.
It was 12 noon. I walked around, deciding where to go. Well, actually, I knew exactly where I was going to go.
Thirty minutes later, I was in Captain Jack�s pub. A large spacious place on the other side of the city, it really had very little in the way of atmosphere. There was a no music policy, as is the case with so many of the modern chain pubs, but the drinks were relatively cheap and several people I knew drank there.
I walked in, stood at the bar waiting to order a drink (it usually took a while, as the pub was always busy and they had few bar staff). I looked around and noticed Tony, a guy I used to work with. He was sitting at a table on his own and waved at me. I waved back, then turned back to the bar to order.
Once I had paid for my pint of lager, I walked over to Tony�s table. He was sitting with his usual bottle of strong cider. We said hello.
�How�s the post office job going?� I asked.
�They�ve been fucking us about. We were supposed to be contracted till the end of August but now they�re trying to say we�ve only got jobs till July.�
Tony was working as a temporary post office mail sorter, on the other side of town.
We chatted for a while, just catching up a bit with each other�s news. Several regulars came and went; Tony�s mate Nick who had half a left ear (he apparently liked to be �a bit rough� with his women and one of them had hit him with an iron in a hotel room. They were then asked to leave!); Tom (who was drinking jugs of lager and who seemed worryingly intense) and others who I didn�t recognise but had probably seen, or even talked to, before. My friend Gram, who I�d known for a few years and had become a good and trusted friend, despite my initial reservations about us only having one thing in common (drink!)
At one point, Tony�s wife came in to give him something which she had bought at the bakery across the road. I don�t know if she had wanted him to eat it or not, but by the time he left the pub to go to work for 5pm, he had left it on the table.
I left with Gram at around 5. We got a bus into town and went to the Bay Tree bar, where I usually went each evening after work. Three people I worked with were there, but things got pretty hazy and I knocked over a pint glass and left in a hurry. I felt a little ashamed of myself to be acting like a drunk in a place where I was a regular and always very well behaved.
I walked through town, through the crowds of people going home from work going back to their wives and husbands and lovers. I bought myself some noodles (the first thing I had eaten all day) and ate them in a park. It started to rain.
I slowly walked back to my room, but then I noticed a guy I used to work with standing on the street, outside a bank. He looked a bit bewildered and lost, so I called his name (Dennis) and he smiled and came over to greet me. We decided to go for a drink and went down the road to Hurler�s, a place which used to be quite good, but was now a student hang-out, complete with expensive prices. We chatted and drank for a while. Dennis was back on the dole after a brief spell working in an office. He had a lot of time on his hands and little money to speak of.
After a while, we said out goodbyes and I walked back to my room. I drank a bottle of cider and went to bed.
Friday
On the Friday morning I rang in sick. I left my room at 8.30am and went to the phone box on the corner. It wasn�t working. It stole some of my money. I went to the shop to buy a soft drink so I could get some more change, went to another nearby phone box. This one didn�t steal my money. It had a 50 pence stuck in the slot, which I carefully removed with a piece of paper. I rang the number. No answer. This went on for around half an hour. I walked around the area, trying the number of my office again and again, until someone eventually answered. I heard myself saying I had a migraine. I don�t actually think that I�ve ever had a migraine in my life!
I walked back to my room and got into bed. Put some Mahler on and listened to it on headphones. I put on a porno video and masturbated a couple of times. Then I had a shower, got dressed and left.
I walked all the way to Captain Jack�s. It was around 4 miles away, on the other side of town to where I lived. I felt like the walk might do me good.
I arrived at around 12.30 again. Tony and Nick were there with a couple of other guys, one who I didn�t know and Brian, who I�d known for a while. Brian looked like a 50 year old hippie, who rarely shaved and didn�t seem to let too much bother him. He seemed to live pretty much just to have a laugh and a good time.
Brian told me about the time when he was living with a black woman who kept his, usually filthy, flat tidy and kept him stocked up on bottles of wine. He would lie in bed drinking wine and she would clean everything in sight, occasionally taking breaks to get on top of him and fuck. She was crazy. One day, she left and never came back. Brian never did find out what had happened to her. And now his flat was back to its usual state, with old newspapers piled high in the bathroom and the rings around the bath which dated the tub like it was an old tree. Brian smiled and had another drink.
The sun shone through the big stain-glass effect windows of the pub. The day drew steadily on. Gram arrived and then Cyril, who used to play in bands in the sixties. I took photos with a cheap throwaway camera I had bought. We chased the conversation around the table.
Tony left to go to work but then came back again dressed in different clothes. He had told his wife he was going to work but decided instead to come back to the pub and drink some more. As the day turned into night, everyone was getting progressively drunker.
�I hate Scotland,� Tony said to me.
�Why?�
�It doesn�t live up to its potential. It could be a great country if only we tried harder�.
�But that�s the whole thing about Scotland � we revel in being heroic failures.�
�Aye, but I still hate it�.
He looked despondent.
�Do you hate yourself?� I asked.
For a moment, he looked as if he were going to punch me.
�Because I hate myself�, I said, just to qualify that my question wasn�t as impertinent as it had maybe sounded.
He told me, sadly, that he did and that he thought all Scottish people hated themselves.
I began to talk about how I had always been a depressive person, even from childhood (even though, I had always had love and understanding from my family). I began to get a little bit upset. Tony hugged me and told me it was okay. I was a nice guy. He liked me. I should just try and learn to like myself a bit more.
�It�s all kid-o-logy. It�s all shite. Fuck it.�
As we drank more, I was obviously visibly showing it. Tony asked me what I wanted from the bar. I told him I couldn�t drink another pint, so he got me a double vodka. As I drank it, slowly, he told me not to look like a victim. He meant when I was making my way home.
�Don�t let the fuckers think you�re a victim. Don�t look like an easy target.�
I agreed, told him that I usually didn�t. I could usually outwardly, at least, hold my drink pretty well. I could be drunk or hung-over and not really show it all that much. It kind of made me feel a strange sense of pride.
Tony had gone over to the other side of the room and was talking to a woman he knew. I chatted to some other guys who were sitting at the table and then left, got something to eat from Burger King, got on a bus and somehow made it to my room. I took off my clothes, climbed into bed and let the darkness envelope me.
Saturday
I knew I wasn�t going home on the Saturday morning. I normally went and saw my mother, but she lived 25 miles away and I couldn�t face the train journey. I had woke up early and lay around in bed with Mozart playing on the headphones and watching porno films. When it reached a suitable time, I pulled on some clothes and left the house.
I walked down the front steps into the glare of Saturday morning. When I turned the corner into one of the main roads, the full force of the weekend hit me. Crying children, their parents harassed, pulling them along. Saturday shoppers, people jogging in expensive running outfits. People having picnics in the local park. I couldn�t bear it.
I found a telephone box. It ate my money again. This was always happening. I found another box and dialled my mother�s number.
�Hi, mum, I won�t be coming home today. I�ve got a lot of stuff to do and won�t have time.�
�That means you�ll be drinking, doesn�t it?�
�No, no, mum. I�ve just got stuff to do. �
We agreed that I would ring in a few days and told each other to take care. I was sure that my mother knew I was lying, but I was only doing it because I loved her and telling her the truth would cause her worry.
I walked into town and got a bus to Captain Jack�s.
The last few yards before reaching the pub were always the worst. Everyone seemed to be walking slowly on purpose, as if they were trying to stop me reaching my destination. A mother was screaming at her little daughter and gave her a smack on the bum. I felt immense rage and wanted to punch the woman in the face. I didn�t care if she was harassed. The woman�s companion told her off.
�Don�t hit that wean in public.�
I wondered how she must have hit her behind closed doors but stopped myself thinking about it too much.
I went into the pub, ordered a drink and sat down at the usual table. No one was there, but after a minute or two had passed, Tony walked up and put his bottle of cider down on the table. He sat down opposite me.
�I never went to work this morning. That�s your fault by the way.�
�Aye, right,� I said.
�I ended up going to the Neighing Horse last night after I left here. Had a few in there. Left at shutting time. I was fucked up, bouncing off walls. I never got in till about quarter to one. I told her I was going to work today at 10 � I�m meant to be on from 10 till 5, but I went back to the Bay Window and had a couple in there. Took me ages to drink them. It was brilliant. Had a game of pool, played some songs on the jukey. Then came in here. I�m just in after you.�
�Did you phone in sick?� I asked.
�Nah. Fuck it. I�ll be in trouble when I go back on Monday. Just tell them I had a migraine or something. Some excuse. I�ll not get paid for today or last night, which means I�ll have less money to give her. I feel a bit bad about that, but I can�t be arsed. You were pretty upset last night. I gave you a cuddle.�
�I know! I remember! God. And I appreciated it, man�
�The wife knew I wasn�t going to work. She�s got a sixth sense.�
�My mother�s got one too. All women have.�
A group of young men in tracksuits and baseball hats sat nearby. They were all very loud and I sensed they were trouble. Each time I heard a noise from their table I visibly winced, but decided to try and look as if it didn't concern me. No one else seemed to notice them, although I did see the bar staff looking at them with some apprehension.
A little boy came in to the pub, looked around then left.
I said, �When you�re a kid, you spend all your time wishing you were grown-up and when you�re grown-up, you wish you were a kid.�
�Oh, don�t start all that again,� Tony said, raising his eyebrows.
I laughed and said sorry.
We both sat in silence for a while, staring off into space. Then we laughed when we realised we were doing this.
We talked about music. Joni Mitchell (one of my favourites, Tony liked her too). Carole King (his favourite female singer-songwriter, I didn�t know much of her stuff). Neil Young (one of my heroes, Tony liked him but preferred Dylan). Fleetwood Mac (Tony liked Stevie Nicks). Lynyrd Skynyrd (we both liked �Freebird� and �Sweet Home Alabama�). Leonard Cohen (I loved his stuff, Tony�s wife was a big fan and he liked him too but thought his voice was a bit depressing and monotone). Tony�s favourite band was Queen.
This guy Pete showed up. Tony introduced me and said "He's a pain in the arse". We laughed. Pete was about to leave for his holiday home in Italy, so we started talking about Italian food. None of us had eaten that day. Black puddings, haggis, pizzas (Domino's were great, Tony said. Not cheap but you got a lot, too much for one person, and they delivered to your door), several things. We kept drinking, talking about food. Unable to eat any.
Brian came in. He got himself a drink and sat down. We chatted about various things. Nothing too heavy. Tony said his 16 year old daughter had this new boyfriend who had started coming round the house. He seemed a bit scared of Tony, as if he didn't know what to make of him. The fact that he deliberately wound him up probably didn't help! But he said the boy seemed like a nice person.
When 5 o�clock came, Tony left to go home. Brian and I sat talking for a bit longer when Bob came in. He was a self-employed guy who did a lot of work for large companies and could take several foreign holidays a year. He was just back that day from the Norwegian fjords. He was dressed in a yellow shirt which I said made him look like Rupert the Bear.
Brian and Bob briefly went outside to watch a marching band as they went down the street. I stayed inside, drinking my pint of lager.
After 7pm, I left the pub and got something to eat and then walked a mile or so to the subway station. I sat on the train trying to avoid eye contact with the other passengers. There was a paper on the seat which I picked up and pretended to read.
When I got back to my room, I was glad to be inside. Weekends always seemed to bring out the freaks. The people who are out for trouble, the people who couldn't really drink but thought they could just because it's the weekend and it's 'normal' to drink at the weekend. These kinds of people made me nervous because of their total unpredictability. You see them less during weekdays, because they are going to work and can�t possibly go out for a drink because it's just not the 'done' thing, is it? There's probably nothing really wrong with these people. They are the ones who society considers 'normal' and those of us who drink during the week and take days, weeks, months, years, our whole lives off work because drinking seems like a better option are seen as the misfits. Who makes up these rules anyway? Who the fuck are these mysterious people?
I closed the curtains on the Saturday night rain and opened the cider bottle.
Sunday
I had decided not to drink on Sunday. I left early and walked around for a while. It was a sunny morning so I went to a nearby pond and watched the swans and ducks. I took some photos, of graffiti, of an empty bottle floating in the water, then I walked about some more.
I walked past churches, saw the people going in. A family with a stern looking father, all of them dressed well (their 'Sunday best'), all of them looking rather bored except for the father, who I thought was probably forcing them all to go, even though they'd all much rather stay in bed. I had a tape playing in my walkman - Johnny Cash. Here was a man who believed in God, but who knew that life wasn't as black and white as some would have you believe. He sang about loneliness, and of a human form of spirituality which went far deeper than the join-the-dots religion which is preached at you in churches. When he sang the Hank Williams song "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry", I understood.
I found myself walking down an old street where I once lived. The old house (which had been a nursing home in years gone by) was soon to be demolished and I wondered if anyone was still living there.
I pressed the buzzer of the old German guy I knew. He let me in, said hello. Most of his belongings had gone and he was packing some odds and ends into cardboard boxes.
"I'm moving out today," he said. "My daughter's coming soon to pick me up."
He told me where he was moving to then we shook hands and I left.
I went back to my room where I stayed for a while, eating some soup and bread which I had bought. Then I left again and walked into town. I didn't have anything else to do.
The city centre was very busy. There was some festival on and there were makeshift stages dotted around where people were playing music. I saw someone I knew, but I pretended I didn't see him. Then I saw someone else who I knew. He was sitting talking to some punky looking girl in the entrance to a subway station. I waved at him. He didn't respond. I went up to him.
"Hi Sid."
"Oh hi," he said, as if he had only just seen me.
"What are you up to?" I asked.
"Not much," he said. He was wearing expensive looking sunglasses and his usual black nail varnish. Most people who used to know him thought he was a freak but I quite liked him.
"I'm just going to the park," I said.
He just stared at me.
"To play with a frisbee". Like fuck I was!
We said goodbye. Why did I say that thing about the frisbee? I felt stupid, even though I didn�t particularly care one way or the other what he or the girl had thought of me.
I went to an art gallery where my friend Greg worked. We went outside for a while and he told me about what had been happening with him in the past few days. He had met some woman and taken her back to his flat, but his insane ex had rang up while she was there and was yelling abuse at him over the phone. He had been in some pub and some old guy was going round the bar singing and holding out his hat for money. He had walked a woman he met in another pub along the coast to where she lived, some miles away.
We agreed to meet up for a drink at 5, when he finished work. This was some hours away, so I killed some time by getting a bite to eat and wandering around, looking in shops.
Then I went to a few pubs. In the first one, I sat at a table and tried to read a magazine I had just bought. Some older guy sat down next to me. I stared at him. He stared at me. I went back to my magazine. His presence was making me slightly uncomfortable, as he could have sat anywhere (the place wasn�t particularly busy), but I didn�t move. I sat reading my magazine and taking the occasional sip of my pint. Eventually, the man left. I walked out a few minutes later.
In the second pub, it took me a while to get served. It was yet another one of these new chain pubs with hardly any staff but lots of thirsty customers. When I eventually got my drink, I went over to a far corner and stood on my own until I had an empty glass.
Then I went to the Bay Tree bar. I had totally forgotten about smashing a glass in there on the Thursday, and so didn�t feel at all embarrassed about going in. I stood at the bar and drank two pints of lager. Four men in suits came in. They appeared to be drunk and unsure of what to order. They were loud and obviously had money but not any clue about what to spend it on. They depressed me immensely. I looked around. Few of the usual regulars were in, what with it being a Sunday, but there were one or two faces I recognised.
I left and went to the pub where I was meeting Greg from the art gallery. A couple of his work mates who I knew were there, so I sat with them until he arrived. It soon became clear that everyone from his workplace were there. We had to sit at two different tables, there were so many of us. I didn�t know that many of them and so felt a little self-conscious. But I stayed for a beer and then slipped away quietly.
I went to another pub. So much for my plan of having a day of not drinking. I had another pint and stared out of the window. It was surprisingly busy considering it was Sunday night. People laughed. The occasional glass was accidentally smashed. Pretty normal stuff, really. When I had finished my pint I left.
I walked home. Bought a bottle of cider and started to drink it in my room.
When it was finished, I picked up a can of cider I had bought sometime before. I had bought it for 50p at a market. I opened the can, took a swig and immediately vomitted in the sink. It tasted absolutely vile. I poured the rest down the drain, puked up again and then opened another bottle which I had next to my bed. I drank that for the rest of the night until I passed out sometime in the early hours.
Monday
I woke up feeling amazingly refreshed. I shaved, dressed and got myself ready for work. The subway was crowded with the usual dour faces of Monday morning workers. Everyone looked miserable and thoroughly pissed off. I felt great, holding my head high. As confident as I ever could be. When I got into work, I opened the mail and put it on the boss�s desk, as usual. People came and went, doing their jobs. I felt fine until halfway through the morning.
I went downstairs to another part of the building. I rang my friend Gram and woke him up.
�How was the wedding on Saturday?�
He had been to a family wedding.
�Fine.�
He sounded tired and a little bit annoyed.
�Look,� I said. �I�m sorry to hassle you but could you phone me at work later and pretend you�re from the housing benefit office or something?�
�Uh, yeah. Wait till I get a pen.�
He went away and found a pen and wrote down the number of my office. He said he would phone in around an hour.
I waited for the call, going through the motions. I cleared everything out of the tray on my desk and discreetly put them into two plastic shopping bags. I didn�t know why I was doing it.
The phone eventually rang and it was Gram. I made the right noises and went and told my boss that I had been called away urgently. She seemed concerned, and she was a sweet woman, so I felt a little bad about lying to her but then I remembered what Tony had told me and the exact word he had used. Kid-o-logy. That word had so many meanings. It meant giving people only the information they needed to know. It meant telling someone a white lie to spare their feelings or so as not to worry them. It meant pretending to be tough or sober or happy so as not to be a target for people who are out to cause trouble. It meant lying to your boss (even if you liked them) because you couldn�t just say �I�m going on a bender for a few days, so I won�t be in.� The word had more meanings than I could count. I actually thought that it meant everything in the world. I wanted to tattoo it on my arm!
My boss let me go and I went out of the office, out of the building. It was 12 noon. I walked through town with my two plastic bags bulging. One of them burst, so I had to hold it together.
I went to a pub which I had only been in once before. I had one pint, then another. Everything was just kid-o-logy. The people standing at the bar pretending to be hardmen, the pop stars on the big screen TV pretending to be cool and aloof. Every single thing I could think of or see was kid-o-logy. It was like a blinding revelation and I kept saying the word (was it even a proper word, I wondered?) over and over again in my head. Kid-o-logy, kid-o-logy, kid-o-logy.
I left the pub at 1pm and went to the nearby train station. I waited around 15 minutes for a train. I didn�t know where I was going. Kid-o-logy. I thought, I�ll pretend I know where I�m going. A train arrived and I got on. I read a newspaper but I wasn�t really interested in what I was reading. Kid-o-logy. Some old woman was talking shit on a mobile phone and I got annoyed but didn�t show it. Kid-o-logy.
When I noticed where the train was going, I knew where to go. I got off and went to visit my friend Stuart. He had been working away and I wasn�t sure if he was even back. I knocked on the door of the house where he lived with his parents and the dog barked. I knew that someone was in, as the dog only barked when someone was in. No one answered. I knocked again. The dog kept on barking. I went to the window and saw a pair of legs. Woman�s legs. It was Stuart�s mother. I called her name and knocked on the window and then she opened the front door.
She was in a dressing gown and looked slightly drunk. She said hello and to come in. She called for Stuart and we all chatted a while. Pleasantries. I told some lie about having a day off. Then I went and sat in the garden, in the summer house with Stuart�s mother.
We talked for a while. She was drinking wine. I told her about the last few days. Told her about how emotionally raw I had been feeling, about how I couldn�t shut off my emotions. It was like all my skin had been removed and all that remained were nerves. She told me I could always stay there for a few days until I felt better. Without the pressures of going home to my mother�s house, who loved me very much, but was too involved and concerned about me to really give me as much space as I needed to recuperate. We talked about reasons why I possibly felt so bad. Was it my childhood? No. I�d had a great childhood, brought up in a loving family. I hadn�t had a father because my mother had only met him a few times. He had convinced her that he was single and really liked her, but one night she had got drunk and slept with him, leaving her pregnant with me. When she told him this, he said that he was married already and that, if she told anyone, he would get all his friends to say that they had all slept with her and that she was a lying slut. My mother was devastated, but also determined to keep the child and bring it up. Her family were extremely loving and supported her every step of the way. Everyone doted on the newborn child, a boy. He grew up in a house full of love, with his mother and grandparents and aunties, uncles, cousins. A loving and caring and normal family. Sometimes the boy wondered why he didn�t have a father, though, but when he asked the question, his mother would tell him not to worry about that because he had a family who all loved him very much. The boy eventually stopped asking the question, until he wasn�t a boy any longer. He asked the question again when he was a man of 23 and he had just taken an overdose of pills and vodka. His mother asked the man if he was so depressed because he had grown up without a father. Then the man told his mother that he didn�t think that was the reason, that life wasn�t as simple as that. But then he asked his mother to tell him that story. About why he didn�t have a father, and his mother told the 23 year old man, who had just had his stomach pumped in the hospital. And she told him about it and the man felt relief, because he had sometimes wondered (but not too many times) what the story was. And now he knew and he felt relief because not once in his whole life had he ever felt anything but loved by his family, and now he realised that his life would have been worse, not better, if this person he didn�t even wish to call �father� (�biological male parent� was perhaps a more appropraite term) had been in his life. If someone could do something as evil as what this person had done to the man�s mother then why would he want to know them? Why would you want to have evil people in your life? Surely, most of us want to surround ourselves with people who are good. Friends, family (real family, people who brought you up to adulthood and beyond and care about you and love you); people who love us and who we love in return.
Then I thought about all the people I had in my life who cared about me. The people in Captain Jack�s who cared enough to spend their time talking shit with me or giving me advice or giving me a hug when I needed it, my friends, my mother and other members of my family who sent me cards on my birthday and at Christmas, and who telephoned if they were too far away to visit. So many people who cared, and I was wasting so much of my life thinking about the people who didn�t even care or whom I didn�t even know. People in the street � fuck them! Who cares what they think? Neighbours who bang doors and get me paranoid that they�re doing it for my benefit, even though I am a quiet person. Fuck them! People who do evil things and justify it and don�t have any conscience or sense of their own wrongdoing. Fuck them all!
Then Stuart and I went shopping and I bought a shirt and we laughed because I asked if it was pink and we took his dog to the park and had a great chat. I hadn�t seen him in a while and he told me about what he�d been doing while he�d been away. About working in a library and how easy it was and how he had just realised that work only exists to generate more work. Items of furniture are moved around, only to be moved back to the same place the next day. Scientists conduct studies which tell the world the Ultimate Truth and then another team of scientists conduct another study to disprove that supposed Ultimate Truth. And so it goes on. Kid-o-logy.
Stuart told me how someone had taken all of his belongings away and left him with only a spoon. One day he was so bored and in need of stimulation that he turned on the tap and listened to the noise the water made as it went down the drain. He said it was blew his mind! He said you didn�t need a lot of things to survive. You could get by quite easily with just the basics. As long as you had imagination and a little bit of joy, you could survive almost anything.
Then we had dinner back at Stuart�s house and his mother and father and brother were there and later we went out into the garden and shone Stuart�s new torch onto the tower block across the street. We shone it into the night sky and tried to make morse code signals, but neither of us knew much morse code. Then eventually I slept in the front room. Stuart gave me lots of quilts and sleeping bags and a pillow. I couldn�t sleep and heard noises of people outside in the street. Fuck them, I thought. They�re not people I need to care about. They�re not Stuart or his mother or my mother or Gram or my friends in Captain Jack�s. They might be good enough people but they need to prove it to me before I accept them as that. Everyone�s an enemy until they prove that they�re a friend and I had plenty of people in my life who had proved it. I said a little prayer to thank God (I wasn�t religious or even sure if God existed, but I believed in God as a force of nature, of change, of the world existing even after every living thing on it has died, of natural decay, of infinite possibility). To thank God for all of the good people in my life. To help me remember them and what they had taught me.
And then I slept.