Sunday night marking

I remember, exactly ten years ago, sitting down at this hour (11.38pm) in front of the two decrepit second-hand computers I had piled on top of each other and interlaced with cables (in an effort to get them to hold on, in their grinding silicone dementia, to more than twenty-two hundred words at a time – and, incidentally, which I had painted red and blue, scratching naïve rocketships and flowers into their thin acrylic skins, long before apple computers discovered bondi blue – ) –

 

I remember sitting in that baggy corduroy chair, swinging back, staring at that old screen with its scarlet fringe, getting up to pace about, putting on a record and standing by the open window, turning around, admiring my couch for a good while, debating a cigarette, getting out some charcoal pencils and fiddling them about, turning back to the night, then closing my eyes tightly and growling and setting myself back to the computer. That essay took me eight hours and it was always the same. I’d read and fret and worry, right up to the night of the day before, then realise that I was out of time. I had that creeping panic and loss of circadian time; the essay gods were on my tail and the task, which only I could acquit myself of, closed in, bringing with it a comfortless isolation that insomniacs also know.

 

In Bangkok once I had a moment of clarity in the middle of months of anxiety and stress and illness, catching sight of my own shape in a window backlit by a fluorescent from the bathroom, as I was staring out from a high floor. The sheets on the bed were clean; there was a TV; on this side of the glass it was hushed, with just the occasional bell from the liftwell. I heard myself breathing and my eyes shone out strangely from that temporary mirror like the hundred thousand other pinpoints that were windows and doorways, streetlamps and neons and vendors' torches. I didn’t know what part of town I was in and I realise as I write it now that it could have been any moment in the passage of the night; I couldn’t tell. I had wandered there desperately by foot and tuk-tuk after making a mistake with a visa and finding myself stranded at the airport; I booked in and started to count. The visa took another ten days and in that time I had nothing to do but walk around Bangkok at all hours, manufacturing diversion and praying that sleep would find me, which it didn’t. Looking out of that waiting-room window, in a room that was not my home, too proud and alone, I thought—this is bleak.

Sunday night marking is not that bad.              

But it does suck.