Play the Hand, Find the Song: card games, coping and putting it to paper with unbearable shame

 

I pop ice from its plastic body and they slide across the countertop, taking refuge beneath the dishes again. I pour more coffee than I should be drinking into a glass one of us stole on a night out. I check the photo again, I try to read the words. The people make me smile. I wipe the sweat from my brow and lick it from the back of my palm. I like these people. I always assumed they’d never exist, or be some part of my imagination. They laugh, each in their own way, the same way I laugh, and I see myself in each of them. My phone lives at 10%. There’s rum down the side of the backseat. The music changes. There’s an ancient shipwreck buried beneath the soil. The sun comes by. We pass the same trees at the end of Devon. If we drive through the night we miss them, instead making the same jokes about double suicide or falling asleep behind the wheel. We argue for the fun of it. We raise our voices. I haven’t sung with anybody since I was in a school for boys. I still dream about the choirmaster, getting redder and balder and angrier. In first year they said he threw a chair at the tenors. I don’t know why I thought I would become him. This car doesn’t crash. It has spirit. 

 

The glass cools and seeps water onto my black plastic desk. I clean it, but forget to put anything underneath it until the next time. I check the temperature on my laptop. I tell myself I’ve got work to do. I scroll through the dull, humid heat of June, 2025. I take out the charger and say the laptop doesn’t need it. I reply to messages and insert myself into irrelevant conversations. I am home here, and I am being eaten by this house. I cough. I blow my nose. I drink the coffee and feel the factory fresh syrup catch at the back of my throat. I’m not getting any better. I check my photos. I See These People Around Me. I think I am supposed to be something else. I think about hate. The car turns down another long and empty road of countryside. There used to be forests here.

 

Bugs come in through the broken window and I work to chase them back out again. They irritate themselves around the office and I think, ‘does it really smell that bad in here?’ I change the bin. I move my mouse in Microsoft Teams. I comb through my hair with my fingers. I wash my hands with soap and water. I brush my teeth. I tweeze hairs growing on my chin, upper lip and chest. I listen to music out loud. I make a sandwich for lunch. I try to diagnose the death presently occupying my solar plexus. I follow the logic my step-mother gave me. If there’s pain in my hip — I am sick in my movements, there is some adjusting I cannot fulfil. If I feel a pain in my throat — I am sick in expressing myself, in vocalising a given truth. If I feel a pain in my back — my foundations are struggling to uphold themselves. I drink the coffee and chew on the ice. I floss. I take medicine for cold and flu in thirty degree heat. 

 

I can’t think in summer. I splash my face with lukewarm water from the tap. I used to publish myself five years ago. I was proud of this, the last time I sat somewhere with this sort of warmth. It surrounds me. I breathe a little less. I cough a little more. I place myself in a dark room and close the curtains. Everybody I've ever met tells me I’m good for something. I’ve got to get published again. I check the last thing I wrote, almost a month ago, and I feel like throwing up. Raymond Carver looks with a glare and a hunch and a dirty readiness to resent me. I smile for the photo and try to take in my success. In another breath, right after I feel sincere, or smart, or good for a second, I feel like a moron in a sweaty layer of skin. The time keeps turning, the necessity for another side of the same thing persuades me to listen. I smile for the photo and try to take in my success. This could be us bro. We could be two lambs on a rainy day. You could hold my hands when you’re scared. I’ll tell you I love you for free. I’ll think myself a moron later. Tell me it’s alright. Let’s link and build this summer. What the hell, sure. 

 

My hands function. They show signs of living. You can see the veins, flaunting their masculinity, and the stretching elongated length of my palms. I worry these are not my hands. I said to some loves that I felt sick when I wasn’t writing. To cope,  I pluck hairs from my hands with my teeth. I feel it’s a relatively well adjusted behaviour. Do you feel the sun setting at three pm? I’m an adult now, but I’m making myself live by the laws of regret. Why don’t I do the things I want to do? Why can’t i let myself be happy? To cope, I sign into x, the everything app, again, and hope maybe this time, maybe this time, i’ll find a post stupid enough to offer me the answer. I sit in my desk chair like a child on an iPad. I smile and clap when the colours change. I buy new product without irony. I used to believe in something, probably. I used to believe in something the way every twenty year old is driven by their convictions about the world. I go back to locals. 

Have you listened to Soft Play by Honningbarna? This party never stops. You’ve got to come over. This is the party that never stops. Here lives sweat, excitement, death, atrophy. Here lives drinking vodka again. Here lives these people in this half-broken car. I’m there again, another open hall, another needlessly high ceiling. I’m supposed to be losing this game. I thought I’d be dead by 25. I think, I move, I shuffle the cards between my hands. I order forty cards into six piles. I am still alive. I offer them to my opponent. They cut the deck, and pass them back. It’s only fair. I breathe. I know the art, I know each card as my own. The elected decision for each one is reasonable. It’s a process not dissimilar to writing, but that’s for tomorrow. All that’s important is that I chose for the cards to be there in an act of logistical process. There will be no surprises when I pick up my hand of five. There’s a part of this that is about managing expectations, and understood familiarity with every card I’ve chosen. I know what each combination does. There is an effect it will have on both playmats. 

 

To cope, I count the pages in my journal. I take another look at my phone. It’s about the noise, the caffeine, the movement, the momentum. I use inertia to describe what a doctor would call nausea. I watch a ship crash into the sun. I play with the piercing in my nose. I worry about it falling out. There’s nothing atrophying yet. I point and say Mars to whatever’s north of the moon. I drink too much. I go sober for a few months.  I’m not dead. I succumb to peer pressure. I lose things precious to me. I kiss. My life is only beginning. I change the sleeves and buy another set. I’m not old yet, I’m old, I’m picking the flowers and thinking of the wind. I don’t care if I’ve peaked, I don’t care if I’m washed. The hairs on my arms, legs, face, back, belly keep growing. The estrogen changes me, slowly and with the readiness of the seasons. There are no signs of rigour mortis anywhere except the brain. I shuffle the cards, and motion my hand to the player across the table. I let them know time is continuing while they’re playing. I show my open palm. I tell them I have nothing. I don’t shake when I play. 

 

The other day, Wren and I took a date in town. We got coffee and a pastry and the place had good aircon. We walked up the hill and sat in some shade and I lay on my back and saw the trees and the sky and the wind. She said to me we’re supposed to take thirty seconds to a minute each day to look at nature. She rested her head on the crook of my arm, but before long, got up to go back home. I was staying out. After we kissed goodbye, I put my headphones back on.  

I listen to the leaves. I feel the wind move them above me. I make small sacrifices to mother nature and pray at shrines to her name. When the wind comes, it moves the trees, the leaves, the grass, the light;

Summer’s remind me of childhood, they make me feel like a child. I’ve been prone to seasons of idleness lately. I want and I want and I want and I want, but for the life of me, it’s a chore to even think about going that far. To work for myself, to change, to stare at the leaves for more than a minute, to pray or god forbid, meditate in the moment. 

There’s a song I’m trying to find.