Starve

When you wake up, the street glistens and the sky hangs low in. Heavy sleet shoots sideways in alternating giant snowflakes and icy raindrops. Umbrellas turn themselves inside out at the sight; you know it's miserable. The dog builds a fort in your bed and curls up, commits to a whole day of naps, while you pull up a never-ending document and ramble into the void. Some days the story teaches you of worlds yet unexplored, some days it grates at your shoulders. There's no telling how a day will go just by reading the weather report.

You sleep a restless sleep and wake in a sweat, the radiators delirious with the changing seasons. Every night you dream of mice, now, and how few of them you catch. When the alarm clock rings, too early for a Saturday but such is life in the upside down, you struggle to remember your purpose with it all. But later on the train, tired and hungry and angry with the crowds, the story whispered to you as you sat staring at mattress advertisements. It painted pictures on the insides of your eyelids, swirled bits of magic around your spine. You remember there was a phrase somewhere, a few pages back, that you really quite liked and you think someone else might understand what you were trying to say.

The road ahead didn't seem so long then, the quest not so impossible after all. There was a phrase that I really quite liked and maybe if I keep at it, there will be another again.