Sometimes, Even Monsters Feel Pain

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As my mind begins swimming to the surface of consciousness, the depth of the sleep I am emerging from makes it feel like I’m swimming to the surface of some deep, forsaken sea. It pulls at me, trying to drag me back into the darkness of its fathomless depths.

I hear voices in the kitchen. My son, whose deep timbre I still haven’t gotten used to, four years after it changed, laughs. He’s a night owl who has a hard time sleeping and tends to be a late riser. If he’s up, it must mean he needs to go to work, and that means I need to get my ass out of bed.

For what? Some part of my mind, a cynical, blackpilled sector, asks, throwing up an error code. What is the point?

I ignore it, and feel my awareness coming into focus anyway.

If the sleep was deep, it was not refreshing. My eyes feel gritty, swollen. My toe hurts, and I probe it with my other foot. There is an injury there I don’t remember receiving. It’s painful to the touch.

I drag my comically large body out of bed — quietly so I don’t wake the baby — and do the minimum morning ablutions. There are dark circles under my eyes. I need coffee. And vitamins.

I’m not hung over, but I did drink last night. Like a patient trying to white knuckle a surgery without anesthesia, I’ve made and broken a commitment to transitory sobriety probably half a dozen times this year, and it’s only April. The cheap vodka in the freezer — best I can afford at the moment, and “afford” is being generous — is a band-aid for my tortured soul.

The problem is the pain. Not the physical kind, though I’m no fan of that either. My brand of hurting is emotional, mental. It never relents for long. And sometimes, it just has to be numbed into submission because I cannot let it take over.

Everything aches. My middle-aged muscles, atrophied from sedentary years spent typing away at a keyboard in front of a computer screen, protest the sudden flurry of physical activity over the past week. My wife’s real estate business is taking off, and I spend my days working with her, producing marketing materials and building systems and creating newsletters that will make the volume of work increase, but be manageable. But it’s all future revenue, since no deals have closed yet. The one that was supposed to finish this week, just in time to pay next month’s bills, fell through at the last minute. Still, as of yesterday, she’s up to 9 concurrent listings, if I’m counting right, and has at least another 4 buyer clients.

She’s busy all the time.

But there’s no cash until the transactions are finished, recorded in the county records. No money for food, or gas, or utilities. I’ve been spending my days working in my home office, then making dinner every night as early as I can get it on the table. Around 5, I leave, sometimes with no time to eat anything myself, to go do food deliveries at night. Only job I can do that has total flexibility, and where I don’t have to pretend to want to be there to get hired. I’m a meat cog in an algorithmic machine, and my feelings are irrelevant.

I’ve done 26 hours of delivery work over the past week, for a measly $472. Comes out to a little over $18/hour. Of course, most of that money is going into the gas tanks of our two cars, because I drive a lot of miles doing that work at night, and Jamie is driving nearly as many during the day to meet with clients. What’s left over isn’t really enough, but we make it stretch. Tough when you have 9 people to feed — including three teenage boys with big appetites. We’re making 4 or 5 pounds of meat at every major meal.

I turn on the espresso machine, and as it buzzes noisily to life, reach for my shaker bottle. Ice first, then a bit of water, then a scoop of Athletic Greens, and a few drops of Vitamin D. It’s gritty, and tastes like despair, but I need the nutrients. I reach for the scoop and find there’s no ice in the ice maker. Of course there isn’t, because I was gone all day yesterday and it’s one of those manual-fill machines. Typically, I’m the only one who fills it, or the water-filtration machine I use to get ice that doesn’t taste like the tap. The reverse osmosis alchemy box sits on the counter, nearly as exhausted as I am, because it was never made to filter this much liquid for this many people. The “change filter” light has been on for at least a month, but I don’t have $80 to blow on that, so I’m just going to wing it on the filter we’ve got.

There is an elephant sitting in the room, occupying an inordinate amount of emotional space.