still ill

 The balcony is calm and beautiful, but the sound of gun shots from the nearby shooting range is consistent. Intermittently reading and writing I receive a message from a former lover in Taiwan to say that she recently had a baby. We exchange a few lines and have a laugh at a memory of her rolling her eyes. It was one of her idiosyncrasies. It was cute. Now the gun shots somehow remind me just how far away everyone is. Family and friends. Even here… there is no one at the pool, there is no one on their balcony, there is just me and if it were not for the gunshots, I’d feel like I was the last survivor in a post-apocalyptic world. As I continue to read, I realise that sensitive scenes in films and books hurt me so much these days. When I was younger it simply seemed like fiction, but I know the suffering is real. 

                  Now I sit at The Ginger Man pub and sip a beer. The weather is wonderful today. And yet, as morbid as it sounds, I can’t seem to escape thoughts of death lately. I don’t even really want to write about… it simply lingers. A father and son from Kansas begin to chat to me and tell me about their various European trips, whilst a beautiful lady sits alone just behind them, drinks a coke and eats some kind of bacon dish. Feeling tired and overheated, I decide to go home and, as I get up to go, the lady ask for a to go box so that she can leave too. More dreams of the day kind. Arriving home, I swim and start to suffer a sore stomach. It turns to nausea. And, here I am, lying on my bed feeling ill.