Some of It Is Rent: The List That Keeps Me Up
We spend more time looking at the bedroom ceiling with the light off than with it on. That's where tomorrow's list gets read out.
I'd gone to bed at eleven on a weeknight. By twenty to twelve I was on my back in the dark with the list going round.
It started with the real things. Pay the gas bill, due at the end of the week. Then the ten o'clock. I'm a project manager on software for warehouses, and the warehouse people were coming in to say what was wrong with it. A bill and a meeting. Fine.
Then the dark added its own.
Paint the shed door green. Start running, said the voice in my head, and then "again", which was generous, since I never started the first time. Finish the book on the bedside table, which has had a bus ticket at page forty since August.
Nobody writes "start running" in daylight, between a gas bill and a meeting. The voice didn't want a green door so much as a better me by morning, starting with the door.
I let it talk for a good while, because listening felt like the next best thing to doing. Lying in bed agreeing to start running is a lot like running, apart from all of it.
Somewhere past midnight I asked each one a single question. What happens if this waits a week?
The gas bill, a late fee and then a letter in red. The ten o'clock, five people from a warehouse sitting in a meeting room, waiting for me.
The shed door, nothing. It has waited eight weekends and it opens and shuts like any other door. Running, nothing. The pavements will keep. The book, nothing. A bus ticket is very good at keeping a place.
Some of the list is rent. Some of it is a voice.
Most of what goes round in the dark is the voice, adding "and be better" to the end of every day. The rent is what keeps the roof up and the job that pays for it. It gets my right effort tomorrow, in daylight, at good enough. Pay the bill while the kettle boils, turn up at ten with the numbers, and that's the whole job. The voice can say what it likes. It just doesn't get the night.
Some nights it's the rent itself that keeps you up, because when money is short a gas bill can do that on its own, and no question makes it wait. That's a cost of being short, not a flaw in you.
The question is short enough to ask lying down, which helps, because that's where the list does its talking.
The voice didn't stop because I'd sorted it. It went on to the gutters, then drinking more water, and it was halfway through the windows when I fell asleep on it.
