My backside is sore from the number of times that I kicked myself yesterday. I knew that this whole experience was going to be much more intense that my previous life had been, and that for every euphoric high that I’d experience, there’d probably be a corresponding low of epic proportions, but I had forgotten this fact in the general enjoyment I’ve been having lately. Well, yesterday I hit a rather large stumbling block and ended up drowning in my own misery.
First I stuffed up at work. Now I don’t usually get that upset with myself about an honest mistake. I just apologise and fix it and move on. But this was a rush job, and I didn’t pay as much attention to it as I probably should have. It wasn’t a huge error, looking back at it now, but at the time I decided it was Karmic Retribution for my over-confidence of late and that it was the Biggest Disaster to Ever Happen To Me! I kicked myself soundly for a least an hour until I fixed the problem, and was forgiven for it by my lovely boss, but I felt as rotten as I could possibly feel. And it lasted all day. Everything I did thereafter went wrong. My programming failed, my numbers didn’t add up and my computer kept falling over. Something was out to get me. It just wasn’t my day.
I was so miserable, that I decided to go to the one location that always makes me feel better – a bookshop. I always feel very safe and at peace in a bookstore. There’s something about the way that the noises of the world disappear as you wander into a maze of shelving and fascinating titles, the hush that books inspire and the aura of quite contemplation, and the smell… that musty smell of libraries and old things… it’s like walking into a lovely memory. This wasn’t just any bookstore either. No, the Waterstones at Piccadilly Circus is the biggest bookstore in Europe and, although Richard had once taken me there after my job interview, I hadn’t recognised the significance of the location and so had neglected to go back. So I purposefully walked in the opposite direction to home to find solace in the biggest bookshop in London.
And it didn’t help.
I bee-lined strait for my favourite section – sci-fi and fantasy – in the hope of finding a particular book – the name of which I still can’t remember because I was startled to find Helen standing not five paces away. And because I was so miserable, and so intent on this book, which I had promptly forgotten the name of, I didn’t really say much, and so she left. It took me about 10 seconds after she’d gone to come to my senses and run after her, but she’d vanished. I tried phoning her, but got no answer. I was doubly annoyed with myself, as I really could have used someone’s shoulder to cry on, so I went up to reference and sat amongst the books on how to write, and cried in a bookshop for the first time I can ever remember. My solace was lost. The one place I’d always found comfort in before, and I was just as miserable in the bookshop as I’d been everywhere else. I sat on a footstool and pretended to read something, facing a corner, feeling like an absolute idiot, and trying not to get the books wet, for about 15 minutes.
It took another two hours and two Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe mysteries, Francis Hodgeson Burnett’s ‘Little Princess’, one of Foster’s Hornblower compendiums and the Neil Gaiman / Terry Pratchett ‘Good Omen’s’ book before I felt even half-way normal, and then I got buyers guilt. But I needed a pick-me-up, and a Pratchett is always a good pick-me-up, but spending two and half hours browsing in a bookshop is an even better one.
By the time I got home, I was so emotionally drained that I couldn’t face anything, and so said a regretful no to a games night at Richard and Hilary’s, earning myself another kick in the butt for saying ‘no’ to something which I’ve promised myself not to do this year, and went to bed… there to lie and think and think because of course I couldn’t sleep. Eventually the sandman came and ended the misery by committing my litany of woe to dreamless oblivion, thank the gods.
Today, I’m fine. Apparently, it was just one of those days.
What a silly girl am I
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