sarah eve kelly

I’m going to get back to work in just a minute here.

What is it about Sunday nights that brings a person up against the edge of Destiny? I used to think it was about the week starting again, and I’m sure there’s an element of that to it, but now I’m working every day, and things don’t change much from day to day, and still here I am, standing on my balcony and muttering to myself - and occasionally to Mike - about Destiny.

My mother says this often and I ought to listen to her: “you may,” she says, “remember this as the greatest time in your life.” But Sunday nights still manage to penetrate. A friend told me, I’m sick of being on my way to something - I want to be there. I’m terrified of being there. I’m terrified, if we’re honest, about getting anything I want, because what if it wasn’t what I wanted? But I just made a very full-throated speech to Mike about learning to be shameless in the pursuit of what I wanted - I can’t back down from that. Can I?

Muttering about Destiny never gets a person very far. Usually, in fact, the act is in aid of putting something else off. The good advice is Complete What’s In Front of You. Forget about your Five Year Plans and oh-god-what-will-houses-cost. Complete what’s in front of you (which is precisely what I am, on this very chilly balcony, now I think about it, failing to do).

I worry constantly about the future. What’s a woman in her right mind doing getting a PhD in the humanities at this particular point in history, anyway? I haven’t heard a single person tell me that it will be easy or even possible to find a job at the end of this $120,000 road. So I worry. I worry about that, and becoming a mother, and not being talented enough, about losing the friends that I have and missing opportunities to make more while I’m muttering about Destiny. That worrying isn’t confined to Sunday nights, but at those times it takes on an apocalyptic colour: one wants - or thinks one wants - the future nailed down, certain, visible. One wants a home that one doesn’t have to think about moving out of in nine months’ time. One wants to be where one is going, to have a pee break and stretch out and have a goddamned nap and know that the landscape won’t have changed entirely when one wakes up.

But I’m always throwing myself into these situations, these changeable and unreliable situations - it’s a famiily legacy. I say I want security but I work with glory in mind.

A few weeks ago I might have abated this Sunday night bullshit by going over to Naomi’s for a glass of wine and a few fags out the bathroom window. We would have stared down Farquhar Road together and pissed and moaned about the coming week and missed out entirely on this weird depression that descends on the twilight of the Lord’s Day. Now Naomi is two hours away, not two minutes, and I’m convinced that everyone in Cambridge is perfectly prepared for, and even enthused about the coming week.

Well, let’s face it, I’m excited too. Not about slogging into town for groceries, mind, or checking my pigeonhole, or any of that day-to-day crap, but for the reason I’m here: the work. I suppose that’s more than a lot of people have. I love my work, when I’m not terrified of it - when I think I can do it. And now that I’ve committed this piece of offal to the air supply, I’m less sure than ever. But back to it.

Till next time, &c &c.

Related posts:

1. the joys of mediocrity
2. my sunday shitlist