LENSES

I woke up this morning feeling a bit sick. Not ill, not even lazy, just a bit upside-down.

I'm okay. I'm in work anyway, trying to move Japanese characters around so that I can 'cheat' at making a screenshot. It is fiddly and it is tedious. And I don't understand Japanese.

I had a long Skype chat with Winners and Teebs yesterday. They seem really happy in Zimbabwe - in fact, today they're off to Hwange National Park for a holiday, somewhere near Victoria Falls.

Afterwards, Winners sent me a message:

"Thankyou for your time. Today it was awesome to see your face."

It was awesome to see my face. That's a friend, right there. I thought I'd looked like a kind of exhausted vagrant... or of course, the spectre who's taken to wandering around the office. The window of me in the corner of the screen was like a portrait I didn't want to see.

Anyway, this morning I woke up not quite feeling like myself. I think I'm bored. I'm kind of fed up with the status quo and I feel like changing, well, everything.

That same face looked at me from the bathroom mirror. He smiled weakly, lips curling across the unshaven grey of his chin, squeezing his cheeks into a forced, thin expression. Hair shot out in all directions like uncoiled springs.

Maybe I should try contacts again? I thought to myself. It did seem as though the light was catching my eyes today - they weren't sparkling but it did look a bit like a fire had been lit behind each pupil. How often, I wondered, has that fire been hidden by spectacles?

There it is. Sometimes the lenses we think we need to see the world, prevent the world from seeing us.

I've been sitting here thinking about that sentence for twenty minutes.