I wish I was one of those people with dreamless sleep

One Hundred Years of Solitude feels like the more appropriate literary themed meme today than any crowbarring of coronavirus into Love in the Time of Cholera. Today I feel unable to sustain any optimism for my life as I try to extrapolate from past into future. For someone like me, happiness is probably a very low percentage game and I’d have to be alert enough to take it when it comes but today I’m utterly convinces I had that chance, gazed at it for a moment and then rejected it because I was too broken to realise what it was.

Okay, so that all sounds pretty (melo)dramatic, I know. But it is how I feel today. Crushed with sadness. Obsessed with the mis-steps that brought me here and running through the counter-factual simulations that play out better than this. Of course, I realise now that there is no place for me to reach so that I can relax and be happy. No achievement that will give me any real satisfaction. Stuck in a lockdown, there isn’t even the lie that I can go out and search for the thing I think I need.

Today, I woke up feeling utterly crushed by the hazy dreams that had been splashing around inside my head all night. Now I’m wallowing in a semi-automatic sadness triggered by a dream, triggered by a reminiscence that too much time inside my own head makes impossible to ignore. The reminiscence is, as always, a variation on a theme. Or, to be more precise, a variation on a scene. A scene containing the same person, a girl, a woman, a lola. My Lola. She still sits there, right behind my closes eyes. Unaged and smiling. Still scintillatingly beautiful. Still better than any reality.

Anyway, there is no love in the time of coronavirus for me. But there wasn’t enough in the time before and I don’t it expect it to be a side effect of vaccination either.

A single Marlboro Menthol, ignited by a match, sounds good to me right now!