A Light Breakfast With Darwin And Poe

“We will now discuss in a little more detail the struggle for existence.”
Darwin, Origin of Species, Ch.3.

It’s like you’ve just been born. As though some huge gorilla midwife with piss green eyes, a thick moustache and a tattoo on her forehead saying give up the drink has, for the sheer hell of it, clamped her forceps around your skull and yanked you too early into life. She’s cut through your umbilical cord with a blow torch. You’re alone now and your stomach burns. You can barely breathe. You can’t open your eyes. Everything is deep space black, you’ve lost the mother ship of sleep and you’re separate, floating in a void. You’re a full time astronaut, not even sure there’s a world anymore. Instead of a feather lined cot the gorilla midwife has placed you beneath a sheet of sandpaper on a bed of nails. Instead of a pillow she’s put your head in a vice. Now and then she twists the handle. You’re hung-over.

You cling to the idea you’ve not woken at all. You’re dreaming. Or you’re somebody else’s dream. Or you’ve wandered into some parallel universe, another time, another life. You are well versed in Victorian literature, both fiction and non-fiction. You wrote and essay once on doppelgangers and duality. So you’re someone else. Sometime else. That would explain the distance you feel. Perhaps you’re just a different you. Wouldn’t that explain the confusion? If this is the case then there isn’t any pain after all; you’re lungs don’t bleed, your joints don’t throb and ache, you didn’t spend all your money last night. The things that happened and didn’t happen, didn’t necessarily happen or not happen.

There’s only one way to find out. Tell your brain to tell your eyelids to peel back again. It’s painful, like ripping sticky tape from a hairy piece of skin. As your eyes open, the darkness shatters in a big bang explosion of white light and gold. You think you’re staring at the centre of the sun, despite the fact that you’re indoors, alone in bed and the curtains are drawn. Gradually as the lights dim and you focus, you realise that this is what you understand to be your reality. Your clothes are strewn across the floor. Your underwear, socks and shirts. If there are parallel worlds with parallel yous, they won’t be this untidy. No, it’s unfortunate but you are the real you, existing just as you are. Alone, thick tongued, brain ruptured. Last night you drank too much.

And existing is only half the problem. Now you’ve to work out how to go on. How can you continue after a night like last night? You’ve made such a fool of yourself. How can you face Mary? How can you face your friends? They’re bound to find out sometime. Everyone’s bound to know.

You read somewhere only the fittest survive, that survival is a competition. Well, you don’t feel much like a winner. In a second you make decisions. Today you’ll give up smoking. Give up drinking. Give up bacon, burgers, butter, chips, chocolate, coffee, cream, crisps, fried bread, fried eggs, full fat milk, kebabs (and therefore chilli sauce), late night curries whether your hungry or not, salt and sugar in all it’s forms. Instead you’ll breakfast on fruit and brown bread and then you’ll exercise. You’ll start running today. Or tomorrow perhaps. You figure then you’ll live linger than most of your friends. Maybe it’s too late as far as Mary is concerned, but if you look after yourself certain future situations might be avoided.

You look around your room, at limp plants that need watering, at the broken spined books stacked dog-eared and random on the shelves, or leaning in piles upon the floor. You look at the c.d.’s scattered outside of their cases. You can’t quite believe you played The Carpenters when you got in. You can’t quite believe the neighbours complained during Rainy Days and Mondays. You don’t even like The Carpenters. They had been Mary’s idea. Natural, healthy Mary. Perfect body Mary. Good mother Mary. In the countryside you imagine she’d be able to talk to deer and have birds land on her hands.

Here, in your room, on the carpet, there is a mass of cold, hard wax, all that remains of the candle you lit. Two empty glasses stand by the opened bottle of cheap red wine. Vicious reminders. And you’re annoyed to find you have an erection now, in the morning, when you’re alone. Why couldn’t you have been like this last night? When it was supposed to happen, when she was here, when it mattered.

Your first date with Mary, a friend of a friend, the girl of your dreams. Already drunk before you met her, you took her to a club, The Evolution, where boys choose girls and girls choose boys. Sometimes it gets rowdy and everybody struggles together. But last night was peaceful. You just talked, danced, drank and then you brought Mary home. You wish now she’s never come back. You wish you hadn’t opened the second bottle of wine. You wish you hadn’t smoked those thirty cigarettes. You wish you’d not fallen asleep with her on top of you, kissing you. You wish she hadn’t said it could happen to anyone. You wish you hadn’t told her it had never happened to you before. You wish she hadn’t said so are you blaming me? You wish you hadn’t said, well it can’t be all my fault. You wished she hadn’t got dressed then. You wish you hadn’t turned your back on her. You wish she hadn’t walked out, slamming the door. You wonder if this means you’ll not see her again. You wonder if this will happen every time you meet a girl. You wonder if this means you’ll not have children.

Your pulse pounds at you temple and your stomach churns. Every cell in your body’s disturbed, fighting each other and themselves. You are well versed in Victorian Literature, both fiction and non-fiction. Have you mentioned this before? You wrap yourself in the quilt, close your eyes again and try and sleep. For an hour you can’t, but then you’re dreaming. You’re someone else, sometime else, like Usher maybe, falling and crawling back into the sea, melting into green slime, dissolving.