On A Sudden Spell of Fatigue

All of a sudden I am tired and I do not know why.

I had been holding a paragraph of words in the minutes before this fatigue struck. Now my mind loosens and the whole thing disintegrates, dripping out somewhere - through my skin along with sweat, perhaps, or jumbled in with the conversation that marches on without noticing I am prostrate in a ditch along the way, prostrate but still crawling.


Work is the imposition of the dictum that your time does not belong to you. Within the restricted space we have we try to make do - if work is life, then work must also include sleep and at least two meals. But there is nothing for us to rest on. No rest, no chair, no bed - only a floor, which would have been fine but has not been swept in weeks and can never be swept clean anyway-

(Cue T. S. Eliot.)


Even when I take out the notebook and jot down ideas for one story or another I do so slowly. This is not the normal deliberate slowness, it is the hand saying stop brain, stop a moment, you are surges of current and I am mechanical physics. There is some sort of insight to be had here but I can't see it.

Reading gives me a headache after a while, and then I see it is because the lights are all off. That I do not sense the difference for so long says something about the intensity of the light outside, which I do not want to let in fully through the door. And so I open it a bit to see, to my surprise, it is already early afternoon; the sky is saturated with both light and grey-white water, and that water is already everywhere on the ground also, being led towards the drains or collecting in depressions in the tarmac of the road.


Light is ubiquitous in summer, especially tropical summer. Light unfettered, light filling clouds, light through suspended droplets in air. In the morning a rainbow, and at evening great white towers of vapour in the north. My eye has deceived me into thinking it is the same, all the same, and behind me the day sneaks by.