Chapter 23

I do nothing.

Weeks of nothing.

I can’t...

The sphere of things I can do without having problems is shrinking more and more, every day.

Every time I step out of the sphere I feel like I’m going to collapse. The world spins around me and I go out of control.

It’s terrifying.

Today I was doing my laundry - a hop, skip and a jump from the hostel - and I felt like I was about to blackout. All I was doing was watching the dryer go round and round, and I swooned in my chair like a drunk. Lurching up to my feet, I stumbled back to the hostel to lay down in my bed - my only safe place - and left the washing behind...

Yesterday, I was out having a coffee and reading a book when it happened. I was trying so hard to read the words - just read the words - but I couldn’t. The page didn’t make sense. Like my brain was at 1% capacity.

Can’t... read...

I felt like I was going to fall off my chair. The need to get back to the hostel, back to my bed, was utterly overwhelming. When confronted with a line at the cafe's paying counter I skipped to the front, threw them ten times what the coffee was worth, and without waiting for change quick stepped it back to the hostel and to my bed.

If I can’t do laundry, if I can’t even read a book, how will I get back home? If I can't do the simplest of tasks, how will I catch two planes??

More and more I think that it’s going to be more likely that my family are going to have to fly over here to help me back, or else they’re going to have to put me in a hospital here for people sick in the head.

I can’t see me getting home under my own steam.

That said, the other night I went out and had some drinks with some French backpackers from the hostel. We drank a fair bit... and I felt better.

For a couple of hours I felt like me again. Normal me.

I wasn’t scared.

It was a blissful window of normality. I was chatty and friendly and having fun. A brief respite from the constant feeling of terror; the always there feeling that something is about to go wrong; the feeling that I'm very not ok. Gone.

A slippery slope, that one... and I know exactly where it ends. The once confusing world of alcoholism makes perfect sense now; it works.

I don’t drink again.

I shave my face. It’s a lot of beard; a years’ worth, maybe, which, when you look at it, is pretty damn pathetic.

I didn’t care how I looked for the whole of the last year through Africa, but now, here, I'm suddenly self-conscious. I care again. Backpackers will do that...

I’ve been sleeping twelve hours a day.

Sleep: It’s the only place I feel normal. Or, at least, the only place where I’m getting a break from it. Sleep; my only sanctuary.

Lots of it.

A normal day I’ll get out of bed at eleven or twelve o'clock (after waking up and forcing myself back to sleep four or five times.) Breakfast of muesli at the hostel. Take a shower, which brings on it for some reason - like my body is somehow outside itself, and my brain is trying to keep up, just swooning around on the spot. Never still. Showers are the worst, they scare the shit out of me.

I fucking hate it.

It’s like when you step onto an escalator that’s not moving, and it feels really weird for a half second. It’s just like that, but always. Every second, I'm walking around on a broken escalator.

Then a few hours of staring at rectangles. Then lunch at a rotisserie sushi place down the road from the hostel. Then back to the hostel for more rectangles. Then off to get some dinner, which is invariably from the circuit of close-by fast-food chicken or fish and chips or some Thai food place. Then back to the hostel for even more rectangles till somewhere around midnight when I go to sleep for another twelve hours.

I’ve seen practically nothing of Cape Town.

I know it’s a travesty, because from the little I’ve seen, it’s an unbelievable place. Like, jaw dropping unbelievable. But the cue is in the rack. I’ve seen enough. I’m basically killing time as best I can till I get clearance from Australian Customs to ship the Shrike back home.

Till then, I need to stay as safe as I can. I'm holding all my reserves in wait, so that I can get on that plane, and get home.

It's all that matters. I need my family.