Numbers have had a grip on me recently. I've always been fascinated by them. Not to the extent that I study them, but I've always found working with them easy - it's not difficult to understand them. I can work out equations quite quick. I'm also one of those people who's pretty good at guessing the weight of something or how many balloons there are in a car in a shopping mall or something. I pay a price though. The fuckers have me in a stranglehold sometimes and I can barely move some mornings because of them. Just my luck to have been born into a life which straddles a millennium tick over.
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My wife and I love one another. But, there are numbers too - sitting behind our lives like ghosts which bade us to be together. Our fathers share the same birthday. Her grandmother and my brother have the same birthday too. She spent her years growing up in apartment number twenty-seven. You guessed it - I grew up in house number twenty seven in a street of over two hundred. My daughter was born on my mother's birthday. Sure, I can convince myself they are coincidences just like I can convince myself a noise in the night is a pipe creaking. I don't know it's a pipe creaking though. I don't know, actually have the full knowledge, that there is not something else strolling through whilst kicking my plumbing. Nor do you.
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So, with forty building a brick wall of years for me I've not been writing. I've been thinking about it, but every time a story comes to me a set of numbers march in and boot it out. There was the one about the fat guy lining up the Filopino whores in a seaside village cabana. The need to get down to less than eighty kilograms before I'm forty kicked the shit out of that idea though. Reflecting on age I had a short story in mind about the last time I went clothes shopping with my mother aged sixteen - how she'd dictated which ones I should have bought and how my near-to-tears plea had negotiated me into a pair which I, somewhere in my mind, had thought would get me sex for the first time - a story about believing a pair of trousers would help you lose your virginity. A number of calories burned, over a period of running, on a certain incline, with the temperature of the air con at particular coldness stamped on the fucking story as well though.
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So, there are ten more days left of my thirties. I now weigh seventy-nine kilograms. I was ninety-eight kilograms. I've done it.
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The clock ticks and it weighs on me. Some nights, trying to fall asleep, each second is like a thump to the kidneys. For me, time is corrupt police officer. Sometimes he throws me in a cell, strips me bear, beats me and takes my money. Other times he lets me off because the man in the next cell is fading faster.
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I'm back I think. I've put some of these numbers to sleep. It won't be a month before I post again, but thank fuck it was a month, or I'd have never written again.
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The minutes and hours still cling to me, pace my breathing, march my legs. I am aware that I am the sperm that made it from my father's ball sack, and I wonder about that too. Millions of others and I'm the victor.
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Sometimes I wonder if minutes and hours are counted right - or if the people who set them up in the beginning made a big mistake.
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I still have six dashes in my writing - I have to.
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However, I am back.
