Why can’t I just be happy?

It’s a beautiful winter’s day outside the window. I watch the dog-walkers use the small alley cut-through to the park, and let their dogs off the lead a safe distance within to gambol joyfully in the pale sunshine. The nearby junior school lies deserted, its playground empty, the primary-coloured climbing frame shiny and solitary in the sun. A cat slinks belly-low along a neighbour’s fence, and two sparrows flap startled into the air from the bare branches of a tree.

I watch it all from behind clear glass, the central heating cushioning me from the pale sun and the cool breeze. I want to go outside but I have nowhere to go, not really, not at this time of day. This time of day is for shoppers, children with pocket money, people on a mission, people in a hurry. I have no mission, no hurry. I am nothing much.

I stare ahead, but am not really seeing anymore. My mind is where it always rests, back with the novel. My thoughts whir and skitter between paragraphs, while the words ‘get a job’ bubble up from the depths like noxious gases. Everything collides and is simultaneous – my characters, my finances, my future, my story, my fears, my dreams. Underpinning everything is the hum from the hoover being worked downstairs, and the radio set to old-time classics. My mum sings, and I enjoy her happiness, even as I feel stuck in time, and somewhere out there is another me on a mission in a hurry.

I wonder what she looks like, this other me. Taller, somehow. Graceful. She looks like she is someone as she goes about her day, a real person, not a shadow. She has nice hair. I wonder if I will ever be that girl. The way to being her is through this story, I think. So here I sit, and turn away from the pale sunshine. It’s not for me today.