This morning.

I woke up around three am. It was still dark, the only real light in the house coming from my phone. As I lay on my right side my left hand was holding my phone off the side of the bed so as not to wake my wife who was sleeping next to me. She was snoring and periodically stirring. Perhaps dreaming, no doubt of some other man or some other life that doesn’t involve me, because I’m so narcissistic that I believe even in her sleep my wife’s life must revolve around me in some way. In reality, I’m sure her dreams are more about her life and her own ongoing struggles with addiction and identity. I scroll through Reddit and answer some ridiculous Proustian questions that are supposed to reveal something about me, but don’t, because I don’t answer them accurately. Because obviously my whole life all I’ve been waiting for is someone to ask me what type of animal I would be and why, and now if I answer truthfully my entire psyche will be unveiled to the Redditshpere and thus the world will know my terrible, shocking secrets! After a while my battery starts to die. The 10% warning flashes up on my phone, the room is now healthily filling with light and I carefully sit up and raise my body out of the bed. My ninja-esque movements mean the wife is still asleep and stealing my dressing gown from the back of the bedroom door I tiptoe downstairs. Downstairs is filled with the discarded remnants of yesterday. Clothes, dishes, rubbish. Reminders of how terrible I am at housekeeping. For a while I stand silent in the living room. The only sounds the ticking of an unseen clock and the lashing of the mornings rain against the patio doors that lead to the construction site that has been our patio for the last 10 years. My biggest visible trophy of failure. My ode to lazy.