Begin Again | ongoing

one

The first time Tennyson Shelley woke up with the overwhelming sense that her life was over before it had begun, she spiralled into a crushing panic attack that stole her breath and spiked every fear, plunging the depths of every insecurity that lingered for hours. By the tenth time Sunny was gripped by the conviction that she wasn't making the most of her life and the fleeting days were turning into fleeting months that she couldn't get back, she rang her best friend and snottily sobbed down the line that she was going to die a forgettable underachiever.

Now, thanks to the soft souled wisdom that is Ravi Patel, she has a name for that feeling – twentiesitis. It doesn't bother her anymore. Not that she doesn't experience that horrible feeling every now and then, because it still creeps back at least once a month, but now she knows it isn't real and she isn't alone.

As Ravi said, "Darling, do you think you're the first twenty-one-year-old with a useless degree and a dead-end minimum wage job who doesn't know what they want to do with their life? Absolutely not. It just happens that the select few who do have a clue happen to be the vocal minority. Don't listen to them. Listen to me. I make three twenty an hour at a job I hate and I have no fucking clue what I want to do. You and me? We're in the same boat, babe. Except I'm not named after my mother's literary idols."

So no, Sunny doesn't give into that feeling anymore. She's twenty-three now, and she makes a whopping four pounds an hour at a job she mildly likes, and sure, she's not sure she wants to make coffee and serve pastries for the rest of her life but as her friends keep reminding her, she's twenty-three. A foetus in the eyes of the universe, if that. A speck. An amoeba. What's smaller than an amoeba? She isn't sure; she barely scraped a C in GCSE biology, but the universe doesn't give a fuck about her and she finds that oddly soothing.

I am virtually nothing, she sometimes thinks with a distant smile, and the universe agrees, so why am I stressed?

It's easy for her to think too hard about the vastness of the earth and the galaxy and beyond; it's so easy to slip into a dissociative state where she quietly ponders the meaning of it all, the point of it all. Because what is the point of humanity when all we do is live and die? Sunny sure as hell doesn't know.

When she was a child, she loathed the moments when her brain wandered down that path, paralysing her in place. She would be sitting on the floor of the school hall in assembly, six years old, silently panicking about the vastness of space and the insignificance of her. Now she thinks – ah. Everything will be okay. Because in the end, nothing matters. And if the history books will forget her name, why should she lose sleep over her lack of direction? Everyone ends up in the same place, after all.

These are the places her mind goes to as she makes coffee after coffee, her hands working on autopilot to fix mochas and cappuccinos, plating cakes and heating sandwiches. The monotony is a reliable comfort: she gets to work and she serves drinks and cleans tables until her feet start to ache, and then she works a few more hours until the end of her shift. In summer she gets to watch the day change, when she arrives at work when the sun is still high and she finishes when night has sunk its teeth in. The same can't be said for February. Dreary, droopy February.

The problem with winter: the days are so short that they merge into a hazy, nebulous blur that consists of eat-work-sleep on repeat until Sunny's version of a weekend rolls around – Wednesday, one a.m. until Friday, five p.m. – when she sleeps too much and eats too much and naps on the bus with her Walkman in her hand, the sun long gone by four o'clock.

The bonus of winter: early dark means cosy nights; cold hands wrapped around a hot mug; crackling log fires when she drags herself across town for a couple of days' respite with her mothers in their creaking house with its creaking willow tree.