In response to a question from L____, I decided that I’m not really sure how I’m feeling at the moment—which is less due to any lack of feeling or insight, and more due to a scrum of competing feelings and concerns, some of which have hung in the balance for the better part of a year, others which are fresher but more pressing. If we were going for a metaphor (and when am I ever not?), it feels like waiting in the early hours at the central bus station of a minor town in a country you don’t know well, a long way from the few citizens who you could realistically call on for help, to see which of three or four prospectively scheduled busses will actually appear, at which point you may be able to determine which one (if any) has seats to spare, and thus decide (or at least have your options narrowed by circumstance regarding) where you’re going to be driven to in the dark hours before dawn.

(Having written that out, it now seems awfully melodramatic, but nonetheless that’s the vibe. The whole confusion-in-the-middle-of-the-night bit may very well be connected to having been woken mid-dream at 3:30am by the Malmö police helicopter charging around the neighbourhood for an hour at what sounded like a very low altitude, but the imagery is very much of Mexican bus-stations during my travels there back in 2003.)

More plainly, I’m still waiting on decisions for some outstanding applications, which are due to drop in the next few weeks, and have reached a point where I almost (but not quite) wish I’d never made the damned applications in the first place, because balancing the hope of success against the statistical likelihood of failure (after a year of hard work and disappointment) is becoming a sort of crescendo of tension, making it hard to get on with anything.

And of course there’s lots to get on with, such as finishing up the Marie Curie project and writing the associated report for the funders, due around the same date as the decisions mentioned above. Add to that a very exciting and interesting fiction commission which is nonetheless quite large, very tightly specified, confined to a very short delivery period, and (it turns out) completely unlike anything I’ve ever written before, thus throwing me deep into terra incognita in terms of technique even as it drops a breezeblock into the bathtub of my scheduling…

… and yeah, ok, tiny violin, file under problems that many people would be very glad to have, etc etc. The work I can cope with, but the uncertainty is playing havoc with my ability to do the work. I need those decisions made so that I can know which busses I have the option of boarding, but I also don’t want those decisions made because they’re likely to be negative and painful. All I want in this exact moment is to know where I’m going, to be able to commit to whatever option is actually on the the table, but instead I’m sat waiting on a metaphorical concrete bench, smoking metaphorical knock-off Marlboro Lights that some guy warned me probably have fiberglass in the filters, and staring at the metaphorical sickly actinic light spilling out of an all-but-empty vending machine while an old man with an impassive and stoic face slowly mops the floor.

But sometimes all there is to do is wait, and to fill the time of the waiting with whatever you can put your mind to. So that’s what I’m doing, or trying to do.