tiresome

I have a new job in the Inventory Control department of British Steel Services, tapping 8-digit product codes into their database. I hate it but I stumble through the hours wordlessly, fighting a constant losing battle against a weariness that worsens by the day. While I was in Italy my previous employers decided they didn't need me any more, and that there was not much point my going back. I started this new placement the next morning, and haven't even gone back to the old place return my key. I'm sure I've left things in my desk but I'm too tired to cope with the drama of turning up there, hearing their explanations, saying my farewells. If I've left a place I've left it, particularly jobs; I very rarely want to think about it again.

Now I'm sitting on the top floor of these city centre offices and the raspberry & echinacea tea I'm drinking tastes like soil in my mouth. I watch the slow progress of the clock in the corner of my screen mournfully, although I'm not sure what it is I'm mourning. These golden September days, perhaps, days I should be spending reading my texts for next year, sitting crosslegged on my bed in the afternoon sun, a book in my lap, mentally preparing myself for term? Or is it my whole summer, divided between frantic escapes by train at weekends and an introverted limbo inbetween? Summers in your home town should be careless, relaxed, spent with old friends in city haunts, drinking and smoking. A ritual farewell to adolesence. (Or perhaps I'm wrong, perhaps the lonely emptiness Leicester holds for me now does have meaning, perhaps it signals once and for all that I don't have a place here any more.) It could be this melancholy is simply exhaustion; I'm tired of leaving those I love and facing a bleak week of work alone, I'm tired of missing people. It's tedious, and I'm sick of counting days - until I leave, until I see him again, until I once again pack my life into boxes and rejoin my real life in Cambridge, which I feel has been waiting for me during my long absence, holding its breath. I want to arrive somewhere and actually stay there long enough to be happy.

I'm being ridiculous, I know. It's just that I'm so bored of this now. My weekend with Iain was wonderful but I'm sick of coming back here, each and every time. I'm desperate to write about Italy but I can't find the words. It seems so far away. Maybe I'll feel better about all this tonight. I'm going to go get myself a coffee.