The Mariner

[The Mariner] lay in bed, awake despite the early hours. Not the early hours of horror films, usually around the one-thirty mark, but the genuine early hours. The sort that make you wince and want to poke out your eyes at a glimpse of the clock. Hours beyond three and before six. Those are true witching hours, the horrifying ones that bring despair to the insomniac.

His wife lay beside him, breathing gently. She moved slightly in her slumber and murmured. A stranger might take this as a sign of waking, but he’d been married to her for years and spouses learn their partner’s sleeping patterns better than their own. She was in deep, as far into the Land of Nod as he was out of it. Tonight, for him, that land was off-limits. He was barred.

[The Mariner] stared at the ceiling whilst idly fidgeting with his cock, trying to lure his mind into erotic fantasy, rather than dwelling upon concerns. But he failed. The pecker failed to peck. Concerns won the night.

Work was one of them. Not far off, the hours would slide by with the resistance of oil. Soon he’d be presented with what he regarded the ‘early morning apocalypse’, when no matter what the day promised, he would wake consumed by a terror of it. Only in films did people open they eyes, yawn and greet the morn with a smile upon their face. Real people kept theirs tightly shut, hoping and praying and pleading against the mechanical protests of their alarm clock. A miniature CIA agent, employing torture of the most persistent kind. There must be some mistake. There had to be. Could life truly be this dreadful?

The morning mourning would pass (given enough coffee), but the depression would not relent. It would look over every thought that passed through his mind like a conveyor belt before a quality inspector, twisting and morphing. A tabloid stance on every topic. Always the worst. Always the darkest.

Crippling. Even now, in the dead of night when there was no social interaction to be had, his chest hurt from the tightness of a panic attack. Day in and day out he felt as if he were on top of a roller-coaster about to plunge from an enormous height. Except that moment never came. He was left with the expectant feeling and never the release. It made him want to scream, but of course he never did.

Well… almost never.

Sometimes, on nights like this, he stuffed a towel into his mouth so sound couldn’t escape and howled. For a second, as he expelled every cubit of air in his lungs till they shook, he’d believe the pain had escaped, that perhaps he’d birthed the horrible monster inside him, but it was all a cruel trick. It was still there, deep down. It always was.

His psychotherapist had suggested that all the problems stemmed back to childhood. Apparently all the problematic behaviour could be traced to those early days. Not a difficult child, but perhaps one a tad too quiet, too withdrawn, too needy for approval. And perhaps that had been caused by the incident with the pillow?

Well, whatever the cause, be it parental influence, chemical imbalance, or just a sharp knock to the head, what’s done was done. He was stuck with a mind that viewed the world through a tint.

3:47

Time steadily progressed and still sleep eluded him. Once again he tried to fantasise in the hope that an orgasm would release enough endorphins to end this rut. Like any man, he conjured images pornographic in style, lacking setting or plot. Simple, functional and explicit. Fantastically pliable and sluttish women entertained, dragging his mind away from the cycle of anxiety and into lust.

And then, just as things were looking up, an image he spent his waking life trying to avoid popped in. Her, his wife, with him. That arsehole who’d managed to plague his insecurities ever since he’d blundered into their lives five years ago. Martin Marling, his wife’s temporary darling. And the man he wanted to kill.

But kill him he couldn’t, because he’d never met the man. He’d never attended one of his wife’s work socials (perhaps if he had, they never would have begun flirting and the whole horrible situation could have been avoided), and thus had never so much as laid eyes on her supervisor. Martin Marling. World-class shit.

Her indiscretions, three indiscretions, had occurred years ago. A brief trio of secret liaisons at her supervisor’s flat, all occurring over a short period of time and followed up with a tearful confession. It almost tore their marriage apart. Accusations were made, regretful words said, but ultimately he forgave her. What else could he do? He loved her. Love is like that; it’s not the all-or-nothing commodity, as seen in films and teen-dramas, easily gained and just as easily lost. Once love’s worked its way inside you, no amount of pain will tear it loose.