Careless abandon.
I have always wanted to be one of those people that have their possessions strewn across their bed whilst they sleep. You know the kind of person I’m talking about — the kind of person who falls asleep whilst watching Netflix, who sleeps with their make-up on, and leaves the washing up until tomorrow.
To wake up and have your laptop asking if you want to continue watching Peep Show is the absolute pinnacle, in my view, of earthly virtue. I would be absolutely delighted to have such a heedless sleeping pattern. I would be thrilled to possess such an absent-minded attitude towards technological items charging on a flammable surface in the night. On those rare occasions when I do find a hairbrush stuffed recklessly between my blanket and duvet in the night, I am filled with a sense of inexplicable satisfaction, a sense of the careless abandon that may now typify my existence, now that I have become the kind of person that drifts off with a hairbrush in their bed.
I think to myself ‘Oops. I was just *so* filled with spontaneous whimsy that I completely forgot to survey my physical and psychological surroundings before bed. I am *so* carefree that I think not of such trivial matters. Maybe tomorrow I’ll buy an iced latte without checking my Monzo first, or go out to Sainsbury's without locking the door precisely five times. The possibilities are endless.’
I have always aspired to the climes of those precipitous individuals that do not try to control every aspect of themselves and their environment. I confess that I do envy those who assume that everything is in its rightful place without checking first. It is my eternal ambition to be nonchalant in my attitude to daily life — to turn up late without a preformulated excuse (and to get away with it too), to start work on that essay three days before it is due and not have a complete meltdown because of it, to go up and start talking to somebody without a contrived plan to make them believe that I too am as footloose-and-fancy-free (to use a phrase outdated by about two hundred years) as them.
Some people might believe that I am a casual person upon first impressions. I shall do nothing to dispel this myth, as it is a façade that I have spent a long time carefully constructing. However, it is a complete and utter fabrication.
I do admit that perhaps everybody else feels exactly the same way as me, but are just not vocalising their parochial neuroses in the same way as I am. I sometimes feel that everyone must be wandering around, pondering to themselves whether they walked up the stairs in the ‘wrong’ way, panicking that their train ticket isn’t still in their pocket even though they’ve checked about thirty times in the same number of minutes, and secretly worrying that they’ve left the gas on.
Other people look so effortless when they go out into the world. I have to remind myself that they too might be putting on a brave face and going about their business, simply doing the best they can. I really try to put myself in their shoes, to imagine what they are thinking when they’re reading on the tube. Are they just reading the words in front of them, lost in the story that the narrator is offering to them on the page? Or are they worried about whether their hair looks ‘squiffy’, whether their shoelace is untied, and what station that have to get out at to change onto the Piccadilly line? I would love to know.
But if this hallowed nonchalantness (if that is a word?) exists, I wish I had it. Life would no longer be a matter of simply coping, but would become a delightful breeze. If I were to wake up tomorrow and find I had rolled over a spare dinnerplate in the night, I would be ecstatic.