Nearly went under... but not quite

It sucks to be me this week.

My work, study, and personal lives are all COMPLETE crap right now. I'm down to about a third of my usual energy, the sheer frustration of scheduling projects and meetings is leaving precisely zero hours for actual study, I'm more undecided about the future than I've ever been. Not to mention I've lost a WHOLE THREE MINUTES from my 1600m time and my heart's stuffed with a writhing mass of blackness even a twenty-year-old Executive Stress Relief Consultant from Latvia can't cure.

Life sucks this week. And then it got worse.

There's a pair of swans on the lake near the postgrad block.

Only one of them returned from its winter break. Plowing forlornly back and forth beneath the little bridge, lost without its partner, unable to take Warwick Lakeside any other way.

And it all but broke me. I stood there for five minutes, quietly sobbing.

I can deal with all the project work, the hundreds of pages of reading, the demands of clients back in London, and the - let's face it - that 'other thing' that happened this week. But the death of a swan just pushed me over the edge. It was the sight of its bereaved partner, and being reminded of what my suddenly-solo avian friend had just realised: life has no purpose, no reason, no goals or targets or Key Performance Indicators, save those we impose upon it. Life is without meaning.

The cold, infinite, suffocating dark goes on forever, and we are alone.

Tonight I'll buy a small bottle of wine and pour it into the lake, remembering what shouldn't be forgotten. I hope those swans had at least a year or two together before tragedy struck.

Goodbye, my aquatic friend. You helped me feel something.