Distraction

Found while retrieving a shopping list from the notes in the organiser section on my mobile phone:

‘Someone needs to call T out on her relationship with Mik and say it’s time to let him go. Debbie?’

Work, and the ongoing task of optimising a text for someone else’s translation when any personal engagement I had with it dissipated months ago (yet that’s the one that’s going to have my real name on it…), has been taking its toll on my short-term memory for other things all month, but this is a step up. I have no flaming idea who any of these people are. I do know, like every woman in the southern suburbs, my fair share of Debbies, but couldn’t say I was on sufficiently intimate terms with any of them to ask them to become an emotional go-between between myself and T and Mik. When did Mik ever become so toxic? And at what stage of work-induced tiredness did I even meet a man and woman who had nicknames like those?

Why don’t I have the strength of character to deal with this myself instead of implicating Debbie?

‘Mik’ gives a clue. At some stage this week, I must have briefly turned my mind to a short story that has never worked since January but still compels me to explore its setting. I’m still not sure I’ve found the right characters to do it with. But two of them do have names that could be shortened down to T and Mik. And T, although not Mik, does know a Debbie.

At some stage this week, I must have come close enough to believing in these characters as real people. And lost that sense immediately before I could go back and edit the story the right way.