Focus by A. R. Craftier

By A. R. Craftier | Graphics by Joanne Guo

It is 10:01am on Sunday, the 30th of August. It is windy clock tick-tock through the long, agonising seminars. outside, and I am still in bed. Four minutes have passed. I have checked my social media, replied to all that I The days are blending, the minutes stretching and needed to, and have begun writing the creative non- coalescing, my world shrinking into this little room, in this fiction I promised a friend I would write. little house, in this quiet, lonely neighbourhood. When we turn on the news at 12, we either cheer at the good I did not do it yesterday, on account of some drama news or groan at bad – perhaps both. And then we ask: occurring, and the other assignment I had due, as well as some revision for another subject. The day before ‘What’s for dinner?’ that, I was finishing my three-day grind to translate and proofread a 60-page long monster of a manga chapter. My mum leaves for the shops by herself, and I head back to my room, either staring at the half-written work on my I do not remember what I was doing the week before, desk or the messages upon my screens or the distant but it likely included rushing lectures and watching the world outside my window. I do not really think about

what I am missing this year. Well, the first year of university do all these things matter? was meant to be that year, the year I got off my ass, and put effort into getting my life sorted. I planned to find a There are so many things I could be doing, but instead, I job, find an apartment, and find friends; find a place for check the calendar, noting how many weeks I have left myself in the world. A step into adulthood. to procrastinate all my university work.

But here I am, still in bed at 10:37am on a Sunday, It is 2:47pm now. I just spent the last two hours playing hunger gnawing holes in my chest, wondering if I care a Monopoly game and lost miserably. It was fun when I enough to write something good. I have reached the was not losing, but the game is over now. I checked my stage where I close my eyes and put my thoughts on social media. Opened my laptop. Started writing again. paper, loosely related to a topic but not quite there. I am not an outdoor person, no, and I am not particularly beginning to grate me. I wake up, check my phone, stay It feels like the dragged-out high school months spent step out of my room. The house feels cold and haunted. just outside my peripheral. A sense of nothingness. peeling away from reality. I have two folios due by the end of Week 6. I do not know exactly when they are due, but instead, they just loom over me. The thought of them makes me tired. It is 11:29am. I am eating a delicious breakfast – brunch? – and there are three silent people in the kitchen with me. All of us on our devices. Once I finish my food, we will harvest the potatoes we have been growing for the last few months. We do not have much hope in them. I have yet to finish this piece. What point was I trying to make here? What am I even writing? This is not a diary, so why am I treating it like one? I still have those folios. For one of them, I need to collect nine news articles, do an interview, and make a TV series review. I want to rewrite the assignment I did yesterday. I want to finish the fanfiction I told a friend I was going to write; I want to start writing a book. I am not doing any of them. I do not know exactly when they are due. Why I still do not know what I am writing. I sit at the dining Perhaps my writing this piece comes at the right time. I table, listening to dinner plans and typing a few words a feel like I am going crazy. minute. I check the COVID cases in Victoria. Google tells unhappy about staying inside, but god, it is truly That’s the extent I give to it. I move on with my day. me it is 99. Thanks, Google. in bed for maybe an hour or less, and then pretend to be There’s nothing else to say about it. I have not left the productive by staring at my computer screen. house in weeks, and all I do is talk to equally bored and healthy friends in a world separate from mine. My world I eat, I shit, I sleep. I stare at screens until a little ball of is massive, yet so small. I feel alone in a way different pain forms in the front of my head, and I wait for the sun to all other times. It is so close, yet so far. I am there, but to move across the sky, hidden in the clouds. This is not not. A world in turmoil exists, but I do not know of it. I what I wanted for my first year of university. am just here, in this chair, writing a piece for people I do on assignments, with no solid friendships, no reason to Here I sit, alone. It feels like limbo. There’s an emptiness lingering It is 3:13pm. Why does my time pass this way? Pessimism. Existentialism. Stress. A descent into silence, I am tired.

not know. I have an assignment to do.