Fire

Yesterday afternoon UK time (middle of the night NZ time), my boyfriend's accommodation caught fire. Everyone escaped unhurt, but many of the student's rooms were trashed, their belongings beyond repair. Luckily, all his valuables remained undamaged but he is unable to return to his room, as the linking corridor has been destroyed. He is now staying in youth hostel-eqsue accommodation in a local Christian Commune, where alcohol is prohibited (which I imagine is not particularly helping) and hopes to be moved to temporary accommodation by the end of the week.

Today, I am a ghost of myself. Even choosing beans on toast for lunch instead of local-notaste soup in a vain attempt to cheer myself up fell flat and I'm now feeling a bit queasy. I'm now on my 5th or 6th cup of tea, I've lost count, and by body is deluding my mind into thinking that it is pre-caffeine. All my limbs feel incredibly heavy and I have spent a good deal of today staring at my computer, my arms draped unproductively over the keyboard and the tips of my fingers unusually still.

Last night, after an intense period of worry and a flurry of phone calls, I managed to happily consume a bottle of wine with my boyfriend's sister and my SP (that's each, by the way - we should have just opened one each and drunk it through a straw). I managed to not think about it too much and my boyfriend seemed to be in fairly good spirits considering the circumstances, he sent me a text message saying he was drinking beer, waiting for his breakfast at 5:15 am so while things were far from normal, at least he still had an appetite.

Today though the realisation has slowly seeped in and I have become more and more exhausted with every hour, despite my deep alcohol-drenched sleep last night. Some of his friends have lost pretty much everything they took out with them, from what I can gather.

I am wondering how the rest of the families are feeling back in the UK, whether they have barely thought about it as everyone's safe, or whether they are feeling like I am. I can barely type and my concentration span on a scale of 1 to 10 is winging its way speedily into negative figures.

Fire is terrifyingly unforgiving and incredibly fast moving. My boyfriend's belongings were only saved because he closed his door on his way out, those who didn't managed to salvage very little. They are having to leave a lot of their smoke-damaged property for the insurers to record.

Today I am feeling: useless. I have a lot of emotion that is circling continually inside myself, unable to vent apart from through the gratuitous abuse of a variety of colourful words at my poor laptop monitor (it has suffered greatly during its short lifespan, continually at the receiving end of The WebStress's vicious tongue) upon receiving yet another extremely frustrating email from a client who is, yet again, changing their forever unsatisfied minds about the positioning of a tiny graphical element that, of course, is in itself wholly responsible for the ineffective running of the company if it remains where it currently is (quite a responsibility for a 1px transparent gif, I'm sure you'll agree).

Events like this make you realise the importance of life and the unimportance of belongings. They endeavour to force my acknowledgment of an ever present physical divide between myself and my boyfriend. They make me know how truly far away he really is. And they make me miss him more than I ever thought I could.

And they make me really, really, really hate being a web designer. Because, while the client clearly really cares on positioning of said graphic, I really, really, really don't. And today I am having to use all my remaining energy resources, scraping the barrel to try and use its over tired remnants, to make sure I don't tell them that.