Kiki's Day Off

Kiki didn’t normally work all that hard. Her job mainly consisted of replying to emails, sitting in meetings and offering her manager tea. She was very junior in a very big company and she suspected she was probably replaceable by AI. Fortunately, no one seemed to have noticed - yet.

She had been given a day off because she hadn’t used all her annual leave. Her manager had grudgingly informed her that it would actually be illegal for her to come to work.

She hadn’t had time to plan anything.

So she lay in bed in the morning and wondered what to do.

In the past, that wouldn’t have been a difficult question to answer. When she was younger, Kiki was incredibly creative. She painted, danced, drew and played music. While the other kids played video games, she always had another big project to work on — whether it was practising for the next ballet recital, art class or school concert.

Even when she got to university, she was pretty active with all that stuff. She joined clubs and societies and made friends that way. When she graduated with her degree in communications, she was still planning to be a performer or an artist of some form. But the first question that had arisen was, well, what specifically? Because she’d always loved so many different things - she’d never been obsessed with one in particular. And then, as she made some valiant efforts to become more ‘professional’, she discovered all the issues with being an artist. It was ultra competitive, there was no money for anyone and the things that people did pay for weren’t exactly the things she’d always dreamed of doing.

So slowly she came to terms with the fact that adult life might mean doing something a bit less, well, fun. She polished up her CV, got a job, and a boyfriend (although that didn’t last), and that pretty much took her to here, today, with all the free time in the world.

Truthfully, as Kiki woke up, she didn’t feel relieved or excited by the empty day ahead. She felt a little bit scared. Scared, because she didn’t want to watch TV or see a friend or go for a run. She felt strangely paralysed by the fact that she didn’t really want to do anything at all.

Of course the elephant in the room was that at any other point of her life she’d have set about creating something. But she felt overwhelmingly weighed down by the fact that there didn’t seem to be much point in the idea anymore. After all, she wasn’t going to do it professionally. She wasn’t going to get all that much better. So it would be a project with no destination. A fruitless act of labour for no one in particular. Harder work than just sitting in bed all day, staring at the wall.

Kiki knew all the usual arguments surrounding such things. She knew that one could just have a hobby for the sake of it and it didn’t need to amount to anything in particular. She knew that doing something, anything, usually felt better than doing nothing at all. But for some reason, that wasn’t good enough for her today. Instead, she felt a curious desire to honour the part of her that couldn’t be bothered to do anything at all. Maybe that was a desire for rest, or maybe it was something deeper. Because this story is supposed to end with her overcoming her reluctance and setting quietly about some amateur artistic activity for the sake of it. But Kiki, always the contrarian, decided she wasn’t interested in that today.

So she just lay there in bed. All day. Not in a ridiculous way. She still went to the bathroom and made herself food. She still answered her texts. But mostly, that is for the vast majority of the day, she simply lay there, awake, staring at the ceiling. And yes, she was sort of depressed, but it wasn’t as simple as that. Because what she was trying to do was become genuinely compassionate towards the part of her that screamed that there was no point to anything. Because, in a way, it was right.

And the more she lay there and the more she accepted that she needn’t do anything or create anything or become anything — the more relaxed she started to feel. The more she compared herself to the cow in the field or the squirrel in the tree, the more she realised that she would one day die and it would be the same as it always was before she was alive. The more she realised that while her matter had assembled itself for the short period of being Kiki, there was no need to desperately struggle and strain to shout her own existence from the rooftops. It was okay to simple be, to simply mull over the extremely odd sensation of being alive. Of being able to do a million clever things: start a company, start a band, start a revolution - and yet choosing, in a small act of true rebellion - to simply do nothing at all.