The Pause by John Larkin Page B

guess they don’t want us either slashing our wrists or gazing too long at the shadows we’ve become.
    Back in the room I notice that the blind is sandwiched between two thick glass panes. You canadjust the daylight or the dark by turning a dial built into the frame but otherwise there’s no escape through either the window or the cord.
    Even though it’s still morning, the nurse helps me into bed and returns minutes later with the promised pills. I attempt to display an interest in my recovery by asking her what they are, but I couldn’t care less. Anything’s got to be better than this. She tells me that it’ll calm some of my anxiety and help me sleep.
    â€˜It will take a little while,’ she says, ‘but you need to reboot. We all need to reboot sometimes.’ She smiles at me. ‘Not everyone gets a second chance. You’re one of the lucky ones. From this point on, each day is a bonus.’ She pats me on the leg. ‘Make the most of it.’
    I think she’s probably going beyond her job description by saying this but I know she’s right. I came so close to throwing my life away and so now I owe it to myself, my friends, my family, Lisa or the girls I’m yet to meet, and the children I’m yet to have, not just to survive but to prosper. But first I must heal. First I must reboot.
    I swallow my meds, already familiar with the language of the psych unit, and the effect that washes over me is almost immediate. It’s like gentle waves lapping at your feet on a blistering summer’s day. I want to plunge into the ocean andbe carried away but Mum comes into the room to hug me goodbye and tell me that she’ll be back later and ask if there’s anything I need. I try to tell her that I don’t need anything, not even Lisa, but my speech is slurred, because of the drugs, because of the day.
    The pills gently unravel my twisted nerves so that I can breathe again. I try desperately to fight off the sleep it brings so that I can enjoy the effects a little longer. I reach for my phone to send Chris a text to tell him that I won’t be able to hang at the mall with him tonight. I see that it’s flashing. I pick it up and try to adjust my vision to the screen but the drugs aren’t helping my focus. I adjust my eyes enough to see that someone has sent me a text. I open it but I don’t recognise the number.
    Hey D. Hope you’re surviving.
    Mum took my phone.
    Email when I can. Love L XXX
    Through the haze of drug-induced semi-consciousness, I hardly even have time to process the idea that the text was from Lisa before sleep cradles me and carries me away.

Here’s an interesting fact. You don’t exist. You can’t possibly. The author/mathematician Ali Binazir sat down and calculated the chances of your existence, sparing you the tedious necessity of having to do it yourself. At a mathematical level, your existence comes in at one in 10 2,685,000 . Which is so close to zero it is zero.
    First of all there are the chances of your parents actually meeting. If your father was particularly sociable – and not too keen on sleep or actually doing any work once he got to the office – he could have met about two hundred million women before he turned forty, not including those who volunteer to appear as the studio audience in infomercials andshould be automatically excluded from procreating. A slightly shy male, providing he doesn’t attend Star Trek conventions (which would disqualify him from procreating or at least meeting someone to procreate with) would meet around ten thousand women. Even allowing for these conservative odds, the chances of your mother being one of these women is about one in twenty thousand. Having then met, the chances of them getting along, hanging out, being attracted to each other, dating, marrying and staying together despite various incompatibilities and disputes is now one in two thousand.