I had never thought much about birds before I met Muddy. Any interest that I had in them, and the various species that inhabited Britain, was because of him. There were a lot of things I hadn’t considered before I met him. I’d often thought of life as something to be bargained with, to be battled with. It was an entity to which you repeatedly justified your existence, to which you made your case for why it deserved to be embellished with happiness and love and friendship. There was something almost mythical about people for whom it hadn’t been this way, people who were simply entitled to
I had never thought much about birds before I met Muddy. Any interest that I had in them, and the various species that inhabited Britain, was because of him. There were a lot of things I hadn’t considered before I met him. I’d often thought of life as something to be bargained with, to be battled with. It was an entity to which you repeatedly justified your existence, to which you made your case for why it deserved to be embellished with happiness and love and friendship. There was something almost mythical about people for whom it hadn’t been this way, people who were simply entitled to happiness by virtue of being alive. Muddy often made me feel as if I deserved to be one of these people. His enthusiasm for his own life made mine feel better by association. It was an enthusiasm that seeped into quotidian things like swimming, various kinds of rock music, karaoke, and, yeah, birds. The first time I saw him was on a warm afternoon in July. I’d just returned home to Dartford from university, and I had no intention of going back. I stood in the woods by my flat, staring at a small X-Acto knife cradled in my palm. I thought I’d submerged myself somewhere that felt thickly wooded enough that nobody would see me. It was so quiet. From the trees to the dirt to the wildflowers, it felt as if the woods were closing in on themselves. The quiet hadn’t brought with it any peace; in fact, it had amplified my ominous thoughts. I pressed my eyes shut and begged life for something it had...
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quotidian /kwōˈtidēən/ I. adjective — [attrib.] 1. of or occurring every day; daily • the car sped noisily off through the quotidian traffic. 2. ordinary or everyday, especially when mundane • his story is an achingly human one, mired in quotidian details. 3. [Medicine] denoting the malignant form of malaria. – origin Middle English: via Old French from Latin quotidianus, earlier cotidianus, from cotidie ‘daily.’
