…in which I can’t move. It’s me, years from now. Or maybe sooner: I don’t know. I am bedbound, chairbound, housebound. I don’t know which: just bound. No longer able to move the way I want to, my brain the only thing left that cooperates.

What haunts me, then? Time spent watching So You Think You Can Dance. Time spent complaining. Time spent doing anything other than tearing the skin off every moment, sloppy and juice-dripping.

You idiot, snaps the me of then to the me of now. Leave the house.

Somedays, I feel incredibly fortunate. I’m not nearly oppressed or tormented enough to be a celebrated novelist, entrenched with ten cats and a pantry full of canned peas and one constant, nubby cardigan (although at this rate, it may well happen... all except the 'celebrated novelist' part).

But I make a living, writing. In the business sphere, the kind of writing that wears khakis and deck shoes. Dismissed by true creatives that ooze authenticity through unemployment, or turmoil, or cafe-scribbling sacrifice.

I should be a more interesting person than I am, saying it: writer. But I do it, between dribble castles and floor tumbles and teddy puffs, and I like it.

Otherdays, I feel incredibly mediocre. Pasty and wheezing. Entire days slipping by from sheer laziness, bereft of substance, elements, earthly vigor.

I see our yoga teacher at the farmer's market, a human sprite who shames me with her glow. She rides hundreds of miles in the rain on her roadbike and she has the most amazing pistons for legs and she knows how to breathe and she chants in sanskrit like she really, truly believes it and her cheeks are always rosy and her eyes are filled with sparkling, interested goodness. Being in her presence is like being outside after rain, refreshing and unencumbered and brimming with possibilities.

Next to her I am a bowl of forgotten three-hour-old oatmeal, gummy and resistant and full of excuses and good intentions.

Athletes have always been a mystery to me. The way they would wither away without movement, without wind, without sprays of mud and battle bruises. They’re hungry and passionate and driven by something that I’ve only ever glimpsed. They seem to live life more than I do, through sheer discipline. Pushing and gripping and bonking and relishing.

Cue self-loathing funk. Cue too much of my own baking.

I need the Ghost of Christmas Future to visit me, shock me with the date of my confinement. You have X more days to run, to plunge, to sweat. Then you’re done, left to think and rot and lust for just one more day of blissful ignorance. A suddenly unrequited passion for life, too late. Only then will you know the true value of legs and lungs and your own ka-thump.

Does it all add up to a downer, or an upper, for past-life band geeks? I can't decide.