Sakura Self-Destruct

By Simon Rooney

Sakura Self-Destruct is a story of how one man’s sufferings led him to discover a life-changing realization. Jason Colbach is a reclusive Englishman who lives a pitiful life. He is poor, unemployed and mainly survives off the meager welfare benefits provided by the government. Jason’s feelings of worthlessness are tempered momentarily by getting high each day. Marijuana seems to be the only remedy for his woes. Not many things are important to Jason besides marijuana, but the sakura tree outside his window is very dear to him. Unfortunately, neither smoking weed nor the tree can help Jason with his family dilemmas and growing pressures from Sergei, his marijuana dealer. When his therapist introduces him to the practice of mindfulness, Jason begins to embrace the concepts. Will this simple practice be life-changing enough to set Jason on a new path or will it be too late for him?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Simon Rooney
• Release date: Mar 5, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005744205

Simon Rooney

Simon Rooney lives in the U.K. He has a degree in Philosophy and Art History and a PGC in Buddhist studies. He is a qualified Yoga Instructor and has practised Yoga for over twenty-five years and has practised Yang style Tai Chi Chuan for over ten years. He has studied scriptures and meditation techniques from a wide variety of different spiritual traditions, in particular Hinduism, Taoism and Buddhism. As well as writing literature he also writes poetry and plays and writes music.

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SAKURA

SELF-DESTRUCT

Simon Rooney

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Copyright © Simon Rooney 2019

ISBN 9 781707 015986

1

One of the things I can’t really explain is how exactly I ended up where I am. I’m not too sure I can put it into words, and to be honest I don’t think you’d understand even if I could, but for the sake of a good story, I’m gonna at least try.

Where I used to be, everything seemed to start somewhere, so I’ll start where I think things began; a couple of weeks ago on a pretty standard day, lying on the floor on my ten year old pancaked mattress, without a bed, trying to feel the hardness and flatness of the floor beneath me. I was having a common daydream of mine, just trying to imagine what it would feel like if I jumped off a car park or some other high building and hit the hard ground beneath me - trying to imagine the split second of impact and wondering what I’d feel in that instant before the ground smashed me to pieces and I could finally get away from it all.

I try to imagine if it’d hurt, or even if there’d be time to hurt. Whether I’d actually feel all the bones in my body being hit with a massive amount of force, like the feeling you get in your skull when you head a really hard football that’s had too much air pumped into it, and been kicked about thirty feet up into the sky on a freezing cold day. That heavy, dull, thudding feeling pounding you with an almighty shock wave that travels through your whole body. Or maybe it’d be a sharper, more intense kind of bone-crunching pain like when you smack your shin on a table, but all over you, and way stronger.

The thought of it gave me a bit of comfort. My violent, self-destructive fantasies were the only solace I had sometimes, and would you believe there were actually people out there who wanted to fucking take them away from me! I’m sure they were well-intentioned and only trying to help, and despite my general disdain for do-gooders I had to reluctantly admit we may have been aiming for the same thing.

It’s not that I wanted to be miserable, I mean who does? It’s a little contradictory that I was always thinking of topping myself, because when you look a bit closer the main reason that I fancied checking out was so I could stop constantly feeling like total shit, and sometimes the idea of not feeling anything was the closest I could get. I had a psychologist who claimed she wanted the same thing, though she didn’t express it quite like that.

As it happened I was due to visit her that day. The only reason I was going was because the Jobcentre had decided that my lack of motivation and general negativity was a ‘factor that may be limiting my chances of returning to work’ and if I didn’t go I'd get sanctioned. Sixty-five pounds a week is a paltry amount of money, but its value increases relative to no fucking pounds at all. I was on a reduced rate anyway as I was having deductions taken out of my benefits to pay back a budgeting loan I got to buy a new bike, the idea being it’d help me with finding a job. Between you and me, the bike never materialised but I had fun and ate like a king for a week - pizzas, ice-cream, cake, chocolate; things you just can’t afford on your normal giro.

I didn’t like having to go into the Jobcentre as it was always packed and generally I’m not a big fan of people. I especially didn’t like the type of people who'd judge me and look down on me. As I see it there’s always someone bigger than you and there’s always someone smaller. Despite having to go out and take part in society I suppose it could've been worse. The local Jobcentre was right in the centre of town and so was my flat, more or less.

My flat was nothing special, just a standard whitewashed council flat set in a block three floors high with about twenty flats on each floor. It kind of snaked round in a semicircle and there was another block of council flats the same size and shape opposite. In between the two blocks was a pathway and a green area, so looking out of my window my view was more flats and some trees and grass. There was a main road that was kind of out of sight, though not earshot, up on the left of the path between the two blocks.

It could get pretty noisy at times but I’d learnt to put up with it, and discovered earplugs, as I’d been there five years and I’d had to. I had people I didn’t know that well above and below me, and some to one side of me, as my flat was in the middle of the block on the first floor. The stairs were next to me and the next flat was on the other side of them. I had a good position in the block as I could look out my window and see the front entrance where there was a security door and a buzzer which didn’t always work properly so I was one of the few people in the building who knew who was calling whenever we had any visitors.

There was a tree just to the side of the front door that was about the height of my flat and sat covering about two-thirds of my front window. It got a few different birds sitting in it from time to time and had recently had two magpies start nesting in it. I think they’re beautiful birds and I’m not superstitious, though two are supposed to be for joy - which I never seemed to be getting much of. I sat watching them when they first turned up and one just seemed to sit around in the branches while the other was flying back and forth and always doing something. The less active one just seemed to be sitting thinking all the time, although I do a lot of that so we’d got something in common. The other one just made me remember how lazy I’d gotten.

I’ve heard somewhere magpies are part of the same family as crows and ravens, which were my favourite birds as they seemed a bit dark and mysterious, and I tried to hide my anti-social, depressed loner tendencies behind a mask of similar traits, although I’m sure what seemed mysterious in my head just came across as fucking odd to most. I’d also seen a squirrel, or tree rat as the caretaker called them, as well as a few cats. It was like watching a wildlife documentary sometimes.

Apart from the odd bit of grass in between the blocks, the tree was about the only piece of nature I got to see living in the part of the town centre I was in, and I could sometimes sit for hours looking out the window at it, especially in early spring when it got that pink sort of cherry blossom on it and in the summer when it was covered in leaves and partially blocked my window, helping me forget about the outside world. This day though was a cold, damp, miserable time of year and most of the leaves had long since fallen off, even though a few were still lying soggily decomposing on the floor with little auras of damp surrounding them. The bare branches still gave me some good cover though.

It was a beautiful tree, and there’s something about trees; the way they just stand there gracefully and silently whatever the weather or whatever is happening around them. I had to pass it every time I went out or came in and if no one was looking I’d often give its bark a pat and a stroke like it was a friend, which it kind of was. It was a rare and colourful living thing in a life that mostly felt grey, stunted, and dead.

It took about five or ten minutes to walk to town depending on how up or down I'd feel. I only had to walk down one main road and a couple of side streets which helped me avoid too many people. To be honest the main road wasn’t that bad despite it being busy. It was always covered in litter of various types, and the street signs were rusty and dirty, and so were the lampposts. I hadn’t noticed the ones that were turned off to save the council money as they never worked half the time anyway. It had changed a lot in the last few years, and now out of about thirty shops I reckon over twenty must have been foreign-owned. There were four barbers or hairdressers, or whatever they were, and they were always packed. One of them was full of North African looking guys with light brown skin and jet black hair, and they all seemed to get the same haircut, short and shaved around the sides and back and a bit left on top that was usually spiked up with a ton of gel or grease. Casually well-dressed groups of lads were usually standing about outside and they always seemed to have an angry, mean and distant look in their eyes that said ‘don’t fucking tread on me.’ They didn’t look like a happy bunch, to be honest, but I'd seen the news from some of them countries they’re from and maybe they'd got good reason to be pissed off.

Two of the others were always packed with black African guys sitting around laughing and joking and watching football on big screens. There was another, similar hairdressers but for women with hair extensions and beads and all sorts of sprays and creams and dyes on sale in the window. We’d got a halal butcher shop run by some Arabic looking types along the same stretch, two curry shops one of which was a takeaway and the other a restaurant, and a fresh fish shop which always seemed busy, despite the fact I’d never seen any locals shopping there, and it gave half the street a strong fishy smell which always reminded me of the sea and being at the seaside. And to top it off there were three different newsagents run by people who didn’t seem to speak much English, and two eastern European ‘minimarts’ covered with Lithuanian, Russian, and Polish flags that I recognised from playing computer football World Cups. They all seemed to stock a lot of drink and the window of one of them, from the floor to the ceiling, was packed with different types of vodka and beers and lagers that I’d never heard of. I hardly understood any of the different languages I heard being spoken around there and I couldn’t recognise half the fruit and vegetables on sale outside some of the shops.

I wouldn’t want you to think I was a racist. I was alright with them as it goes, it’s just it has changed a lot round here and changed too quickly, but I guess that’s the way of the world and I don’t have a say in who lives where. Plus, to be honest, half the shops along there would've been empty if it wasn’t for the foreign owners. I didn’t want to fit in and get along with anyone, and maybe they just wanted to be left alone too, and the fact that we all came from different backgrounds and didn’t speak the same languages really helped to create an environment where we could all just keep ourselves to ourselves and get on with our own business.

It wasn't one hundred percent foreigners on the main road though, so there was no need to vote for the far-right just yet. There was a normal English express supermarket on the corner where I did most of my shopping. It was pretty good in there too as they’d got those self-service tills so I didn’t have to interact too much with people in there either. Plus I was well aware there were plenty of parts of town, mainly populated by locals, where no one had immigrated to - or would want to - and they were just as much of a shit hole as the town centre was. When you’re skint and hopeless though, you’ve got to blame someone.

The streets seemed dirty and messy to me but I’m not sure if that’s because just about everything seemed to have a grey sheen on it to my eye. On the way into the Jobcentre, I had to pass a five storey car park that had been part of my escape plan fantasy. It’s the place I planned to jump from when I finally built up the courage to do what needed to be done. I wasn't scared of dying, I mean I thought the world would be just about the same with or without me, but I was scared of pain and of screwing the whole thing up - I once heard a story about a man who jumped off a car park and basically slid down the wall and survived but totally destroyed his legs and ended up a paraplegic.

I didn't think I'd ever do it, although feeling like doing it was a constant companion from one day to the next, and it was comforting to know that just a couple of minutes from where I was staying there was a potential exit for me. Of course, it wasn't my only planned escape route but it was one of my easier and more practical ones.

I was well aware I was a miserable bastard and the psychologist noticed it too in my first session but liked to give my misery a posh sounding name and medical label. I didn’t quite see things that way though I was prepared to admit I might have been wrong. It was unlikely but not impossible. My brain had rarely ever let me down and could analyse the shit out of anything. It was always thinking about all sorts of things and always running at high speed. How I saw it was that I didn’t have mental health problems, in fact, I really didn’t like labels. Anyone in my shoes would've been feeling shitty and maybe even a bit worse than me, on account of my thick hide and a fucking stubbornness a mule would've been proud of. I didn’t have much choice in life and like a lot of people I just couldn’t face dead-end, mundane jobs that physically wore you out and emotionally drained you, and where you had no hope of ever getting anywhere beyond being treated like a fucking serf and feeling more like a robot or a cog in a machine than a human being. On top of that, you got paid as little as legally possible, and it was tough to know you were working forty-odd hours doing shit you hated to literally earn a few pounds a week more than you got for signing on. So stuck between the two options of the dole or slavery is it any wonder I wasn't exactly buzzing?

As I dragged myself to the Jobcentre the weather made the morning feel miserable. The sky was entirely covered in dull-looking clouds that filtered the sunlight from a bright yellow-orange to a gloomy grey shadow that covered everything and always made it feel much earlier or later in the day. It’s an often-overlooked thing that us Brits live a large part of our lives in the shade like some kind of fucking slug or bug. It was also raining, a confusing type of rain, the fast sort of drizzle that's made up of tiny atom-like droplets. It caught me out as it looked as though it was hardly raining at all, but as I walked it stealthily drenched me and I ended up soaking wet and cold right through. This was soon countered though as I got closer to the Jobcentre building and started to anxiously sweat. Not only did the place have a bad atmosphere and a lot of bad associations for me but the building had an imposing and menacing air which only added to my feelings of anxiety.

It was dark red brick, really wide and three floors high, and had an entrance of two wide double doors in a central column that separated the place into two halves. The entrance was taller than the two wings, which had thirteen office windows on each side of each floor and the place had a shape and look that felt institutional, like a prison camp or something. Adding to my negative feeling was the fact I had to justify my existence every week to people who weren’t like me and hadn’t lived the life I’d lived. People who were narrow-minded about other people and the different ways they tried to get by. I didn’t like them much and they didn’t like me. I expect part of it is the fact that I’d been going in there so long they were sick of me. Another part of it was they didn’t know what to do with a loser like me which only highlighted the fact that they didn’t have as many answers as they thought they had, which is always painful for those smart-arsed, educated types.

I walked in past the rows of seating populated by the unkempt, unhealthy looking, world-weary people with sad, dejected expressions on their faces, walked towards desk four, my designated desk, and reached over the customer in front of me to put my signing-on book on my advisor's desk. She wasn't actually my advisor as I’d hardly seen the same person twice in a row the last couple of years. It was better in a way when you kept getting passed around, as nobody got to know you or your situation and you could sign on with less hassle. It was better not to build up too much of a personal relationship because then nobody really gave a shit whether you got a job or not, and in part that had allowed me to carry on living in the manner to which I'd become accustomed for the last few years or so.

It wasn't totally like that though as I’d had a couple of bleeding hearts who'd sent me on a few courses and that; and in actual fact, it should've been a breeze signing on that day as I had the psychologist appointment straight after, plus I'd taken a C.V. into a shop near my flat the week before. It was always an anxious wait though especially when you got an advisor who was a real ball breaker, but this time it looked good as I heard my name called and spotted the advisor was a young girl I’d seen before who, thankfully, if I remembered rightly, was a bit of a soft touch.

Mr. Colbach. Mr. Colbach please, my advisor shouted a little too quietly. Mr. Jason Colbach?

Yeah, I’m here, I shouted back raising my hand and walking towards her desk.

Hello sir, how are you this morning? she asked in an upbeat tone.

I’m okay, I half mumbled back.

And how has your job search been going?

Well obviously not that great or I wouldn’t be sitting here again would I? I replied mildly antagonistically.

OK, so have you managed to find any suitable vacancies to apply for in the last fortnight?

Well yeah, a couple but I’ve written it all down in my job search diary.

At this she looked at the few lines I’d written down that basically listed the few activities I’d taken part in over the last two weeks to try and find work including looking in the local newspaper twice, looking online a bit more than twice and handing in a C.V. to a local supermarket, where I’ve handed in an application three times already this year. After reading through my massive literary effort she looked up at me, with a look of resignation and asked the standard questions for Jobcentre protocol.

Are you registered to sign electronically?

Yep, I answered.

And have you done any work, paid or unpaid in the last two weeks?

Nope.

OK, Mr. Colbach, sign here please.

So I did sign there. Pretty easy money I’d have to say. As I got up to say goodbye my advisor seemed to urgently recall seeing an advert in an agency window for a kitchen porter, which was something I’d done before.

Perhaps you could pop in and apply today? she suggested a little hopelessly.

Erm, well actually I can’t today as I’ve been given an appointment to see the DWP psychologist but I could maybe pop in later in the week, maybe? I said accentuating the ‘maybe’ so as to highlight the fact that it definitely wasn’t a certainty.

Oh okay, she answered smiling in an unsure but upbeat tone with which she seemed to reassure herself. Her job was worthwhile and important because if I was seeing a psychologist then she was part of an organisation that was helping me to be a better person. Never even considering I may be willingly jumping through hoops out of quiet desperation because I live an impoverished, hand to mouth existence and have almost no other fucking option.

2

I walked nervously over to the seating area and sat outside the small side office that I’d had my first meeting with the Jobcentre psychologist in. The chairs were made of a cheap red material that looked like a soft fuzzy felt but felt like rough sackcloth. They had no arms and had the shape of a square cushion with a half tube on top for the back support. They weren’t that comfortable but it’s pretty clear these days that the government doesn’t want anyone getting comfortable, well not at this end of the social scale anyway. I sat perched on the edge of my seat with my head looking down at the floor and focusing on the carpet beneath my feet, a kind of grey, blue corduroy that uniformly covered every inch of the building. I look at my feet most of the time when I’m waiting in here mainly because I can’t help but associate the place with anything but feeling low and miserable and partly because unspoken social convention suggests that looking or being happy while you’re on the dole just isn’t the done thing. After a few minutes, I was called over. I walked into her small side office, which was basically a partitioned corner set up to allow a small bit of privacy for the one on one meetings that were required in certain situations like mine. I sat down in a chair that was placed at a strange angle to the psychologist’s chair, probably some psychological trick to make me more comfortable I’d thought a little cynically on my first visit. For a few seconds, she let me settle into my seat and smiled a friendly smile at me trying to set me at ease, which it did. Her name was Dr. Alia Begum. She was a British Asian girl and the fact I liked her proves I’m not a racist. She had an unremarkable, symmetrical face, with small features except for large, kind, deep brown eyes. She must have been about five feet and six inches tall and had a healthy-looking body and wore a pink designer jumper and a black knee-length skirt with a pair of expensive-looking black high heel shoes that made her look smart and fashionable as well as professional. Her whole demeanour was of someone successful who really looks after and cares about themselves, almost the exact opposite of someone like me. I had met her briefly the week before for an initial assessment and I have to say just getting to sit and spend an hour or so with someone positive like this was such a massive contrast to the type of people I was usually surrounded by that it brightened my dour mood straight away. Well slightly.

So how are you today Jason, how are you feeling? she asked genuinely.

Not too bad I suppose, I said with a somewhat fickle half sigh.

OK, well before we start the session I’d just like to go over the questionnaire we did in your initial assessment last week, and then we’ll have a chat. Today’s session will be a bit longer so you can have a little refreshment break halfway through.

OK, I said.

The questionnaire was