The Slow Ringing of my Demise

These last couple of weeks since being back home I’ve decided that my new hate is the sound of a ringing telephone. My dad, having wrung up god knows how much debt, doesn’t exactly get his payments off in time. To be honest, I don’t think he can afford to, I mean he doesn’t work, he doesn’t earn anything apart from his pension and that isn’t much, all he does is waste his time on some online game and spend the little money he has on cigarettes. My mother has had to bail him out a few times, giving him some cash here and there, I’ve had to do the same. In fact, within two days of being back he had already asked me for money.

Well, after getting fed up of the credit card companies phoning him and demanding payments he has taken the very mature and adult decision to deal with it by ignoring the phone. No one in the house is allowed to answer it. The phone rings, we sit there, ignore it, and wait for the damn ringing to stop. It must ring at least 20 times a day now and I’m starting to lose my patience and sanity. The problem is, at first it just made me irritated, now, I’m getting irritated as well as terribly down. Every ring seems to get loader and sharper, each ring pierces right though me and now provides a nice countdown to a shit mood. And the phone rings every day, meaning it doesn’t matter if I wake up feeling relatively good, the sound of that telephone puts me right back down.

I didn’t get worried about it until earlier today. I was having coffee with my mother when someone’s mobile went off, the ringtone happened to be the sound of a ringing telephone. Even though the person answered the phone, and I knew perfectly fine that it wasn’t my house phone, it had the same effect on me. I felt incredibly down all of the sudden, everything seemed hopeless. I’m not sure what to do; my brain now associates the sound of a ringing telephone with a depressed mood, a depressed mood that hits so suddenly that if I was already in a vulnerable state, well, I dread to think what could happen.

To me it looks like I only have two choices. I either try and reverse my mental attitude by trying to associate the sound with something good, or, I throw the phone out of the nearest window after setting it alight into the path of an oncoming bus the next time it rings. No choice really, just need to find that lighter...