{PART THREE}

***

[1:05pm, the next day] I’m meeting with a character this story picked up last spring, in Santorini, when there was a 7.9 magnitude earthquake and I awoke, dumbfounded, groggy – maddened – who is this stranger rattling my bedframe, waking me up at five am? We’re meeting at a Jamaican place in the 10^th for lunch. I’m early, for once, so I linger in the unclaimed space between the bench outside the restaurant and the offcuts of the street, undecided as to whether I am more inconspicuous, seated, or hovering with half of my weight propped up on a pole jutting out of the concrete at an odd angle. Loitering looks so unbecoming on me. How I wish I didn’t view myself at the centre of this awful universe. I picked up the wrong shade of concealer. What was that analogy: something to do with sheep? I think life would be far too straightforward if it could be summed up with us all looking for the next way to “bah.” There’s more than one way to sear a fish…skin a cat? It doesn’t matter; the menu here is vegan, anyway.

At 1:08pm, she texts that she just got off work and she’ll be with me in two minutes, with multiple exclamation marks – I estimate an additional 30 seconds for each – so I text to say I’ll sear it skin-side down first…I mean, I’ll go in and grab us a table. She arrives five minutes later, wearing grey wrap suit trousers with brown buttons, a long wool black trench coat, and a vintage COACH handbag, bursting with papiers. She’s doing an internship here and we catch up on the very dramatic events following her drunken encouragement for me to let a certain trainwreck man I had met in Athens fly me back out there for his Yacht party. I tell her he invited me and another girl to the same beach bar, and that’s how we found him out. I wonder if she believes me. The waitress comes over with a small flip-notepad to take our orders. I’m undecided, too wrapped up in the delivery of my story – the problem with telling stories is that I am already bored, I already know what happens, I give it away too soon, I bore everyone, I always burn one of the seared sides – so I swipe at the menu and pick the one I saw [retracted]’s eyes hover over when she was choosing what to eat. Approval is the only form of safety when you’re looking for the next way to bah.

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She is impressed that I can order in French, and so is the waitress. It is the kind of encouragement a child receives when they match up the tiger growl with the plastic tiger and the horse’s neigh with the horse. I hate that being English makes it so impressive to speak the most fractured selection of words from another language. It’s embarrassing. Sorry, I meant je trouve ça embarrassant.

The food arrives and she – I mean, I – chose well. It looks delicious. She tells me about what it’s like to live in Paris and as we finish up and head over to her office building, I wish I was living her life here in this city which is still a bit grimy like London but far more appealing to me. There is a difference between a ‘grass is greener’ and feeling the pull of escaping your current ‘normal’. I cannot catch the fish beneath the swirling water, but you have to trust me – dear reader – there are fish in these parts.

There is an envy which is not green and sour and tinged with spite.

On the walk, I give away my noticing her elevated cortisol and so she sets off on a harangue about how her manager is always breathing down her neck and scheduling progress reports and actually fired the previous intern – so, yes, she can have a long French lunch but said long French lunch must break promptly après une heure. The cat doesn’t like to watch itself being skinned. And every grey acropolis demands long office hours from its people, whether it feeds them with the promise of fresh croissants in the streets or not. After bidding her farewell, I walk around the corner and find a café with the red wicker chairs and awning outside. I know it’s probably for tourists and retirees, but it’s a nice place to sit and take coffee and a cigarette and I end up smoking three and reading half of The Picture of Dorian Grey.

In the evening, I meet another friend for drinks. She was my French pen pal back in school, meaning – when I do the maths as I walk down from my hostel to château d’eau, feeling a pang for the extra coat I left, strewn over the bottom bunk, on my way out – we’ve known one another for a decade now, which is remarkable given most people leave before they can be included in future chapters and I find that a shame, really. Anyway, she texts and asks if I want to get wine before or after dinner and I say after and I imagine she chortles at her phone in French as she types is 11pm too late and I chortle at my phone in English. I forget the French dine after bedtime for the English. Best before dinner, she suggests, and I agree yes sounds good.

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***

I keep reading this line, << the madness of it all >>. [11:32, the previous day] I’m sitting in a blue-tiled café with the girl from Berlin who works in the music industry and is currently taking a zoom call. It reminds me of the time I got in trouble with my Chinese student for teaching a chemistry lesson over Zoom in Gails, and I’m watching in slight awe from my peripheral vision as she manages to do her entire makeup routine from a pencil case at the café whilst nodding along to whatever conversation they are having. I wonder what shade of lip gloss she’s using. It’s mostly clear but has a little pink sheen to it.

I didn’t have the bravery to order in French, and I realise I’ve kind of come to Paris without a plan. I wonder how much of freedom is self-determined. How much is perspective. I could be flailing, in a city with no itinerary. Or I could have the liberty of getting the Eurostar from London to Paris on no particular Tuesday evening, with no safety belt suffocating me. It reminds me of the book I’m supposed to be writing – the protagonist wakes up with wings in hospital and must decide if these mean flying into fire or freedom. But at least I have enough warm clothes, so in some regards I did plan. And a change is as good as rest.

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Spent last night texting a friend about Hegel, and the notion of destruction as a prerequisite for creation. Perhaps all great poets must first be bored and violent before they construct masterpieces. Also, some [absurd?] notion that, with this methodology, we may somehow remedy our fallen state. A lot of people must believe this, because there seems to be a lot of destruction in this world – not solely the construction work going on outside Gare du Nord.

I open a book Dad bought me for Christmas, In the Days of Rain, which is about growing up in a Christian cult. Speaking on the alleged cult, she says <<The Exclusive Brethren went from close to closed.>> I used to think I had grown up in a cult. I was the weird girl who believed in Heaven and Hell and angels and demons, and I guess people like to swipe at some form of spirituality but claiming there is a fiery pit beneath us is too far stretched and deluded? The world is absurd; that Satan being in everything is some ludicrous notion, to me, is illogical. And why can we only invest in the supernatural when it’s dressed up in Hollywood glimmer? I kind of get it; believing is seeing, and I spend a lot of time talking about things unseen. I worry a lot: I don’t want to be a headless chicken, and I don’t want to go to Hell. But maybe I worry about that sort of fortune (well, opposite of) more than the next person. And what even is the definition of a ‘cult’, anyway – do we not feed ourselves our own doctrines, lies to match the furniture in our living rooms, justifications for actions founded on desire, anyway? I’m only kidding: I didn’t grow up in a cult. And, well, as my student says – some people aren’t scared of things that should scare-you-out-of-your-socks because they don’t think about the scare-you-out-of-your-socks things enough.

But then, do I let the scare-you-out-of-your-socks things consume me? Hegel conflates God as ‘less than’, rationalising Christianity; he turns it into something which unfurls as some logical equation, seeing the trinity as his system of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. And I’m kidding: I didn’t grow up in a cult.

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princess &

the pea. sleeping

blossom. foaming

at the mouth.

haul the last frozen

carcass out

the chest freezer.

don’t bite

the winter that still

feeds. the mattress

that keeps you

asleep. spring

is the sludge, mid-thaw.

this is not a re-birth.

i repeat,

only lambs are born

in spring. is the admittance

of a lie you made

yourself believe

so that you could be

convincing. ugly

exposed in

first light. clues

to your crimes

told in your mind. come out

come out. wherever

you are.

whodunit. who

you were, in the

dark. it’s all got to

bubble up

to the surface.

the thawing process

is gradual. stays

slushy

for a while.

princess &

the pea. sleeping

blossom. she’ll

be awake soon.

it’s already spring,

mind.

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P A R T O N E

[Second week of February, Paris] The hostel room smells of tobacco and sweat this morning and when I go to turn the shower on the smell of piss rises up from the drain. Paris is a dirty city, and that, it does nothing to hide. You are forced to bathe in its grime and filth and at least it’s not summer. Every time I catch my breath another siren sets off. Like the Odyssey, except we don’t all set off dancing at the sound, at the peril of self-abandonment and, well, the end of ourselves.

I arrived yesterday evening to heavy rain and an overflow of piss gushing down the streets which were under construction, the signs in French promising sparkling new city infrastructure soon: lying is a universal talent and one which does not require a stained mouth. I wheel my suitcase through swirls of water and mud and piss all mixed up and discarded and crumpled cans and plastic bottles. A man suddenly appears right in my face, pauses, and says << très belle >> and it doesn’t take much French to know he was trying it on. I meet two girls in the room, one from Bordeaux, and one from Berlin. The French girl is already getting ready for bed as we converse in broken French. The German girl and I spend the evening at the bar together. It turns out she used to live in London for a time, and it really does seem that London is the centre of the world. Tired from my travels, at half past midnight we decide to retire to bed. I slip into my pyjamas and brush my teeth in the shared bathrooms, trying not to study the stains on the sinks and wondering if I will ever treat myself to a hotel in Paris. There are certain things I always deemed as ‘adult’ things to do when I was younger, and I don’t think I will ever deem myself ‘adult’ enough. Age is not an accumulation of time but of catastrophes. And at that, even my sliding out of the womb was a drama felt by all in the hospital room.

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I climb into my bunk which is the top one and why do they always slot the stairs in at such bizarre angles and why are they always so slippery. Ready to collapse into the mattress I start unfurling the duvet and plug my phone onto charge. I always bring a book to bed, so I select Clarice Lispector The Burned Sinner and the Harmonious Angels and a pen in case I want to underline anything and much to my shock and horror I discover that there is no pillow on my bed. Deliberating briefly over whether I should just suck it up: I didn’t book a hotel; I sling my leather jacket over my pyjamas and slide on my flipflops which I always bring for the hostel showers and trot down the three flights of cold spiral stairs to reception, which to reach I must cross the outdoor bar area. I queue awkwardly in the reception area, hoping no one is staring at my toes and trying not to shuffle around too much.

(To find out what happens next, whether my pillow arrives or I am left - abandoned at reception - become a paid subscriber for LESS THAN A COFFEE, and help me to fund my creative writing masters in PARIS and give you even better work like this, thank you!)

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They birthed a little girl.

Village tradition

says – all girls,

upon birth,

ripped from pulsing

wombs of

tired mothers,

are handed a

white, muslin cloth.

A spotless,

blameless

rag. Lovingly draped.

Soft skin

yet to be washed in

the world,

swaddled

a cream cloth.

Milk-drunk lamb:

innocent.

A babe.

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[16:07, sun just about to duck behind the row of Georgian terraced houses]

I’m listening to Duran Duran Save a Prayer (2009 Remaster) whilst reading Patti Smith’s Just Kids through one ear bud. The song is cutting in and out as the phone signal around this part of Bristol is fickler than me when deciding what to wear on any given day. But I don’t mind too much; the whirring picking up reverb sounds, dish cloth sponged with bleach on a stuck record, at the beginning of the song is the best part for me. «I was a dreamy somnambulant child». New word: «somnambulant» - its definition makes sense though; sleepwalking. She was proficient in reading but frustrated her teachers (the ADULTS) in that she was never inclined to harness this whimsical reading proficiency into anything practical. One might deem such a brilliant mind as perilously away-with-the-fairies, but I think all writers have to be a little on another planet of their own curation; their own abstraction from what is normal. Glass Town, Angria, and Gondal. [New word «paracosm». Definition implied.] She was «always somewhere else», and I feel this when I write: some veiled separation from those who are playing their cast characters in the world. I am only a silly commentator reaching at some marvellous or introspective remark on the condition of being human, body and soul; this – I think you must be a little abstracted from your grotesque humanness to comment on the human condition. And so, I do agree with Lebowitz and see myself in Patti. I am no god, though.

I’m with [retracted] and we’re both wearing heeled leather cowboy boots and all-black outfits. He ordered us two cortados with oat milk and he agrees, it tastes better. I disagree in them charging an additional 70 pence per drink, though; I mean aren’t we supposed to be saving the planet, adding up points to reach the Good Place after we die? At least I have something to be angry about, though. My brother always says I am just looking for an argument and I think that’s what he means. I need something to be angry about. But don’t we all like a scapegoat? And oat milk feels like a scapegoat which won’t bite back. [Retracted] is slow and methodical and has good taste in music. I think I view him as one of the coolest people on this planet. And Patti Smith. I’m writing in my commonplace book lists of art and poetry books she had on her coffee table, «[her] treasured objects [mingled] with the laundry». Life is a series of lists, though. I just document and write lists all the time.

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[22:34, on the train]

I’m on the night train to Bristol. I managed nearly two days back at home after returning from Paris and I couldn’t bear it. The black vortex of pressure in that house in the countryside where my childhood and becoming an adult and independence and dependence all swirl, thick in the air. It’s all blur and liminality and overcast even when the sun comes out. Mum has cancer and dad is an empty shell, and my brother is a walking taxidermy cloaked figure haunting each corner of the house. It’s all this brooding and silence and only three cars passing on the road outside the house each day and it’s all so quiet and the walls are all so thin we’re on top of one another and I can’t – I can’t bear it. I feel bad for my not bearing it but maybe it’s the kick I need to finally gather my things and pack my bags and get out of the steam and sweat and mould and mildew of that house.

*

A man with mousey blonde curtains and a brown leather messenger bag is seated in front and to the right of me. That’s the proper name for them but dad always called them paperboy bags, I don’t know why. But my first job aged nine was the paper round and I wasn’t technically employed; only contracted by my older brother who was only a year older. I hate jobsworth stupid rules and cut-off points and things for no good reason other than penning people in like sheep. You had to be ten years old to be paid officially, and my brother gave me fifty pence a week for taking the local gazette on the back of our bikes around the village to all the big houses with big driveways and scary dogs. But that added to my thirty pence pocket money meant I could afford a Fry’s chocolate cream from the tuck shop when dad used to take us on a Tuesday after school.

One time after I’d slipped the gazette through the letterbox of one of the houses with a long gravel driveway which curved round to the left, I heard the angry barking of two dogs: rottweilers. Sometimes you hear things before you see them, at least that’s what my mother always said about me. They came prancing towards me, all tongues lolled out and spit flying in smattered trails and paws padding bluntly on the ground. I dropped my bike and legged it down the driveway to the road. Like Lot’s wife I turned back and saw them closing in on me and thought about how they’d gnaw at my legs and they’d disappear bit by bit, like fingers being shaved away on a rotary sander like the one dad told us not to go near on his workshop bench in the garage. I kept running, the image of my brother standing by the big gates at the road with a backpack spilling out with local gazettes looped around one arm growing less blurry in my vision. I got to him and collapsed onto the ground, rolling over like a dog after returning the stick to their owner except with less zeal. I turned back around and saw that there was a separate metal fence keeping the dogs to the front lawn, so we were actually running in parallel the entire time. My danger was over-dramatised in my own imagination, which I could never keep a cap on for it fizzing over so virulently.

My brother laughed at me, but I couldn’t breathe with the panic of it all. I stopped doing the paper round after that incident, and to this day the sight of a Fry’s chocolate cream sends goosebumps up the back of my neck. Mum never took us to the sweetshop, and I think they played good-cop-bad-cop deliberately, my parents. She knew he liked to be the one who treated us and so she let him do all the spoiling.

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something about

juggle your alters—ego.

pull it out

of the box.

how many hats are you wearing?

pre-chewed. poetics.

<<poesy>>—peony—daisy

chains.

too many vowel-sounds

sounds fear.

naming pigeons. pretty like

a frederica wearing a bow

tied up

unbox your emotions.

notes of rose—

tinted nostalgia. return policy

to the self.

love is 50% off if you buy it now.

14 days keep the receipt translation

<<ticket>>, you say <<non, merci>>.

freight train passing through

it’s all smoke &—. mirror

mirror on the wall.

who is the jester out

of them all.

roses—are—red—and

so—are—the

people. power play

eeny meeny miney mo

with

flopsy—mopsy—cottontail

heads legs ears nose

would you like a carrot,

pre-sliced, <<crudités>>

pre-chewed. with a

knife. can’t slice through

self

abstract.

not a pottery class. paint

& sip. slip

into another

alter. acropolis. alliteration slip on the

sharp side of the

ego. death

blade, i meant.

welcome to the circus. now

joke is on

you.

you silent beggar &

you fool.

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My favourite subject at

school, after English,

was biology.

It would have been biology

first, if we didn’t have to

study plants

as well as humans.

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<<Heaven>> in French, translates

to <<paradis>>,

I suppose we call it a paradise,

too. We all walk around

as though we’ve lost

something. They should

call it the

collective fall, paradise lost.

Je sais pas the precise

French translation for

<<headless chicken>>, but the

restaurants here in Paris

mention something about <<poulet>>.

I wonder if the French have

a term for the gnawing feeling

that you’ve left the house,

missing something,

except you can’t quite

put your finger on it.

They have that in les autres langues –

strings of words to describe a

feeling we don’t have in English.

<<Je suis tombée dans les pommes>>

sort of means I am fainting,

but metaphorical, and perhaps

hysterical. Damsel in distress

in front of a prince charming.

As for this phrase, <<maladie>>

might come close.

We’re all sick

in the stomach with it.

I keep

reading the same line,

<<the madness of it all>>.

Is it a cliché for a person

to lose their mind?

The human condition is something

I can’t quite put my finger on.

I stopped eating chicken

years ago. Couldn’t deal

with the flashes of

raw meat

running through my mind

each time I’d sink my teeth into it.

We’ve got a word for that,

o-m-o-p-h-a-g-i-a. It’s a long

one. And it’s not actually a word

for the feeling. And I’ve turned

it into a metaphor.

You wouldn’t eat raw chicken,

now – would you?

A severed head

is a good remedy

for all this stewing in the mind.

<<Exiled from heaven>> in French,

translates to <<chassés

du paradis>>.

This human condition is a quiet

form of exile,

I think.

Even if this exile

milling, missing, looking

is a prerequisite

to paradis.

All of this is painfully

amorphous – chicken or the egg

-which came first – discussion

-I know – that three minus two

equals one. And one

plus two

equals three.

And <<heaven>> in French,

translates to <<paradis>>.

I think it was my keys,

that I left at home.

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[This article was published in Issue Two of Stencil.Zine]

There has been a giant, fuzzy, white teddy bear with a lopsided smile and a bulging belly, lounging in our bathtub for four years now. The sight sometimes arrests me as I’m coming up the stairs, around the third step down from the landing. When the sun is just at the corner of the back of the house and it angles through the bathroom window like a slice of orange, filtering into the room, making the bathtub levitate, golden. But mostly I’m used to it now. When guests come over, we don’t mention the *teddy* in the room, but my mother takes great relish in announcing, “sorry, I forgot to mention we’re housing a bear upstairs, didn’t want to scare you.” The giant, fuzzy, white teddy bear used to smile, but a thread came loose and now he seems to be anonymously pleasant with his life in the bathtub. Not quite indifferent. Another emotion I can’t quite put my finger on. He’s placid, doesn’t take much getting to know. You learn his ways quite quickly.

Occasionally I lift him out of the tub to air out a bit. One day in the summer months there was a distinct smell of cat urine coming from the bathroom, so pungent I feared his lower half would be yellow when I hauled him out and folded him over the banister to decompress his spine. Not that he has one. But he’s got two eyes, and they seem. Well, friendly, I guess. Eye contact is supposed to be a positive body language indicator and, well, you can rely on him for that. Sometimes he sits over the banister to air out for a few days or even weeks if I forget about him and you catch his crumpled face peering down from the landing into the front hallway. He’s probably bored of counting all the wellies we keep on the shoe rack at the bottom of the stairs by now. At least, that’s what I imagine he does; it’s what I’d do if I was stranded, propped up on the landing for days at a time. It’s probably quite like being in a doctor’s office, but less musty, and less wheezing.

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The cats have taken to the giant, fuzzy, white bear in the bathtub, too. They quite enjoy sleeping on his back or his face or whatever surface they deem to be comfortable. Cats are fussy, and my cats think they’re born into royalty. We had no chance hiding them from the house inspector the other week – my plan was to lull them to sleep between all my brother’s teddies, and with a carefully calculated dose of catnip crinkle fish toys half an hour before the inspector was due, they were in position. Unfortunately, I made the error of greeting the inspector with a cup of tea, which all three cats decided to trot down and assist me with, hopping up onto the kitchen counter next to the kettle with poise and grace, as though making a cup of earl grey were part of their daily routines. Anyway, I mean to say that the giant, fuzzy, white bear in the bathtub should be honoured that the cats haven’t demanded his eviction all this time.

The giant, fuzzy, white bear was delivered by some poor DPD delivery man,

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I was at the dentist last week and it rather felt like an out of body experience. You see, it isn’t natural to have that big blinding light all up in your face and three different pairs of gloved hands and rubber tubes and mouth mirrors and periodontal probes and drills and sickle probes and descalers and – yes: it really is called a sickle probe. They make you put on those goggles, but they don’t really fix the glare so you end up laid out on your back, some white lamb who stepped up to the altar willingly, clipboard sent back to the receptionist, hoping they won’t get polish and blood on your clothes, staring up at that circular mirror which bulges out in against the square grey mineral fibre tile ceiling, trying to make out how many teeth you have left in the reflection of the glinting, blurring metal tools swiping past your vision.

And the nurses and dentist weren’t even chatty. To think they spend all day, every day, staring into people’s mouths. People used to ask my why medicine and not dentistry and to me there seemed an obvious answer. I mean, maybe that’s it. You know. Maybe staring into gummy chasms day after day, all that tartar breath or whatever they call it, some kind of solidification reaction with the calcium in your saliva, and I’m not talking about the recipe for a well-loved but perhaps divisive condiment at the local chippy. Maybe that’s why they wouldn’t entertain my attempts at friendly conversation and easy reaches at humour. But my mum adds capers, chopped really finely.

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Any time I have to get any part of me serviced (which does happen fairly often given my tendency for sickliness and general misdemeanour) I think about how clunky our external forms are. I was at the post office dropping off a Vinted parcel yesterday. We don’t actually have a post office in our little village, so I had to drive to the next one along. It’s run by an old lady but aren’t all post offices in rural England run by some old lady who you’re really quite scared of but you wouldn’t admit it but she also gives all the kids sweets and a wink so you wonder if she might be nice.

Anyway, one of the regulars was in, and I knew he was a regular because he left his car unlocked outside the shop and the lady knew exactly what he wanted before he’d even opened his mouth to say anything. Three bottles of merlot and a pack of Marlborough. I politely stood behind him, not really sure if it would be weird to form a queue of two with one being served already, so kind of a queue of one. But we’re all sheep I suppose in some ways. Sheep in dentist chairs. He was leaning over the counter, surprisingly not knocking over the lollipops and lighters, one elbow up on the side of the counter.

“’ow are you then, John,” the lady behind the counter hollered, as though he was standing at the back of the shop.

John, a name made up in absence of remembering this detail of the story, huffed and sighed. She rolled her eyes and gave him a knowing glance. Kind of like a huff and a sigh contained within your eyes, but also a yes, I’m fed up with life. That, too.

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I first felt nostalgia at a five-year-old recycled tin of roses chocolates. But more on that later.

Nostalgia is like lucid dreaming.

I’ve been stuck living some flavour of fever dream for a while now, maybe since birth. I’d have out of body experiences in the conservatory when I was maybe seven or eight years old, writing my stories about the magic plants in the garden, but I’d never tell anyone. I saw myself floating, pinned up on a blade of the ceiling fan, watching my seven arms and seventy-seven fingers scrawling over my little notebooks. Everything was rehearsed. And whilst I didn’t know the next sentence in the story, it would surely make its way onto the page. Perfectly. As ordained by whatever was higher than me.

I thought I was special. That this lucid dreaming whilst awake – this, watching myself from above, was some kind of superpower. I felt this crippling conviction every time I deigned act untoward. I suppose I was scared of whatever higher power held a mirror up to me.

This wasn’t all the time. There were times I wasn’t staring down my own nose at some mirror of time and perception. But then, I’d remember. And I’d be pinned up to the ceiling again. Always when someone said the word ‘remember’ or ‘forget’, ‘don’t forget’. That sort of thing. It would trigger the mirror effect. The chessboard pieces to turn on their heads and the hands of the clock to tick-tick-tick-tock-tock-tock. If I heard music playing, it was sped up, whirring and whirring and swirling in my head, some off-key vortex scooping out everything I knew and trying to replace it with murmuring jelly. I knew that line was next already, why did they even sing it – didn’t they already sing it – why have they sung it three times now.

Superpowers or no superpowers, I’ve lived in fever dream land for a while. And not in the pretty, crazy, fun *manic-pixie-dream-girl* daisies and rainbows and glitter way.

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The moment you start making some sort of memories, good or ugly, you start missing. This missing morphs into nostalgia. I become Dr Jekyll, sipping the carefully constructed potion of my own design, searching for a looking glass from which to watch my vulgar metamorphosis into Hyde –

And yet, when I looked upon that ugly idol in the glass, I was conscious of no repugnance, rather a leap of welcome. This, too, was myself. It seemed natural and human. In my eyes it bore a livelier image of the spirit, it seemed more express and single, than the imperfect and divided countenance I has been hitherto accustomed to call mine.

But one can’t miss what one rejected – in the sense of our constant morphing and moulding and I really do die, over and over, in this lifetime. Except I insist on being the one to re-birth myself, every time – a DH Lawrence “absolutely smash[ing] up the old idols of ourselves”, if you will. And as I stare at the mess of ceramic shards on the floor, I wonder if I did a good enough job.

I lingered but a moment at the mirror: the second and conclusive experiment has yet to be attempted; it yet remained to be seen if I had lost my identity beyond redemption and must flee before daylight from a house that was no longer mine…suffered the pangs of dissolution.

Nostalgia is taking the mirror and gripping it as it is slipping from your hands and smearing over it and calling it pretty. It’s taping up the torn-up shreds of an old photograph so the memories don’t dissolve into some unforgiving abyss of <<I can’t quite put my finger on it.>>

For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know just as I also am known. [1 Cor 13:12]

Like Jekyll watching himself morph into Hyde in the mirror as the glass we peer through turns and swivels upside down. The looking glass is rose tinted and has a part where it is a bit wider and a part where it is a bit narrower. It’s seven-year-old versions of us see the ‘magic’ in the garden, from which we write our stories about sunflowers: how we see that everything that has to happen will happen and will happen for good, whatever that means. That there is some beauty even if perverted in everything, even the way the roses are choking the daisies, and the weeds are taking over them both and the pot is in the shade really too much and the soil must be water-logged by now given the weather of late.

But just as I think I have the lay of the land sussed out, the pieces begin to levitate, swirling and tangling, and I am just as confused as the next person. Warped clocks only make me suspicious of there being an unreliable narrator somewhere in the story. Nostalgia is trying to decipher the last line of the Snellen chart.

And it is feverish.

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When I was four, I played the rat in the nutcracker ballet, and my extended family all came to watch. I even managed to get my little brother to try on my black tutu and nearly convinced him to wear it to his first day of reception class, until my mum intervened. Crucially, not before I’d stolen her camera to document this event.

I remember being backstage – the smell of hairspray and polyester tulle, us all sitting on the floor and for some reason I also remember the orange and crisps Mum put in my lunchbox. Which is bizarre because she didn’t often pack crisps in my lunch. It was more common to be given carrot sticks and ‘healthy’ foods in my packed lunches. In this, I always felt a little left out; I loathed how long it always took me to finish my lunch, compared to the other kids who had cakes and biscuits – me, munching my way through tubs of sugar snap peas and celery batons. Maybe she wanted me to feel less left out, given it was a special occasion. I felt so…normal, opening my bag of crisps in front of the other girls.

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It sounds stupid now. But I always wanted to be one of those kids who had crisps and white bread ham sandwiches in their lunch, cut into little stars. I wanted to be the kids with the sparkly unicorn-shaped lunchboxes and rainbow Tupperware. I wanted to be one of those kids whose mum packed them with the blue suncream for sports in the summer. I wanted to be the kid who knew all the flavours of sweets in the pick-n-mix at the village tuck shop. I wanted to be just like the other kids. I wanted to be so normal, so just like the other kids, no one would even notice I was there. I wanted to blend in, seamlessly, with what seemed so impossibly easy to apparently everyone else.

Ballet, for me, was a short-lived dream, and what I had chosen over going to Rainbows, like my classmates in school. I think I wanted to feel…beautiful? And so, whilst I guess in some ways, I wanted to feel normal, in others I wanted to be special. Special but not weird; I was always a bit weird.

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Ballet was on a Tuesday night. My mum would take my best friend, Olivia, and I there together. I could never figure out how to put on my dusky-flesh-coloured tights, so mum always had to help with this. She’d always help me put my cardigan on, too. She’d tie it in a nice bow, like I could never do. I spent every Tuesday evening for months watching the older girl who appeared to my four-year-old self, everything I ever wanted to be, as she rehearsed for the role of Clara. She was gorgeous. Long, thick, blonde hair, tied up in the most perfect bun. She made all the twirls look so effortless, and our teacher always watched her with such a warmth in her face. I wanted to be her, when I grew up. But maybe I was always destined to be the rat.

I think I did a good job of playing the rat, I really did. My costume had little bells on. I could imagine if I performed my piece, in costume, now in front of my cats they would chase me around the room. I’ve always been small, too; the role of the rat suited me. I don’t think I would’ve been a good Clara.

For starters, I didn’t really have a full head of hair until the age of eight. People don’t believe me when I say this, like when they don’t believe that I played the rat in the nutcracker when I was four.

My mum will tell you the story of getting ice cream from the van by the park in the summer and being asked by the ice cream man “so, how’s her chemo going?” – now I of course do not recall this happening, but I can imagine him looking down at my bald apart from a little wispy orange baby fuzz head as I waited to be handed my 99er, and feeling some kind of pity. But of course, you would pity the girl who was chosen to play the rat in the Nutcracker.

I’m not sure I could tell you a word of what the teachers ever said to us in assembly. Assembly, for me, was time to stare at the backs of heads of thick plaits and ponytails and buns. Even if I had hair, my mum never knew how to plait. I ended up teaching myself locked in the bathroom stalls with a barbie doll and the back of a sweet wrapper which one of the other girls at our child minder’s house had drawn little sketches on, labelling the strands one, two and three, with arrows for me to follow. My barbie’s hair was always matted, though, for all the snagging and loom bands I’d wrap around it, desperately trying to fill whatever lock-less void grew hungry inside of me.

The hairdresser used to give me clips with colourful strands of hair, plaited or crimped, glued on whenever I’d go in to get my hair cut. I think they probably pitied me, too. All I wanted was long princess hair. And, every assembly, I’d scan the room in vexation of those who didn’t use their granted resource as they, in my opinion, should. The girls with long, thick hair who wore it down, to me, were ungrateful wretches. The swoosh of their locks as they turned to laugh or talk to their friends was mockery. On my knees, praying before bed, I’d tell God all the different plaits and ponytail styles I’d learn, if he only granted me hair. I had all manner of gaudy headbands which I’d wear to accessorise my bald head. Flowery ones and stripy ones and one for each day of the week. Monday was yellow plaid, Tuesday purple daisies, Wednesday was navy, Thursday red polka dots, and Friday was for my rainbow glitter headband.

I did eventually grow some hair and sported a ginger bob with an attempt at a fringe (which only really covered a third of my forehead) for most of my younger years at school. I kept wearing the headbands though, still.

Fast forward a few years, and we reach the misfit’s worst nightmare: puberty. And again, I found myself wanting so desperately to be like one of the other girls.

When my best friend told me in the playground one Wednesday morning (the day we had swim practise) that she had started her period, I was enraged. I had been blind to her bullying before, but now I could see it. I got angry. “But we’re only ten. You must be lying.” I retorted. Her response was to jump up and down on my swimming bag in the playground. We arrived at the pool, and I did my first length. Bubbles clouded my vision, and I realised that in her jumping on my PE kit, she had cracked my goggles. Further outraged, I stormed up to her standing and giggling at the side of the pool with her group of swimmers (she was, of course, in the better swimming group than me). “Look, you’ve smashed my goggles. You bully!” I snarled. She chuckled and held them up to the other kids, higher than I could reach to grab them back, “Lydia’s accusing me of breaking her goggles. But I don’t see anything wrong with them. Do you guys?” They all sneered, and she threw them into the deep end. “Oops. Don’t tell the teacher on me, you little grass.” And, of course, I burst out in tears and ran to the changing rooms and cried on the bus all the way home, whilst they all laughed.

The next day, she showed up to school with her first padded training bra. She made eye contact with me as she adjusted it whilst we were changing for sports. I begged my mum to get me one on the way home. We went to M&S, and I remember the cashier looking me up and down and sniggering as she scanned them through. AA. Too big. And it dug into my ribs and under my sternum. My brother caught me trying it on back home – I had my top lifted up in front of the mirror to look at it. I felt so grown up and pretty looking at my reflection, finally wearing a bra. Like the other girls. I saw him peeping through the door and immediately yelled. “Is that your new braaa?” He teased.

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I spent the morning poaching odd-shaped bits of bits of chicken and cod to try to hide my cat’s de-parasite medication. Apparently, he’s picked up a worm. But not a regular worm. And he’s got to have some special medicine. It’s in powder form and I fear it’s giving him trust issues. Maybe he thinks I’m trying to poison him. Who knows. But he’s looking at me all suspicious and leery with his ears all poked down and his eyes like pitted green olives, bulging and shining in my direction. The chicken took 12 minutes. Fish was done in 7. Water went all cloudy and bubbly. It smelt vile. Don’t overthink it. I stabbed the sliced breast with a knife. Jabbed it beneath the poultry spume like a bear fishing for salmon. Dead already. Definitely dead. Soggy chicken breast, halved and boiled and sad on the counter. It didn’t work. Cats are cleverer than boiled chicken and cod. I wish I could take de-parasite medicine. Clean out my insides. When we were kids, my parents would make us do the dishes after dinner. Us, being my brothers and me. I’d stand atop a wooden stool by the kitchen sink. Usually I was the one wielding a tea towel: drying duty. But today, I was scrubbing the pots. I squeezed out a glob of green washing up liquid. It filled the hollow in the wooden spoon. Colour of bile. But more viscous. It glistened all slurry and sluggish. Don’t overthink it. Brothers bickering over who dried and who put away, I licked up the soap, quickly. It wasn’t bitter like bile. Still a little bitter, though. I was four, I think. I spent the next two days hugging the toilet bowl, praying Jesus would purge me of my sins. I don’t think dish soap is in the Bible – last I checked; it was a goat they used as sacrifice inside the Tabernacle. I still felt unclean, even as I kneeled on the bathroom floor. Bubbles floating around inside my intestines. A fool’s purging of sin. But I was only a child. Children have funny ideas of heaven and hell and confessing sins. And perhaps we hadn’t reached the Pool of Bethesda at Sunday school yet. When the dish soap didn’t work I decided to try bleach. I coated the inside of a glass with it and returned again to my confessional booth: the kitchen sink. Filled the glass up to the top with water from the leaky tap. Swirled it around. The mixture didn’t fizz. I had made a pale-yellow dilution. Don’t overthink it. I gulped it in one go. At first I felt nothing. The anticlimax irritated my about-to-be-irritated guts. Insides purging, I returned to bed. I woke up in the dead of night, intestines all pulsing and jitterbugging. I hoped I would see bright white light and be carried up to Saint Peter. We had been taught about the pearly gates in Sunday school. But weren’t they supposed to be fictional? Instead, I was confined to the hell of my mattress – tossing and turning and wondering if I would see the morning. Or would I be all burnt up from the insides-out by then? The dilution was too weak. My guts hurt for days after and I felt nauseated for longer. Maybe my cat was right to be suspicious of me.

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perhaps, it is this 

constant

unsettled-ness, 

dog-on-a-chain,

prisoner-to-the-predictable-

the ordinary-

the everyday,

that is the reason for my

goldie locks

approach 

-to love.

what is, all this 

constant

looking around & wanting 

more,

or- not necessarily wanting

more, but wanting 

different.

dog-on-a-chain, 

prisoner-to-the-mundane.

perhaps, it is this 

stuck-in-the-mud,

writing desk

left 

facing the same wall

for too long,

holding me at this

red-light,

stop-sign.

i trudge through

treacle-terror-tainted-terrible

all-the-same. 

mundane. every

day.

i am a bored, silent,

growling

snarling,

dog-on-a-chain.

prisoner-to-the-same.

or maybe,

every bowl of porridge

is just-

not quite

right.

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need some time off screens.

time to breathe.

alone time but too much

alone

time,

and time spent alone.

speaking to myself.

alone in my room,

my bed.

this bed.

turquoise repose

but never rest.

brain awake -

dreamland -

neverland. 

wake up, she said.

pixelated in and out,

just breathe.

another mint

tea.

candle in the bin.

i have become

a wax figurine

in a little glass jar,

this constant

unhappiness

is a good thing,

he said.

inertia

forward motion,

it’ll get better

if i write more

of my butterfly

life cycle,

a manual.

a manual 

to breathe.

fragile wings

beat

even when asleep.

time off screens.

pitter, patter -

little glass jar,

time to 

breathe.

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I started the summer of ’25 with a €12 plane ticket and ended it with a Zimmer frame.

The year really started in spring. I mean, it feels like that every year. Why did we decide to start mid-freeze, in January? Forgive my archaic language, but apparently 2026 is set to be the year of the analogue revival. This period always feels like the TV buffering; between taking out the old cassette tape and slotting in a new one: the grey, lag phase.

But, no: now is the curtain call to watch the fireworks and hear the annual “next year, we should go see them in London” from dad as we sit around the TV, feeling perhaps a bigger anticlimax than Christmas, which I do believe deserves more animosity than we show it. I’m positive that if you love Christmas as an adult, you have an abnormally functional family or were always on Santa’s nice list as a kid. We didn’t even put the tree up this year, and it wasn’t missed. The neighbours strung out some nice lights in their front garden, though, but probably more for their kids than them.

Santa-slandered and decs back in the box for the loft, if you will allow me to start in spring, 2025 began with my writing field trip. This was sparked by a phone call with my ex-boyfriend – usually abhorred, and I will agree usually unfruitful. However, this time, allow me. Only one more time, I promise.

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I need permission too much. A member of a Facebook group for solo female travellers I completely forgot I had joined two years prior (my mid-uni gap year/ existential crisis of my twenties number one, when I ran away to Italy for as long as border control would let me, post-Brexit) was advertising a spare concert ticket to see the Lumineers in Lisbon. I knew two of their songs at a push from 2012, but really, I just needed rationale to book a plane ticket. It was cheaper to fly into Faro. So, with my first move decided, I spent the next two hours sitting on the floor with my laptop and debit card, arriving at 3 o’clock in the morning with six weeks of backpacking vaguely planned out.

My writing field research trip was really the first unshackling of the chains of ‘med school drop-out’. When asked, “so what do you do” at the hostel bar crawls, I would say “I am writer.” I treated it like rehearsing lines for a character. You must pretend to be the character you want to play in order to be cast, right? Right. And so, with a battered copy of Dostoyevski’s The Brothers Karamavov, my red backpack, and the Steve Madden buckle boots I was in no uncertain terms willing to compromise on (and ended up stuffing with other books and flipflops at every boarding gate to escape the luggage fees), I liberated myself.

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In June, I returned sunburnt and tired but grateful to do laundry without having to ask a hostel full of strangers if they had four €1 coins between them (and one notable time, being gaslit and handed a mixture of money from America, Russia, and someplace else, none of which euros, and no clean socks or underwear left; my desperation was seething). Dirty socks or not, now for the next piece in my unconventional med-school-drop-out to writer/ poet/ creative pipeline.

An old school friend was organising an open-mic and looking for performers. Well, I thought, after rehearing my lines for six weeks in Europe – meaning, reciting my poems to consenting strangers in clubs and pub-smoking areas, often met with raised brows and something between spaced out and shocked stares – it was time to take stage. I do recall being in a club in Berlin with a guy from Austria, who had begged me all night to read out some poetry. After we had agreed that he would buy me a beer and I would read one poem, he did not speak to me for the remainder of the night, but at least he didn’t say it was bad. And at least there was a group of us. Despite what Louise Glück says, I was a poet. And a poet who was about to have one spoken word poetry event under her belt, at that.

Looking around at the families sitting in tables with plates of chips and mostly non-alcoholic beverages, I texted my mum under the table at the pub right before it was my turn to go up behind the mic, ‘I don’t think this is my crowd, they’re all so happy and I feel my poetry is far too dramatic. I don’t wanna dampen the mood.’ I mean, I was about to follow a Taylor Swift acoustic cover with a poem about being stuck in a depressive episode. Don’t worry, I did also include my version of a breakup poem and have since ironically been accused in a pub smoking area of “basically being Taylor Swift” because I use my ex-relationships and situationships and ex-whateveryouwanttocallitmaybewejustkissedships as writing muses, or as I prefer to phrase it: anti-muses. Perhaps when I release my ‘anti-muse’ merch line, I shall post him a t-shirt.

I spent the summer on the train to London, all my money going on train tickets and event tickets and £10 glasses of wine to get me through performance-nerves – but really who am I kidding, I always secretly loved drama at school, especially when I was cast as the kid who dies – practising my lines over and over to myself in the mirror, and always messing up that one same bit.

The notion of adding to the disgusting amount of ‘life is like…’ metaphors does truly repulse me but always messing up that one same bit and always being dragged back to the same lessons does feel very apt, as far as reflective essays go. That being said, I don’t think any of us get anywhere close to the truths of the universe, and neither do I think we’re meant to. And it didn’t take me reading Genesis chapter 3 multiple times to work that one out.

Every fibre of my being yearns for control. It’s insufferable but, well, the more I know and the more I ask why, the more I know. Or the more I think I know. I’m not trying to write in riddles. Why do we never finish the phrase “curiosity killed the cat”? Because it goes on to “but the truth brought him back to life.” But then, why did the fall in the garden of Eden stem from this desire for more knowledge? Resuscitation to death, my liberation from this mindset is in part tied to the ego death. And to deny that the death of the ego is a singular event is to deny the ego death in itself.

Here comes the stumbling block. At some point last year, I realised I was stuck in Wonderland; except it was unclear whether I needed to grow or shrink to be unleashed. There was cake on the table in front of me, but I couldn’t even take one bite, to stir change. And in that I guess I waver even in my own self-destruction.

A friend I met and have kept in touch with from said writing field research trip called the other night. I wanted to tell him that I am actually entirely completely different from how I was when he knew me (and that, I seem to have made a habit out of doing). I die, over and over, in this life. Except I insist on being the one to [re]birth myself, each time. Perhaps why the growing pains I used to complain about when I was younger never stopped.

Summer ended abruptly with a phone call from the hospital, to say that the surgery I’d been anticipating for the best part of two years was in…three days. And so, after one last hurrah: a picnic at Primrose Hill for a friend’s birthday, night out in Soho, followed by a final writing date with my friend at the Barbican, I embarked the tube bleary-eyed to return home from my life of being whoever I wanted to say I was.

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[Entry from early June]

[4:39am, source: notes app]

I’m walking back from Tresor.

It’s already light, and the birds are chirping. I decided to walk alone to enjoy the solitude. I guess. I’m sober now. This all sounds so dramatic (I promise it’s not).

I’m wearing a dress I bought in Athens. It’s mesh with panels of tortoiseshell. The club was insane. Smoke and lights and heavy techno. Stoic and serious and all drugged. It felt like a version of hell, as we all danced in some slow sync to the pulsing music. I don’t know where the blood supply came from.

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I walk past a man in a brown trench just staring into a phone box. Another man is walking his German Shepherd.

Apparently, I have 21 minutes left.

The world is better without so many people, I decide. Perhaps I should hesitate on forming an opinion of a place before seeing it flushed of humanity.

Well, not exactly. I wouldn’t like a ghost town. I don’t think.

I decide: it depends - sometimes I want the company. At others, I enjoy the quiet. It’s a welcome calm after the club.

The streets feel so wide and open. I always feel small when there’s no one around. But not belittled. Just small. Small and no other connotations.

I’ve reached the river again. Springbrunnen im Lustgarten towers ahead. A couple share a cigarette on the river bank. It looks nice. The man who kissed me in the club told me that some people are just temporary and I find that hard to accept sometimes. I think he was trying to be all in the moment and hot I don’t know but I insufferably think about everything. I agree with him, though. We are all just passing through places and on different timelines.

I lost an earring in the club. I seem to lose something everywhere I go. People and things. I don’t mind things, but people hurts. I don’t feel tired.

The fresh air makes me feel alive again.

Lustgarten (the park I’m walking through right now) reminds me of the park in Portugal where I said goodbye to another person I met in my travels. I wonder if growing up really is just missing places and people all the time. Not things. Never things.

Berlin is full of construction but certain places suit renovation midway through.

I’m almost back now and I can hear people. Construction works. No, not this time. Drunk people playing with a Lime scooter. I can’t get away from them, Lime bikes or Lime scooters, whichever city I go to. Or so it seems. Maybe I’ve decided to notice them. Anyway. They’ve collected a road sign - it just clattered beneath the scooter. It’s in the middle of the road and a girl just picked it up. I love the randomness of people. Randomness isn’t the right word for it but it’s the word I want to use right now. So, I love the randomness of people.

I’m back now. I shall fall into a blissful stupor. I’m not spinning, too much.

Goodnight [4:59am].

*

[10:47am, bench in Berlin, source: commonplace book]

I made it to June, and write from a park in Berlin on a lopsided wooden bench in the shade of a tree. The path makes a big swooping motion next to the road on the other side of the fence. Next to me are three students, likely university students, who have sketchpads and pencils and yellow pouches of tobacco (but it’s not amber leaf, at least I don’t recognise it to be) and they are sketching the pond in the middle of the park, whose surface is swept over almost entirely with green and purple water lillies. It’s strange seeing people actually looking at nature, especially in a city like this. If Prague (my stop before this one) was a man who runs a kebab shop and not the fairytale people try to sell you, Berlin is a pill which keeps you awake at night and in some kind of trance, continually jamming at the play button every time you try to buffer. I mean, there isn’t even anything particularly fantastic or remarkable about the pond. And The Romantic Era is over, last I checked. But maybe, more than anything, this city is where everything can co-exist and nothing is out of place (except maybe too much colour in an outfit, and I do expect it to be much different in the winter), and that is what I am quite enjoying about Berlin. Perhaps I shall move here one day. Perhaps I should like to live in every city and no city, all at once.

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If you, if you could return
Don’t let it burn, don’t let it fade
I’m sure I’m not being rude, but it’s just your attitude
It’s tearing me apart, it’s ruining everything

—Linger, The Cranberries

‘I am in a transition period’ feels too insipid; ‘transition’ implies a change of state. We learnt about changes of state in chemistry at school. Solid to liquid is melting, liquid to gaseous is evaporating. But solid to gaseous is sublimation: compounds such as solid carbon dioxide (dry ice), sublimation was always the one I used to get stuck on; how can something be tactile but also ghost-like? I think I might be solid carbon dioxide and not actually human.

No, I am not in a ‘transition period’, I renounce it; I am in a period of upheaval.

And that includes love. Why does saying ‘I love you’ condemn me so? Why do I find it so maddening, love? And is it my idea of love being challenged, or am I not actually in love? I go around in spirals, and it is enraging and my love, if it ever was present, sours. It becomes ‘I hate you’. I have attitude issues, and the Cranberries really did put it better than I can.

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I want to disappear. I get all caught up in my self-loathing episodes, which have become like daydreaming to me, and I am filled with so much spite. I wish I could be soft, and gentle. I wish I could say ‘I love you’ before it turns into ‘I hate you’. But then it’s supposed to be show don’t tell, except last I checked, Mr Darcy wasn’t throwing plates at Elizabeth Bennet in Austen’s Pride and Prejudice when he was trying to win her hand in marriage.

I’ve been keeping so many tabs open all the time and it’s only getting me stupidly stressed. There isn’t any point in to-do lists because nothing ever gets checked off and cleared. There’s always another dirty dish added to the pile after you’re done draining the grey suds.

I’m starting to think that smoking isn’t all that bad for me, despite all the guilt tripping it took to cut down; lying in bed at night feeling an elephant on my chest, sitting on the bus and feeling underwater as I gasped for air through the scarcely propped open window; the old man at the elephant keychain and ukulele stand in Athens who told me I shouldn’t ruin my lungs so young; the essay I handed in to my med school tutor, Arterial pCO₂ in the control of breathing, at 3am before finding out he was in fact my registered GP when I rocked up, puffed-up purple eye bags and unbrushed hair, for my 9am appointment at the surgery on Beaumont Street with the blue door. Cortisol is our cruellest adversary, right? Wasn’t that in the endocrinology lecture series? I was probably too stressed at the time to note it down correctly.

If a cigarette helps me close a few tabs in my frontal lobe, so be it.

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I keep skipping things and then tracing my steps back and trying to fill in the gaps and my phone keeps giving me those notifications ‘turn on low power mode? battery is low’, ‘call will end soon, battery low’, ‘iPhone storage full, go to settings to manage storage options to take more photos’, as though it’s calling me out for trying to run from everything mounting over my head. The pile of clothes sitting next to my wardrobe on the floor do it too: they call out my name every time I glance over from my work-desk.

My father used to tell me if I didn’t rest, something would wedge its way in front of me, but I prefer to continue tapping away at my keyboard whilst the boulder sits between me and my computer, denying its existence. It’s 3:20am as I write this and I have to be up in 3 hours, but I can’t haul myself into bed. Not yet.

I don’t know what I’m trying to find in those extra hours, the ones I delay the relief of nestling beneath the covers (which are only two days old, might I add), and the day to finally end. Even when I had surgery earlier this year, I tried to fight the anaesthetic when they were putting me to sleep (apparently, redheads need more anaesthetic anyway.)

I’m not even being productive, often. I get stuck in this freeze mode, and all I seem to do is shuffle between all these open tabs taking up 346 MB energy in the background or mega giga whatever chrome warning always pops up, which I always close without haste.

People keep telling me I look tired but what do they even mean. As if ‘tiredness’ is not an emotion but a skin condition like acne or rosacea, that can be pointed out and diagnosed and I can pop down to the pharmacy to get an ointment for remedy. Yes, I am tired. ‘Tired’ hardly comes close to the heaviness over my eyes, which feel like they have rubber bands knotted around them from which they are being pulled into my skull whilst I am hit over the other side of the head with a mallet. But yes, I am in denial of this, still. And yes, I will persist in staying up until 3am for fear that I have not done enough to deserve the balm of sleep. Because I am still not soft enough for that.

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