It starts like this...

The shoulders ache. The head spins, and you are tired. You think of the last time you slept. You think of how you woke up (far too late, and the day felt wasted), with no-one beside you. The most exciting thing you can bring yourself to do is to draw a squiggle on your optimistically-open notepad. You think, what's wrong with me?

Through your mind flashes a face. You sigh, you don't move because you can't move. Moving requires energy you are unwilling to expend. You look around you for want of something better to do. You can't see the carpet through the junk piled up.

It is cold and you shiver. Even the thickest of jumpers does not keep you warm today. There is something missing. You backcomb your hair. It looks good, but it doesn't make you feel better. Cool hair is not what's missing. You feel just as bad.

The head spins, and you are tired. You wish for a second you were somewhere else, but then think even in Florida there would be something missing. It's not down to lack of sun. The sky has been thundercloud-grey for at least a month now, and you have adjusted. You wonder - what's wrong with me?

And then with a flash it hits you. You don't feel better for realising. Your head spins just the same. You are just as tired, just as cold.

Severe withdrawal symptoms.

You have not been hugged in such a long time. You are missing cuddles. You remember that first squeeze, how it almost choked you you were pressed so hard between two arms and a chest, a chin resting firmly on the head. You miss that chin and that chest and those arms. You wonder whether it would be too much to ring your mother, bring her back from the cinema. Who else gives hugs on demand? You don't think of anyone close-by. A twenty minute walk is too far, let alone a five-hour train journey.

You think you might become one of those sad people sitting all alone in a corner hugging themselves.

Rocking backwards and forwards is only a step away.


(As an afterthought, you hastily remind your readers you are only joking, and you would never evah resort to hugging yourself. And you apologise for the emo-ness. It was going to be funny. Honestly.)

"Let's get this straight," he said. If "you leave your stuff around, I WILL move it." He leaned over towards me across the table. Face tired and puffy, cuts from yesterday's glass-throwing fandango. Every syllable was loaded with such malice, that you wouldn't have thought we were merely discussing revision folders.

There were hidden depths to this conversation, which took me a while to figure out.

"It was your fault," he hissed. "If things are crappy, it's your fault."

It was like a game of ping-pong, each of us attempting to hurt the other exactly the same amount as they had just done. In retrospect, I should have ignored him from the moment he stuck his face right close to mine. (As Trev says, "With hindsight you have 20-20 vision." I should listen to him more.) In my defence I can only say he brings out the very worst in me.

We kept going and going, hitting the ball of insults back and forth until he missed by making me laugh, ball bouncing from the table in one large leap of miscalculation.

"You're fucking twisted. You need psycho-analysis."

And laugh I did. Dropping my ping-pong bat.

Not for very long, though. It wasn't that sort of laugh.

There are little splatters of red wine on the lampshade.

I was doodling little hearts in blue ink around my name at midnight, and she said, "There is no such thing as lasting love." I pulled a face and didn't let on how bad it felt to hear that. Bowed my head and made a point in colouring in meticulously and silently the hearts in red pen.

"It's a wonder you've all turned out so...normal and sane."

We in the taxi, at eight this morning, were so quiet that I heard the petrol sloshing in the tank. It is quite possible that the only thing that I want to happen right now is for the world to spontaneously combust.

Please?

I am armed.

Armed with my moleskin and pen in the early hours of the morning - 1AM till 2AM, hand racing towards the final pages.

I am armed with three white bin bags in the late morning. Three bin bags and a duster. I am being ruthless. Everything must go. That and that, which takes up space, and this which I haven't found a need for since I was thirteen. And these cinema tickets, 23 little blue squares. This one I saw on my twelth birthday. This one I cried at for two hours, stumbling from the screen with tiny eyes and wobbling lip. This poster I rip from the wall, taking delight in peeling off the yellow tack with my thumb nail. This picture and that DVD, these jumpers (I imagine burying nose into shoulder) and this necklace, this drawing, these teddies, they are contained on a pile by the foot of my bed, waiting for the bin bag.

I am armed with music. New music. Send me songs, I need something which does not remind of being 14 and in love, waiting by the phone. Music not suited for the time of day. William Shatner's Common People at 11PM. Reel Big Fish's Take On Me. Wheatus' Little Respect. Sounds I never would have considered listening to a few weeks ago blast from my computer speakers at an ear-piercing volume. My head does that thing where it pounds, "no no no no no no no no" over and over again in time with my heart, but I won't listen to it.

I am armed with coffee. Mug after mug. No sugar, as little milk as possible. The bitterness pleases me, as does the way I feel two hours later, buzzing at my keyboard. I have never been a coffee person, but maybe now, I will start. It's the smell I can't stand, reminding me of stumbling from bed at 4AM, burning the toaster (flames almost licking the white ceiling tiles) and crawling into the car an hour later to drive to Germany with five in the car. Sickly sweet perfume mingling with coffee aroma. Maybe now is the time to start holding my nose.

I am armed with stinging, weeping ears. I went on a whim yesterday with a friend. "She wants you to mutilate her," the woman behind the one till said disapprovingly to the guy behind the other. Seven holes now. Perhaps I will stop there, or there will be nothing left of me.

Armed with the knowledge that there is something to be done every day. Revision. Painting over the grey fingerprints on my white walls, and the smudged, blue pen mark by my bed. Reading my way through the books on my to-read shelf. Making myself into some other person, because now there is no-one to really define me anymore.

I am always armed with something, because when I am not, there is nothing to do but to sit here and think about what was and why it is best this way and not the other way, about what we said and how we cried together standing before the mirror looking at each other's bodies standing so close for the very last time. And about how we tried to laugh but failed, a little sound starting at the back of our throats, a curl of a smile lasting for all but three seconds before it collapsed again.

Things are almost back to normal. My tear ducts still hurt after the cafe incident yesterday, where most of my hot chocolate comprised of salty tears and we got strange looks from the waitresses who must have become bored of us after the first hour. I won't blog for a bit anyway. The next few days need to be taken up with making sense of things, doing the work I've become so behind with, and watching all my favourite DVD's in one go. Thanks Judith and Joe and Elisabeth :)


Mini update: The whole not blogging for a few days didn't work out. In future when I say things like that I will try and mean it for the few days which follow.

There's nothing I can say (to make you try and feel okay, etc). I have probably said and done the worst things I could ever possibly have dreamed of saying and doing.

I will not be blogging for a long time, until something is funny again.

Look what you've done. You've turned me into one of those girls who wait weedily by the phone, one of those girls who might burst into tears when their grandmothers call to ask about cake recipes. You've turned me into one of those girls who write in angry capital letters something to the tune of I RING FIVE TIMES AND LEAVE TWO MESSAGES AND YOU DON'T CALL BACK! I will ignore the sensible part of my brain which says you might be asleep, or your phone might be on silent, and listen to the part which right now is running around with arms flailing above the head screaming FIRE.

I won't get to sleep tonight. Things like that cannot be said without a follow-up, like a doctor's appointment after a recently pointed-out abnormality. No no no. It's doesn't work like that. My brain will be thinking things, as it does when it has nothing better to do. It will think things and my pillow will be the wrong shape and too hot one side, too cold the other, and I WILL NOT SLEEP. So tomorrow when you've forgotten what the whole thing was about, I shall REMIND you and we will DISCUSS like the mature, rational people we (I?) are (am?) not.

And no arguing. You know that I cannot argue without stuttering and repeating myself and sighing in frustration at my inability to express myself. If it came to it, I'd ask you to argue your side, and you would later recieve a handwritten essay detailing MY side of things. It's the only way I would ever in a million years win.

(I am still waiting by the phone. One eye is looking expectantly and a little suspiciously at blank screen of my mobile. Perhaps it is broken. This is clutching at straws.)

It's dark too early. I got back from college to find the house in dissaray, men in blue over-alls walking around installing the new boiler using complicated hybrid screwdrivers. The power was switched off three times, and each time, I lost either the start of a blog entry, or a continuation of my NaNo story. Third time unlucky.

David Gray and Everything But the Girl is the soundtrack of the day, and they make me think of snow and gloves and THAT feeling I can't grasp. I don't know what it is. It's elusive, it's hidden, but I want it. I need it. Things won't make sense with it, but I need it anyhow, to make myself somehow different.

It's remembering the sound and taste of the first bite of a sweet, crunchy apple. It's the aftertaste of a book which takes you away for a week, to a place far, far away. It's the feeling music gives you at a certain time, in a certain place. It's the feel of the brush against my head when I was younger, the memory of being wrapped into a towel and the taste of Brie after school in Year One. It's the plastic eyes of dolls, and the smell of something old, familiar, but not quite name-able.

Don't worry, I don't know what I'm talking about either.

(the depressingness of...)

Apparently everything is hyper-real and nothing is original. What defines your past? Home videos and photos and the things people tell you about yourself at five. What if they're lying? Does that mean I am not what my past says I am? Am I even real? Debatable. Is me saying this original? Highly highly unlikely.

The pictures of Madonna's belly button are more real than Madonna's belly button itself. Madonna's bellybutton is a myth and a false sign.