I trip over cardboard boxes on the way to sit before my computer and lament my lack of knitting skills. I had the last teabag from the box earlier. A flash of schadenfreude comes over me when I imagine my flatmate's face. We still haven't moved in properly. A friend suggests I make curtains and de-scale the kettle. Apparently the first things she'd do if she moved in somewhere new. (She's got her priorities all wrong!) I think about considering contemplating it. I don't get very far. We all need our stars. Someone I vaguely know is standing at the door, happy-drunk, with a duck quacking away in his arms. I lock the animal in the bathroom. It leaves the next day with the guy. I am threatening to draw the line at poultry.

Had my hair cut off today. I hated how it was before, the curls and the way it flicked out at the sides. How they all exclaimed over it! Even now they're telling me about how the dentist's assistants used to call me Curly Tops. My Gawd! As if they haven't told me that enough times already. This is why I never bring girls home. Jeez. How embarrassing. I check myself out in the reflection in the kitchen window. Yep. That's me.

I'm lying beside the pool. It's hot and I'm not even thinking about being back at home in the stinging cold. Floods over there, apparently. I've got my books, my music, my moleskine. I'm drifting away on a daydream, eyes closed, head back. Hmmm. This is the life. Tonight they'll be pool on a balcony. There is no doubt Jack Daniels will drop by and say hi. Tomorrow I'm going to bite the bullet and ask someone, anyone, where is the elephant?

Finally no more exam stress. It'll work out for me, I know. All I need is someone to pop up occassionally to make me pizza and draw flowers and hearts with chalk on my black mug. If I think about it a certain way, I'd say my life is about to take off. I don't know what's around the corner, but whatever it is, I'll make it happen. Someone sneezed yesterday, I saw it unfold in slow motion before me on the small box framed by rambles and pixels, rambles and pixels framed by computer monitor. I worried for a second. What is it, sweetie? Sneeze? Cry? Death?

We have a cat. We've painted the kitchen. The house is gradually getting there. He's resting at the moment, home for once. He's away working most of the time. I've had a bit of a lucky break. Advertising is under-rated; I needed that so badly and it paid well. What else could we ask for? A baby? I want America back. Too late now.

Sitting here waiting for my life to start. Perhaps it has already, when I wasn't looking. A phone-call-cut-short later (sweaty hands and heart doing the jitterbug) and I think, maybe sweetie, this is it! This along with singing top-volume to Bob Marley's No Woman No Cry, lying back on my covers, eyes closed and arms conducting an invisible orchestra - this is IT. These are the words which make it all happen for me - beautitful but reckless abandon.

Their first argument ended when the pen ran out. Who knew what might have been said after that decisive but internally uncontrollable moment? All they knew is that things had been left unwritten, and that it couldn't go on that way. She poured herself a bowl of cornflakes, didn't stop when they started flowing over the sides of the white porcelaine because she loved the sound. In a house where silence reigned superior, in a relationship in which the dots over the 'i's and the crosses on the 't's spoke louder than the clearing of the throat, she cherished the sound of breakfast cereal flowing into a bowl more than the blue washed-out letters on the lined page he held in his hands. She couldn't stop pouring, and didn't until he wrote 'stop now' with a new pen.

"Have you stopped being so ... so thingy?"
"So 'thingy'?"
"You know. So rhetorical."


You give me miles and miles of mountains, and I ask for the sea.


"I have that effect on women."
"Are you speaking from experience, or are you bluffing?"
"I'm bluffing."


What I am to you is not real.


"Oh, he's angry again. I bought flowers for this room, and not for the other."
"Hmm."
"He's been waiting to pick an argument. It's been too long."


What I give to you is just what I'm going through.


"I'm in LOVE!"
"That doesn't sound like you. Congratulations!"
"...and I won't smoke and he's giving up because of me. And I won't look at other men because I've got him and he's all I need."
"Mhm."
"...and he LOVES me""


This is nothing new. Just another phase of finding what I really need [is what makes me bleed].

...being tired of unconventional posts, darkness of an infinite quality, cheese bread and work. Novel writing for a month - tick tock but at twice the normal speed with hours lopped off days, and minutes off hours. Finished History essay. Ask me a question and I will answer. Lloyd George, Liberal reforms, social evils, Insurance, school meals for kids. Maybe the milk cartons too. Everyone was once a milk monitor at school, When We Were Young. Animated milk carton music video always makes me cry. Must be something about the song. Milky. Blur.

Tonight, and cold finger-tips. Pandora, what do you play now? Sister Hazel. You Can't Put Your Arms Around a Memory. Bath. Lush. Suds. Submerged ears. BANG. Fire-works fire-engine fire-crackers. Fire. Alarm! Music dark dark night and Hungarian peasant-esque slippers. Being warm inside and remembering kisses in town with people walking past and leaves falling slowly from trees, settling around our trainer-clad feet.

Tomorrow promises autumn and fallen leaves. Do not walk past without jumping in: orange, red, brown. Tomorrow is back to school to pick up old coursework and a barrage of nostalgia. Which former teacher will remember me best? History and he calls me "I'm Charlotte". I'm Charlotte, ask me your questions. Art? Science? Will I laugh at the ties, isolation and the no-coats-inside-the-building-rule, or cry at the familiar, almost tangible smell of five years?

Don't be allergic to me. I'm no kiwi.

Carry on "tired of conventional posts" and link back here. I am tagging Matt and Meredith.

"...day-dreaming, thinking...standing close together in a tumble of people. Smiling and whispering into ears. A kiss on the lips; he pulls away..."

"Broke your heart, because you can't finish what you start."

"...it feels like the end because he squeezes and doesn't let go...strokes my hair..."

"Been there, done that, but HAVEN'T worn the T-shirt."

"She began going out with Mr Potato-Head...."

"Still holding my stomach in."

Person A: My dad, you know, he's a bit of a laminating fanatic. He goes to work early just to laminate things. So...do you want anything laminating?

Person B: Ummm...well...do you think he could laminate the whole kitchen, so we can hose it down every three months?

--------------------

Person A: Did you know he writes books about Victorian prostitution??

Person B: Hahaha. No.

Person A: Yeah. So it's always amusing to ask in the middle of the lecture - "Hey Trev, will you tell us about how your experiences with prostitution influenced you to write your books?"...

--------------------

Person A: How's your balloon? Did it survive the night?

Person B: No. I woke up this morning and it was lying on the floor. Like an injured badger.

--------------------

Person A: So, let's introduce ourselves. Can you tell us anything interesting about you? Anything unusual?

Person B: Well, I DO eat taramasalata on toast for breakfast. Every morning. It's become a bit of an obsession.

I live off caramelised biscuits. Stop feeding me. I am not a duck. I can't even quack convincingly. Leave a brussel sprout if you dare.

Eight in the morning. In the bathroom, applying green eyeliner (rightfully my sister's, but she's still in bed, and will never know), with the classic contorted face. I hear the foretelling crash of trouble from downstairs. A chair? Perhaps the whole table, knocked over by more than a just clumsy hand. A shout; to say voices are raised is always an understatement when They are involved.

...

The door jams as I open it. A ham sandwich is splattered almost cruelly onto the terrocotta tile. Mayonnaise and mangled bread stick to the door frame. My brother's chair lies on its back, and leading from the chair into the kitchen and beyond is the evidence of a temper ill controlled - pink shredded ham remenants, globlets of glistening mayonnaise.

...

It's after eight, we're all waiting. Waiting takes the form of shouting. The boundaries between shouting and waiting often become blurred. Waiting at the bus stop is not easy when trying to contol the incredible urge to scream. When riding out an argument, waiting helps more than shouting. No-one but me knows this.

...

Fifteen hours later, there's no trace of ham. The mayonnaise has been swept away (under the rug, with the rest of everythng that matters? If I lifted this rug, you would find a broken relationship and lost words. Many comforting touches have been disregarded here. I keep a lost and found box under the attic window.) A crumb of bread clings onto the doorframe, but that crumb may have existed for some days, maybe a week. It might not be this morning's crumb. I could believe this if I tried, but experience tells me tomorrow morning will be the same.

...

I look forward to the variation. Tomorrow it will be the table knocked over, and peanut butter splattered across the house. Watercress would be nice, thank you.

Once upon a time (today), there was a being (Kiwiqueen) who was walking around disguised as a human being. No-one knew (until now) that this carbon copy of your average teenage girl was, in fact, a teabag, or a slug, depending on its (her) mood.

Today is a teabag-slug day. If you gently peeled back the skin, ominously lurking beneath you would find sluggish features, and half a teabag.

Now you know.

The End.