Things I'm Doing For Story Ideas

These were my friends drinking cider, and I was one of them. But in the winter we all kept ourselves healthy and warmed. Writing our names on our bedroom windows. Condensation conversations. I left my other-eighth behind, like every half full mug of green tea on his bookcase. I left my parents in the dark, flicking the light on occasionally to remind them I was still alive and able. I curled into my malleable form in the early morning. Feeling otherworldly and prominent, always. But these were my friends, gearing up for the sun. We were all waiting. And I was changing, please.

Date that should not have been a date, date. You have terrific eyes but you have said too many kind things about me and I can only foresee you running out of these pleasantries much sooner than you have probably planned.

Winter appeals beyond all else because of layers. This coat swathes a multitude of sins. Oh shit, I’m going to be the fat chick in summer again aren’t I.

Should have just shown him my hips. THINK OF SOMETHING NICE TO SAY NOW, FUCKER.

I don’t have a sweet tooth anymore. It died.

She is chain-smoking, I am trying to maintain eye contact. She is chain-smoking like me. We are looking at each other.

My values and I, hello.

I used to drink gin. But gin makes me sad. It took me too long to figure this out. Mornings after made me want to twist myself over and step on my own face.

Breath through teeth, she takes me to her friends garage so I can punch a bag hanging from the ceiling for an hour. She rolls fat cigarettes and watches the sea. The air holding the smoke like a watermark. 
You’re doing too much. She drags a heel across the concrete.
I sleep at least seven hours.
You never have any down-time.
Got home at four last night.
When you would have been sleeping.
This. I lift my damp wrist to the bag.
Someone upset you. 

It’s Sunday. I don’t care that the sun is out. She lets me work on my handwriting in her car.
I might have taken on more than I should have. 

You were at most my Rigel. Sixth brightest star in the sky. That’s a crappy sentiment so I could also say you are like a disease I never caught so don’t care for. You are the birth defects my children won’t have. You are the children I won’t have. You are the mindset I had at fourteen. The goals of eight years old. You are what I don’t know much about like Campden Tablets or Jean Titelouze. The abhorrence of first love or second marriages. You are the explicit disinterest I have in Mathematical Proof or Dilution Genes and definitely resemble every single embarrassing moment I’ve experienced. Tripping over stairs in movie theaters, caught with apple juice over my mouth and fingers in the hallway, rips in clothes and exposed underwear lines. 

Just so you don’t doubt. I am intelligent. I take in more than I let on. I let believe that I am naive.  I have a fair few friends. I know what you’re doing when you think you’re being cunning and the ‘innocence’ I radiate that consequently evokes a patronizing manner in most is not dim-witted. It’s the shape of my eyes. You’re the slow-minded one for pairing those traits with each other. 

FOR FUCKS SAKE. So much anger to be had before sleep, I’m sure.

Seeing her spacious figure  through the barely mottled glass, ruddy peach skin slathered across her bulky upper body. It’s not the first time I am glad I am not her. Wishing solves nothing but being thankful for not harbouring the wishes of others is mood-settling. You called her ‘repulsive’. I wouldn’t go that far.

Frozen berries in winter, shivering in my bland skin. Wool on wool on flesh. Nothing keeps the heat in. Nothing keeps my disdain for my form ‘under wraps’. What a pun. What an enviable notion. What pride I sense I will never have. My digestive system talks to me and I talk back. Leave me alone. I am happy now. Leave me alone.

All my half-assed pleasantries held no allure for you, surely. It must have been my face, then. It must have been my youth. You didn’t act on it, we always took great pains to avoid each others’ touch. True, I would have reacted as if burnt. I did put my hand on the back of your neck, once. I had been holding a bottle of something cold. But you didn’t jump forward and away, you just smiled. With those eyes, not only your mouth. Those eyes that creased at the edges and glittered. It used to aggravate me to the point of seclusion that when you grinned, I couldn’t halt the curve of my own lips. I’d twist away, bend my neck so my hair fell to cover my the side of my face and the sight of my dimpled cheeks broken by that helpless gap of teeth and gums. You spoke to my mother and blushed and I blushed too. That was odd. My face alight and parallel to a keyboard. What did you feel, with the heat on your face? Were you seeing what I would look a version of with age and found it interesting and comforting? I’m six inches taller than her, we wouldn’t look the same.

What the hell were you doing?

Vodka and I, this Saturday night coming. Will I be bubbly and laughing and brimming with quips or will I be shaky and quiet and desperately seeking solace in a small room with only people I know and can talk bland with? My mindset may be changed, my sensitivity and self-doubt remains unshakeable. I want to venture out of that room and lean back and laugh with semi-strangers and stride instead of crawl. It happens maybe 37% of the time. This version of myself that I actually like in social situations. At least I have no trouble admitting I am awkward. If I stayed silent about this, I’d be perceived as something even lowlier than shy.

At least when you get me talking now, I laugh easily and have news and plans and opportunities. And I am starting to look my age. AT LEAST?! For fucks sake, just drink your fucking vodka and breathe brilliance like you can. That was my rational side. Start giving yourself some credit, she says, stop caring so much about how much of a dork you are sometimes. FINE THEN.

Half a dozen hindrances. You think I won’t make it? You think I’ll let you render me unsuccessful? You don’t know me at all, this selection of diversions.

For the kid that I was and the kid I am still:

You’re allergic to penicillin and you don’t like coriander. You’re afraid to share because you think you won’t get it back. Your mother is as protective as any and your parents are not a single unit. Your father is a millionaire and your fingernails grow fast. The muscles in your legs come out first and fast and your socks are always stained. You do believe in God on varying levels. Your birthday is in summer and your friends are sometimes away. Your left eye is less ordinary than your right and you like flowers. You like flowers too much. You like flowers more than almost anything else. You think a fondness for sugar is a weakness and hate suits on anyone but your father. You spend a lot more time alone than should be considered easy. You are a terrible artist but plaster your walls with your crap anyway. 

None of that, though, adds or detracts from the quality of person you are. Whatever level of quality that may be. Facts are interesting sometimes, but don’t mean anything. I watched a guy eating breakfast alone the other day and he glanced up and saw someone struggling with the door, arms laden with crap in boxes. His meal had only just turned up but he literally sprung from his seat with this noticeably urgent force and dashed to the door to hold it open. That means something, I think. I liked him straight-away. 

I came out of the post-office and dropped a whole of writing, drawings and music on the pavement. A guy stopped and helped me gather them, we chatted without looking at each other and I was saying how embarrassing I am when I went to stand up and recognised him as a musician who also does artworks I’ve seen and liked a lot. Which is just my luck. Bearing all my faux-creativity in front of a person who is actually impressively creative. That wasn’t actually the point, though. The point was that he instantly stopped to help. I liked him straight-away.

I used to write poems when I was six and make up new words so they’d rhyme. Like ‘Spiceba’ (Pronounced spice-ah-bah). That doesn’t mean anything, either. A guy I didn’t know was moving out of my apartment block by himself, hauling huge pieces of unnecessary furniture down the spindly steel stairs outside and I helped for two hours. I drove with him to the new place and back twice. He looked so bashfully grateful I just about hugged him. That means something, I think. I’d like to think he liked me straight-away.

When she was irrationally sad, clearing her desk and burning incense because it was easy. When she was irrationally wretched and running her bony fingers through her hair, life seeming perilous. When she was irrationally sad, she was an extension of incredibly beautiful. She had a wisdom almost Catholic in age, or so it seemed to me. I was thirteen, she was a faded age. She was irrationally sad in the most rational manner. I told myself everything was insubstantial, my future career, tendencies I would develop and the gross indecency of romance. It would all fall insubstantial, if I did not grow into something so helplessly lovely. 

And then I grew up.. And I am yet to grow into myself. I guess it doesn’t matter so much, she developed happiness like weeds. 

Glee and revelry again. I am caring for myself in a way I didn’t think I could. Sympathies for others are kept in their place. I am inarticulate with mirth. Feel like Scrooge McDuck. In a bathtub just throwing all my merriment in the air and cackling. True: The last few photos taken of me, I have my head thrown back. False: It’s just so attractive. True: I’m ambivalent. I like them. I look like someone who never cared. 

“I’d rather be whoring right now.”

I do wish everyone thought of me as ‘nice’, though. I wish they’d forget the shy and sad. Or take my un-meet-able eyes as sensitivity not hostility. Honestly, I never once blanked you on the street.

You intimidate the shivers out of me. 

—— has had sex with ———- people. That’s ——— —— ——— her age. She is sitting at home watching a shitty arthouse film made by two idiots with huge credit card bills. It’s not worth watching. She switches it off to write this.

With a hat on, making arguments. On the steel stairs outside my window, I will die. On the cross-hatched metal stairs I will die, will he be watching?

Making jokes because I slept with her. Laughing at hers because I slept with her. We were up late, then we were up early , and my head was in her lap. Then I slept with her. Kind of.

You had time to waste and I had all the time I’d ever felt weighing dank on my shoulder-blades and spinning ovals across the prickly three-days growth on my legs. I did have every ounce of time I allowed manageable, in truth: Every spindly grasp of time I had ever grabbed, I had. I had for you. You and all of your pet concerns, with ears flattened and tails spiked. I had time to calm their urgent throats and blow-to-close their eyes. So you could sleep and sleep with me. Just rest, dream and lay flat. I had all my time for this, stockpiles of time and such a persistent will to spend it. But I was no help. I never quelled. I rarely faltered the heady anxiety you keep circling around you, even for just a few minutes. A few minutes of this time I had.

Now, though. I have no grasp of time. There is no time to spare, kept safe in the webs of my winter-bitten fingers. It’s all about me. And it was no weakness of my own. I don’t class empathy as such.

Fuck me this winter surprised me. My lips are washed and aquatic blue, my wrists and ankles swear and curse. Sleep comes only when my body is clawed. My breath in my room and I sneer. I am washed out again. Well, shit. Excuse my face.

Right-o.

Going to do one last vid to say goodbye (over-dramatizing, always). So if you want to ask my anything, go nuts. I’m about two-thirds of the way through extracting what I need from the blog so it’ll be down in about a week. Feel free to go anonymous, I’ll be honest. 

TN