No matter how far I try to travel from people, people always appear. Either they follow me, or they’re already there, and I followed them, unwittingly.
. . . buzzed up by the knowledge that none of my family knew where I was, who I was with nor when I’d be home again. I didn’t even know exactly who I was with or when I’d be home again or where home really was anymore.
In the face of immense tragedy—yet again—unexpected beauty.
How easy to be electrocuted. How fine the line between beauty and peril.
I can’t remember the name of the piece, or the artist. Maybe it wasn’t even an artwork. Why must I automatically assume that every strange object is a sculpture, that every public display of unorthodox behavior is an act of performance.
I love that an idea can be so powerful it doesn’t matter whether I’ve seen the artwork for real or not.
How I adored to draw as a child, a teen; all my life before I began to try and shape a career out of it.
Now I wonder if each artwork is in fact utterly inaccessible to everybody but the person to whom it is secretly addressed?
I was wrong to try and impose something of my humanity on you, when being human never did me any good
Blending into the tinctures and textures of the countryside. The tree which falls without any human hearing still falls, as the creatures who die without being found by a human still die.
I see foxes often, but always they are crossing fallow fields in the distance. Gold flecks on faraway expanses of green. Magnetic to the meandering eye. Enigmatic, unreachable.
I decided that if I didn’t allow myself to fall asleep, then I wouldn’t have to wake up again and despair.
But I know I will do neither; nothing. I have all the time in the world, and yet, I can’t be bothered.
My mother says: ‘People who suffer from anxiety are usually those with the most vivid imaginations.
See how community is only a good thing when you’re a part of it.
It’s time to accept that I am average, and to stop making this acceptance of my averageness into a bereavement.
And I felt like such a failure. I thought: I can’t even do mental illness properly.
But no, now I see I never meant to Ben what Ben meant to me. If there was anything I said which resonated in return, he found a better speech elsewhere. My romance went no further than his coat.
Why is it only now that I can see how many ordinary things are actually grotesque?
I look at the cake in my mother’s arms and think: here stands the only person in the whole world who’d go to such trouble for fractious, ungrateful me.
Did it do me any good, early in life, to believe so many things which were not true? Or did it damage me? Pouring a foundation of disappointment, of uncertainty.
The old summer’s-end melancholy nips at my heels. There’s no school to go back to; no detail of my life will change come the onset of September; yet still, I feel the old trepidation.
But I have never wanted to be perceived as chatty and bright. I have always wanted to be solemn and mysterious.
But nowadays I feel guilty that I am granted the immunity of the artistically gifted, having never actually achieved anything to prove myself worthy.
I wish I’d been born with your capacity for wonder. I wouldn’t mind living a shorter life if my short life could be as vivid as yours.
In the days approaching Christmas, she always reminds me of the previous year: ‘Jane crocheted you an entire poncho, and all you gave her was a bone-shaped beach stone.
I think: by the time I’m old, nobody will be able to die any more.
But now I remember, of course, I’m never going to be old.
And out the bus window, here is my dead world come true, my whole dead world in motion.
Sometimes things happen that give me cause to believe I no longer exist. Car park barriers which do not lift when I drive towards them, automatic doors which do not open automatically as I approach.
What bothered me was all of the time he wasted by drumming, and all the time I wasted by listening to him drum, by taking pleasure in it, for pleasure is almost always a waste of time.
This morning, the sun endures past dawn. I realise that it is August: the summer’s last stand.
This morning, I see the lead in my glass tumbler. A slim, bright glint, a silverfish. I feel it collecting in my blood, papercutting the lining of my veins.
It’s too warm for red wine; now I mix gin and tonics instead. I find they make the ordinary sensation of living lighter, less ruffled.
I know with unqualified certainty that I want to die. But I also know with equivalent certainty that I won’t do anything about it. That I will only remain here and wait for death to indulge me.
I lie down and think about how this whole long, strange summer ought to end in a substantial event. But, probably, won’t. For the first time I acknowledge the possibility that nothing will die, or change, or even happen.