fuck lucky

M4 towards Cardiff, just after a junction, the traffic grinds to a halt. About a mile from the services. The car forces its way in from the outside lane to the hard shoulder, pulls up, stops by the concrete steps below the bridge. You get out into spitting rain and start to scramble up, bogged down with brambles and honking horns because three lanes of trucks can see you, know what you're doing, have precious little else to do but watch. Your boyfriend cheers as you slip on a wet leaf, throw out your hand to break your fall and feel thorns embedded in your palm as you run on.

Out of sight (you hope) you find a sheltered place to squat and remove six, seven spikes from your skin. It's bleeding, you're bleeding.

Back down the steps, you throw your hands up in a victory salute and notice that (after you've just pissed in the bushes) the traffic is miraculously moving again. You're so incensed by this, and trying not to slip, that you somehow don't notice what actually just happened.

*****

She was sitting in a chair, in a bedroom, in a building; she was glassy eyed, staring at her lap. On the desk in front of her was a razor of the expensive sort, with the block of moisturiser and the plastic bed around the blade to make them virtually snag-proof on the skin. It was chosen for this exact reason but past its usage now, lying mangled beside a pair of nail scissors.

What people fail to realise about sharp objects is that they are everywhere. Prison guards, health professionals - trained to search them out in any room - they know. Lighters, badges, safety pins, compasses, broken photo frames. It takes a certain turn of thought to see them. To see that a scissor blade or similar (no matter how blunt) can be taken to an overpriced shaver (no matter how snag-proof) and used, with perseverance, to lever a skinny sliver of steel from the plastic bed, bending it in the process to a corner that will hack much harder at skin than a simple sharp edge.

She was the mistress of her own undoing, beautifully adept at avoiding bread and fruit knives in the washing up, throwing out the craft blades she used to use in art class, buying the safest and bluntest of everything. She knew how to remove the more obvious of temptations, but not all of them. There always had to be something, something vulgar and harmful, in a black cloth pouch that was hidden so as not to be thought of, in a secret corner of the room that her thoughts went back to several times a day.

*****

You know, when you reach Cardiff and find your phone is missing, that this isn't exactly new. In two years you've lost/been robbed of four debit cards, three sets of various house keys, one passport, two NUS cards, one university ID and more miscellaneous items of clothing than you can count. A mobile phone lost (and really lost, as in, somewhere between Wales and England lost) is unusual but not unexpected.

Let's just say you're not too worried.

Ten years old and, after weeks of waiting, breathless trips to Toys'r'us, sold out shelves and nagging and nagging, you finally get your hands on a Tamagotchi. You celebrate by leaving your little pet on top of a vending machine in a service station in Scotland. Your parents are understandably annoyed.

On a whim, on the way back down south, you convince your father to pull back in at the services because maybe, just maybe, it'll still be there. The man in the shop smiles, hands it back to you. They've been playing with it, keeping it alive for two weeks. It's been something of a running joke.

"You're a lucky little girl, you know that?"

*****

Back then, on days when the way it felt was completely separate from the way it should be, when the misery was a tangible, physical force, she chatted shit a lot. For this person and that cause, for general edification and spiritual growth. With the controlled, delicate sincerity of someone who likes the sound of their own voice - she would ask God for stuff.

Sometimes, on her own and not nearly as often, she would actually pray. The kind of gut-spoken prayer that's more like yawning or being sick than actually trying, the cry that bubbles up behind the eyes and hurts.

Please, make it stop.

She couldn't stop asking anymore than she could stop crying and, when that failed, she'd sit up and breathe in and get back some of that calculation that served her so well in church. Hating it, knowing it didn't work that way, she'd strike a deal -

if ever I don't have to feel like this, if this ever, ever goes away, I promise you there will never be a day that I won't get down on my knees and thank you. I will never take it for granted, never stop being grateful, I'll do anything, give up everything, just please, please, make it stop.

God, if ever he saw it as a bargain, was dutiful and kept his part. She threw away the black bag, stopped crying, felt it lifting. She smiled, put on her new life like a new outfit, checked her make-up in the mirror and left the room humming to herself. She forgot all about her side of the deal.

*****

On a whim, two days later, you tell Ben to come off at that junction, go over the bridge and wait while the two of you jump out of the car and clamber over the fence to the hard shoulder. Down the steps, shining torches into the brambles, you find your phone snug in the grass by the steps, soaking wet with two days rain.

You dry it out, switch it on and find it works perfectly. Not a scratch on it. You tell the story of the Tamagotchi and remark how you've always been lucky with things like that. The little things, the eleventh hour, twist of fate, would-you-believe-it anecdotes. As if the fairies were on your side.

The irony hits you like a punch; you stop talking. Fuck lucky. Your sporadic ability to get away with things by the skin of your teeth, your smug, jam-covered approach to life's little complications - you think that's what makes you lucky? You think there's something called luck at all?

*****

That night she got into bed and decided to stop talking about luck, once and for all. She rolled over into him, pushed her face into the gap between his shoulders, listened to him breathing, counted her blessings, one by one. She thought about it, but not for too long, started to whisper in that sincere-little-church-voice and then the prayer bubbled up from somewhere deep and happened, sort of by accident.

Fuck lucky.
Thank you.

the fruitcake

So I decided to rip off RLP by rewriting this post with his man in black substituted for my own. Shameless, hey, but I thought it was a good excercise - personifying your unconscious, the parts of you that cause and create your writing. What would they be like, what would they say, would you get on with them?

Anyway, I tried it, hoping I could get to the bottom of my complete inability to write and then post it on here by way of breaking the block. It half worked, in that I figured out pretty quickly why I'm not writing anymore, but then got upset. Really upset.

It turns out that I know exactly why I'm not writing, it's screamingly fucking obvious but it's also tied up, achingly so, with pretty much every other issue in my life. I do want to try and explain it here. if only so (if this is the last post I ever make) passers-by will see an appropriate full-stop on this rambling journal of the last three years. But the 'man in black' format really isn't the right way of doing it. See, once I coaxed him out, put a drink in his hand and sat him down by a roaring fire for some chit-chat, he wouldn't shut up. That bastard thinks he's got an answer for everything. Mainly because, well, he does.

I haven't quite plucked up the balls to tell you what he said, yet. First I want to say a couple of things about this blog, why I'm so fixated on my failing to keep it up.

1) It's almost embarassing to admit it but this stupid little site means an incredible amount to me. I've been painfully open about my life on here, using it as an ill-disguised source of therapy throughout the absolute hardest period of my life. There's been periods where I literally could not have coped without having this as an outlet, where the only comfort I could find on black days was planning these posts, putting them up and waiting on tenterhooks to see who might comment and what they might say. It sounds pathetic, even to myself, but when you're that low, a friend or someone you barely know dropping by to say 'that was good' or 'hang in there' can mark the difference between a hideous day or a better day. Writing here, striving to write well, not only gave me immense satisfaction in the work itself but the comfort of knowing people were listening. However distantly.

2) I guess this is the same point, but writing is the only thing I've ever really felt that I was any good at it. I knew I was sometimes good at drama, sometimes clever, sometimes pretty, sometimes funny, but I've always been able to write. It's the only thing I've ever felt was talent rather than fluke. When I was 15 I won a literary competition at school and the judge said a lot of things, about how I could turn professional, how he would give my name to his publishers. It was flattery, a nice little prize, but it didn't stop me waiting every day for someone to call. It also started me writing for real, in earnest, constantly. Obsessively. I never got a call, there was never any publisher but the can was open and worms were everywhere. I didn't stop writing until about September last year. That's about 4 years of constant scribbling. Now it's gone. Take a moment to imagine what this sudden absence feels like.

3) I know this blog isn't dead yet. Most months show a couple of posts, however bad or pointless they might be. And I know that the sheer volume of writing I produced during the first year of uni couldn't last forever. It was insane. I was posting almost every day, alongside writing two separate diaries, countless poems and pieces of fiction. Then there was the compulsive note taking and essay writing and just shit that I couldn't stop putting down. Was physically terrified of not writing. It became a symptom of the illness, it became an actual fixation, but I think I would have died without it. It was an extreme, but the material I produced then (some posted on this blog, some not) is one of the only things I am actually proud of. Now I've reached the other extreme. For the last year or so, what you see on this blog is actually the sum total of my output. It's shit. I am no longer proud.


4) There aren't that many coincidences in how my relationship with writing has developed. I started working at it when someone told me I was good; started blogging when I was feeling particularly confident about my ability to be interesting; started blogging about serious matters as soon as I realised that the internet wasn't gonna laugh at me. Then, I left home, started uni, and everything changed. The only constant things were being miserable and wanting, needing to write about it. So I did. As I got more and more depressed I wrote more and more, with increasing honesty, about myself, my illness, my faith, my life. I reached breaking point. Got help. Got put on meds. Lost my faith.

Six months later, I guess it was, I took myself off meds, got a new boyfriend who subsequently came to live with me. It's difficult to get lost in your head when you and the person you're in love with are cohabiting with everything you own in a comparatively small room with a single bed. I blogged, occasionally, but it was nothing like the same. Worse, he wanted absolutely nothing to do with it. He never read a single word I wrote. I desperately wanted him to.

That was a distraction though, from the biggest single change. I was still messed up, certainly. My estranged granfather dying, the realisation that I was going to have to leave Royal Holloway, losing touch with most of my friends, all made it a difficult year. But apart from a few very black days, I wasn't depressed anymore. The process of becoming happier didn't just cost me my faith. It cost me this as well.

*****

So present day, I'm staring at this blog, feeling utterly disconnected. I don't know how to process any of the things that are happening to me and (this is very important) I FUCKING HATE every single thing I've written here for the last year or so.

I try so hard to get it back, to shake off this block, but I can't. On the train, by the beach, in the park, over and over again, I snatch so hard at every idea that hits me, try to pin them down and find some way of getting back to that place where I could just express myself and I can't. I cannot write a single word without instantly, instinctively criticising it. Too wanky, too blunt, too boring, too pretentious. Everyone will see right through that and smell the desperation coming off a girl who's lost her edge.

Even this post. Especially this post.

Why?

Because right at the heart of everything, is this one fear. When you strip away all the pretty words (which the meds did pretty well) and spiritual crisis (the meds took care of that one too) and even the depression itself (counselling, balls of steel, but yeah, the meds) the only real thing that's left is this one fear. Not a mental illness fear, a chemical imbalance fear or a religious fear. Just a me-fear.

I'm so so scared that I will fail. Why I didn't apply for drama school. Why I never try to lose weight despite the fact that sometimes I hate my body. Why I didn't go for Oxbridge. Why, on changing universities, I went for somewhere that asked far lower grades than the ones I actually have. Why it took me so long to acknowledge I was ill. Why I have never ever pursued any interest other than writing to any sort of challenging level. Why I stopped auditioning for plays as soon as there was a hint that I was out of my depth. Why I cannot, cannot write.

Deep down, on the most primal level I think I have, I'm convinced that, basically, I'm a twat. That if I was to dress snazzy, lose weight, have perfect hair, amass this wealth of knowledge on every conceivable subject, have impeccable taste in music, sing, act, work hard, be published... if I could be proved worthy in every possible area of my life, then I could be confident. But what if I'm not found worthy? What if I'm found wanting? Surely it's easier not to try?

It's the most ridiculous cliche. If I heard one of my friends say what I've just said it would break my heart, but I'd be furious. How could anyone genuinely believe that anyone expected them to be perfect? That it was better to atrophy than to attempt to improve? And yet... and yet.

*****

The man in black didn't love me so well. He didn't reach over to stroke my face, there was no heart to heart over french toast and diet cokes. What he said was horrible, and true, and I hate him for saying it because it's taken so long for me to realise it:

This is the only part of your life where you've ever felt like you've achieved, where you've actually done something you feel proud of. You feel like you've lost everything else you knew about yourself and if you lost the ability to write that would be the end of you. But you know what the saddest thing is? You're so scared of being shit you're actually gonna let it happen. Just like dropping out, just like every opportunity you've ever thrown away, every time you've been too lazy or scared or sad to get up and do something with your life. You'd rather never write again than write badly and have someone else think badly of you.

So end it, stop it, stop trying, give up, why don't you? What the fuck made you think you could do it anyway?

*****

What title do I give this? What snappy one-liner do I save for the finish line of the most uncomfortably, brutally honest thing I've ever written? How the hell do I end this?

I guess by saying that even though I don't want this to be my last post, I don't see how it can't be. For so long now I've been so unhappy with everything I've written for this site. Whether anyone reading picks up on that, I can't tell, I absolutely cannot be objective anymore. But now you know. Now the self-conscious writer is revealed. Now you can see exactly what I'm thinking when I try and put the world to rights.

It's horribly embarassing. But here's the silver lining: it's the feeling you get when you sit down and take a long, unforgiving look at yourself. No secrets. No excuses, no tiny-violined and artily worded railing against god, no stilted accounts of piss-ups and break-ups and falling apart. No poetry. No essay. No structure. No photos. No humorous similes or analogies about the G8 or student life. No fucking bullshit effort anything. Just writing exactly what I saw when I looked, and exactly what that means.


I take it back. If this is the last one ever then that's ok, because this one at least, I was a little bit proud of.

:)

12 bar acid blues

Dropping out, being in debt, breaking up, cheating, moving home, sleeping on the sofa.

Kings of Leon - On Call
Mika - Grace Kelly
Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Pin
Finger Eleven - One Thing
Maximo Park - Postcard of a Painting
Athlete- Tourist
Stereophonics - Dakota, Local Boy in the Photograph
Steve Harley and the Cockney Rebels - Come up and See Me (Make Me Smile)
Muse - Endlessly
REM - At My Most Beautiful
Gnarls Barkley - Just a Thought
Johnny Cash - Hurt
Snow Patrol - Set the Fire to the Third Bar
The Fray - How to Save a Life
The Kooks - Seaside

New job, no money, no boyfriend, the drinking binge, pulling that terrible man, 8:30am hangover walks to the bus stop, getting perved by alcoholics, inappropriate work place crushes, living at home, sleeping on the sofa, sleeping in the back of Charlotte's car, Camberley with the marras, pissed in Janine's car.

Dizzee Rascal - Fix Up Look Sharp
Muse - Supermassive Black Hole
VAST - Pretty When You Cry
The Cranberries - God Be With You (Ireland)
Linkin Park Feat. Jay-Z - Numbencore
MIA - URAQT
Justin Timberlake - Sexyback
Siobhan Donaghy - Man Without Friends
Bush - Glycerine
Beck - Go it Alone, Black Tambourine
Rihanna - Umbrella
Dresden Dolls - Coin Operated Boy, Girl Anachronism
Editors - Munic
Modest Mouse - Float On

Things getting steady, the summer starting, the big unfriendly giant, walking home from Camberley, small-talking and the awkward hug goodbye, nights at the Red Cross Hut, smoking in Sian's car, last ever legal fags in pubs.

Nelly Furtado - Say it Right
Moody Blues - Nights in White Satin
Oasis - Champagne Supernova
Longview - I Would
Ash - Barefoot
Kings of Leon - Fans
Shaun Colvin - Trouble
Faithless - Salva Mea
Chemical Brothers - The Boxer
Peaches - He's not Dead
The Noisettes - Don't Give up, Count of Monte Christo
Head Automatica - Beating Heart Baby
Fall-Out Boy - This Ain't a Scene
Justice Vs Simian - We Are Your Friends
Bloc Party - The Prayer

Reading '07.

Smashing Pumpkins - 1979, Bullet with Butterfly Wings, Stand Inside Your Love
NIN - Hurt
Maximo Park - Going Missing, Graffiti
Jimmy Eat World - Sweetness, Get it Faster, The Middle
New Young Pony Club - Ice Cream, Hiding on the Staircase
Arcade Fire - Neighbourhood #1, Wake Up, Rebellion, No Cars Go
Kings of Leon - Knocked Up, Black Thumbnail, McFearless, On Call
Gogel Bordello - Start Wearing Purple
The Gossip - Standing in the way of Control
Lostprophets - Last Summer
Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Turn Into


Brighton, the last two weeks, the endless train journeys, everything.

Kate Nash - Foundations
Idlewild - You and I are Both Away, Paint Nothing, Everyone Says You're so Fragile
Ellegarden - Mr Feather
Imogen Heap - Goodnight and Go
Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Maps, Y Control
Regina Spektor - Fidelity
Siobhan Donaghy - 12 Bar Acid Blues
2 Many DJs - Androgyny
Radiohead - Fake Plastic Trees, Idioteque
Maximo Park - I Want You to Stay
Kings of Leon - The Runner
Peter Sarstedt - Where do you go?
Kanye West - Stronger


Can one song sum up your entire summer?

Time is never time at all
You can never ever leave
Without leaving a piece of youth
And our lives are forever changed
We will never be the same
The more you change, the less you feel

Believe
Believe in me
Believe believe

That life can change
That you're not stuck in vain
We're not the same
We're different tonight

Tonight, so bright
Tonight, tonight

And you know you're never sure
But you're sure you could be right
If you held yourself up to the light
And your embers never fade
In your city by the lake
The place where you were born.

Believe
Believe in me
Believe believe

In the resolute urgency of now
And if you believe there's not a chance tonight

Tonight, so bright
Tonight

We'll crucify the insincere tonight
We'll make things right, we'll feel it all tonight
We'll find a way to offer up the night tonight
The indescribable moments of your life tonight.
The impossible is possible tonight
Believe in me as i believe in you...

Tonight
Tonight, tonight
Tonight, Tonight

bright

How good does it feel to be typing up notes from today's seminar, last week's lectures; how messy my handwriting is now, after six months of nothing much at all.

A week ago today, two years since my parents drove me (shaking) to Egham and dropped me off in a flat with Kate, Adam and Reena. I can't even remember the last time I spoke to them, but I remember meeting them. Kate, bounding down the hall behind her boyfriend and not knowing which of them was actually moving in. Reena, unlocking her door with her mother, and thinking she said Rita. Adam, waving while the door slammed shut on him. We went out for drinks, we girls, but everywhere was full so we came home again and went to bed. Around midnight, feeling bored as hell, I went to get some water and ended up talking to Adam in the kitchen until daybreak.

I remember him saying he'd idealised university in his head to be this utopia of coffee shops and ragged jeans, budget cooking and deep and meaningfuls. We bonded over the unshakeable feeling that the better party was happening next door. As it happened, they were having a party next door, but we weren't invited.

This time round? My introductory letter gets lost in the post and all I can wrangle by way of information is to show up at Pavilion Parade at 9am on the first day of term. Oh, and bring passport photos.

I rock up late, 9:15, after a 6am wake up call from my dad, a two hour train journey and getting hopelessly lost in the Lanes in the pouring rain. Sit down in a room full of painfully cool people and think, oh God.

It gets better, quickly. I realise that several fashion students have mistakenly wandered into our induction and, with them gone, I see a lot more hippies. Good sign. It's also reassuring to realise that everyone else seems to be as disorganised as I am.

An hour and a half later a transvestite called Janine asks me out for a 'smoke'. Is that smoke or smoke smoke? Smoke smoke. Some time after that I queue outside the ladies in a pub only to see two men walk out together and see the shiny red condom they left in the toilet bowl.

Everything you've heard about Brighton is true. TRUE.

I can't tell you how surreal it is to be doing this again. Visiting Charlotte's halls, seeing the empty curry trays, the cider cans, the fags out the window. It's so familiar and yet several thousand miles away. I leave our coffee shop conversations to commute home, change out of my hippy clothes to the black shirts of bar work. I don't stay for a smoke, or a pill, or even a drink. I have work to do if I'm gonna afford this.

Walking into a talk in an actual lecture theatre. There's a power point presentatio set up, the SU Sabbs waiting in the wings, royal blue curtains covering the concrete walls. A room full of nervous, buzzing freshers. I'm told that university, no matter how old you are, is a once in a lifetime opportunity. The irony doesn't escape me.

The journey, door to door, takes three hours each way. That's 24 hours a week, £55 of rail fares, £13 bus fares for six hours of classes. Jo, a Leeds girl clutching a multicoloured book called 'The Politics of Ecstasy' says I'm more than welcome to crash on her floor, in fact, I could easily stay on a different floor every night of the week but it's not really an answer.

I smile instead, secretly made up that they like having me around. It's unbelievable, how easy they are to get on with. Unbelievable how much I love this city. Unbelievable how incredibly, life-shatteringly tired I am from trying to work and study full time simultaneously.

I can't remember the last time I was this excited, this nervous - except I can, it was two years ago and part of me feels so incredibly guilty that I should really be a finalist right now. I'm not though, I'm a fucking Fresher again and it feels very, very good.