Monday, February 26, 2007

you can tell from the state of my room / that they let me out too soon

This morning I woke up earlier than I needed to, gave the boy a brief cuddle and grabbed two towels, primed for the longest, most satisfying shower of my life. Upstairs, at some unsure moment between flushing the toilet and turning the tap on, I got the distinct impression of having been slapped in the face.

That sudden, whingey protest, the indignity of it, the pain of someone striking you.

But no one did, so why that feeling? Why the sudden unbidden wobbly lip, the lumpy throat?

Back downstairs, no shower. Back into bed, at which point the boy is conscious enough to ask me what's wrong and at that unsure moment between me beginning to speak and the end of the sentence, I'm crying like a child.

Crying like I haven't cried in, ooh, about a year.

*****

So maybe it's poetic justice, or perhaps this time of year just really isn't good for me. Seems like every time of year is bad for me recently, but Sunday is the first anniversary of my love affair with happy pills and, though we've been on a break the last six months or so, I think it's time that we got back together.

I miss them. Not the yawning. Or the tiredness, or the dependency, or the way it feels when I forget them or the way it feels to tell my parents or the look it earns me when I first tell someone.

Pills? Wow. Like, anti-depressants? Wow. So, are you like, fucked up, or just weak?

Weak. Weak weak weak. For all my fighting talk I am nothing more like that. One year on and cigarettes are no longer an adequate replacement for scars. Neither is alcohol an adequate replacement for actual help, you see, the hangover is sort of a signpost reminding me that I'm not in fact a spy, or a sexbomb, or a shaman like I thought I was the night before and at the end of the smoke they're all still dead. And I still feel weak.

But I was even weaker when I convinced myself I was better. I miss the lying to myself.

*****

I do this or I give up entirely. I go to live in a hippy commune, or join a cult, or become a slut or a heroin addict or an air hostess. I drop out of uni and eventually I'll die, which of course is the only thing not up for debate here. I'll die no matter what so why the fuck can't I die happy? Or at least on enough substances to feel happy.

Going back to the doctor on this, my anniversary, this week of all weeks, admitting that I can't do this, that I have fucked up, that I do give up and give in is actually the only thing I'm strong enough to do.

So here we go.

Again.

Sunday, February 25, 2007

troubled

Apparently just one more post before I am obliged to whore myself to Google. I say whore myself, it really means nothing at all, I just object to the fact that I cannot continue to use this software unless I sign up to Google as well. What if I don't like Google? What if Google shot my dog?

*****

Out last night, after Kit's memorial gig, I see so many things, feel and hear so much that I tell myself to remember. But here I am, pissed yet again and all I can remember from last night is how pale my legs looked in the streetlights in the car on the way home, how yellow they looked, even in yellow tights.

Before the Ag, of course, I remember a lot. I remember Sid singing that Ellegarden song from his Myspace, and the slideshow of pictures. And holding onto Matt. And 99 red balloons and a dozen other emotions in different colours.

*****

And the car, passing it round and realising I can take it down, right into the bottom of my chest and keep on breathing, blowing back several minutes after I toked. So it was that by the time I got inside the place, I thought I was a spy, and that every one of my friends had never looked so beautiful.

Who says drama never taught me anything? If I'd known that seesaw breathing could get me stoned as well as help me riff Shakespeare... I'd have practised, is all.

*****

Now? I'm wearing my grandfather's ring, the ring he died wearing on his little finger on a chain round my neck. His little finger, and I could fit three of mine in there. He was, I learnt today, a man in possession of very big hands. I won't think about the mysterious entry in his 1992 diary, nor will I stare at the two pictures of him that he kept himself. I will not wonder at the weight of his war medals and wonder what he saw.

I'll wear his ring, though, as a reminder that people can be both bad and flawed and beautiful, that men can leave and still make music, that people can hurt and still have sentiment. I'll remember that people die. And remember what that means.

Monday, February 19, 2007

calendar year

I suppose the problem is that hit me harder than I thought. The funeral, those days sleeping on my nan's sofa, that was by far the hardest. But I suppose I thought it would get easier.

Sneaky feeling, sadness. The way it lurks, the way it hides, most of all how it persists. Far better a smack in the face, a bruise I can see. This has been the emotional equivalent of several broken bones, but at least a plaster cast would have come with a removal date.

I feel... old. Because every year is the same.

*****

Summer is when everything is light. The heat gets into things and sends them skyward; thunderstorms to make you clean again. You forget everything in the summer, until it seems like there's nothing but barbecues and pub gardens to even remember. Festivals and the real resolutions.

Autumn, and the buying of the autumn jacket, the flimsy little thing that you use to pretend that you are still warm. Perhaps in leaf red or khaki, with flowers in the cuffs. Maybe a belt. November makes you cold but there's heat in the fireworks still. Autumn you can stand.

But winter is when people die. Those five anniversaries of family, acquaintances and friends swing by like traffic that hits you harder every time you try to get up.

So spring is when you grieve, until the flowers come out and that little gasp of surprise at the first hot day, when summer's back and you're too pissed to care.

Then autumn brings a sense of foreboding.

*****

And I wonder if this is how it's always going to be, with the deaths. Will I spend my whole life in that moment of stomach plunge, the words that you should brace yourself because there's bad news.

It always seems like bad news.

So that's where I've been this term. That's what I've been doing. Shrinking, and shrinking some more, getting some grief done, some downright worry.

I won't pretend that I feel better because of some resolve inside myself, some healing underneath. I feel better because the sun's coming out in the least metaphorical sense - the seasons are changing and I have time to pass.