2 minute writing exercise - 22:32pm

You can't connect the dots
Because you have forgotten Sunday
You are that papered ribbon of a moment
When you wake up and forget who you are.

And the coffee-scented sunrise catching his dusty eyelids
Doesn't make the breath catch in your throat
Any more. The imagery's turned stale.
Your camera's out of film.

Musings

Last night's eyeliner game still going strong? Check. Unquenchable thirst and questionable memories of the night before? Check. Hangover? Check. My face this morning was a mass of contradictions, on the one hand my eyes and lips looked as perfectly made up as they had when I went out, whilst my face was dry, patchy and flaky - I looked like a surrealist painting or something (OR a cheap hooker, but I prefer the painting simile). But contradictions, that got me thinking.  

"We value permanence in impermanence and impermanence in permanence nowadays" I mused as I helped myself to orange juice at my friend's house this morning - essentially worshipping sleep yet forever being the first person up. And as deep and pseudo-philosophical as that may sound, I think I was onto something. We're constantly looking for things to last longer, nights out, eyeliner, orgasms, there's a perpetual fear of life going by so quickly that we're afraid it could always bypass us without us realising. However, how many people are continually racing forwards towards the weekend or the next payday or the summer holidays without stopping to consider that right here, can actually be pretty good as well. Yeah you might have work spilling over from desk to floor to bed and a spot may have appeared in the most inconspicuous of places the day you have a date but what about today when you laughed so hard you thought you were gonna throw up and the lady you see every morning at the bus stop bought you a Diet Coke. 

 I'm trying not to run the risk of sounding like a self-help book or a John Green novel by saying everyone should appreciate the little things more but perhaps people should depreciate when it comes to expectations. I'm doing a little experiment right now where I try my hardest to avoid having expectations so that I can appreciate things for what they are and not for what I thought they were going to be. Let's see how it goes. 

On being a hungover romantic

There's a pile of translations, essay plans and wider reading sizing me up from across the room, I don't want to befriend it today. Today is one of Hello Kitty pyjamas and stories with words so perfectly placed that they give me shivers. 

For once I felt I was doing things I considered more important. Like analysing the cadence of laughter as it drifts through smoky air at 4am, assessing the sweet, fusty smell of last night that clings to the static of your clothes. Hearing the rain pelt the windscreen so hard that I thought it might shatter because in my rosé-haze, we were driving towards the end of the earth.

*** I haven't written prose for years but I found a scrap of paper in my desk drawer with the opening two sentences on and I felt really inspired ***

...And all that happened was that it imminently dawned upon me that you can't find solace in a single person, nor can you seek completion in something as incomplete as yourself. The metallic bite of this statement lingered in my mouth as I lay, defeated.

That had been the whole point of this adventure; discovery of self, self-sufficiency etc etc etc until I begin to sound like an upper-class art student who is "just so damn oppressed by this capitalist haven". But, with only twenty dollars left in my battered jeans, I realised that I'd spent a stupid amount of money pretending I was Jack Kerouac, forgetting in my excitement that my life was not a novel.

I laughed to recall the lonely motel nights, surfing the web for cool things to do in whatever city I'd happened to end up in, then sighing and watching a straight-to-DVD movie, trying to find poetic meaning in the static of the cable channel. Trying to avoid my own company as the walls stared back, blank with apathy and the sunlight reluctantly crept in, worrying that it had disturbed the perfect "woe-is-me" cliché that I had created.

For alas, no police stations did I sit tempestuously in, cold coffee and panda eyes. No buses did I flirt my way onto for free. I learned a lot about independence... I'm grateful to myself for that, but I also learned that as much as you may want to, you cannot crawl back inside yourself to escape from the ghosts that hide in the canvas metropolis of your soul. I discovered that I wasn't trying to find myself at all, I was trying to lose myself amongst neon glares and catcalls and kamikaze bars... I almost succeeded.

However. When I least expected it, feeling the epitome of smug liberation, the essence of who I am would creep back to me across sticky nightclub floors. The least gentle reminder of the jigsaw puzzle pieces I had strewn from bar to flat to cab to park. The "burnt-coffee" smell of realisation that I was actually just as dependent, flawed and insecure as everybody else who pretended they were ok being alone. But that's fine.

When your plans with friends turn to shit - UNFINISHED

We pass through dusk, nonchalant shoulders tilted
Too soon, the colour drains from the street
Extremist pamphlets reign upon your shutters
The house longs for new friends.

The night makes the floorboards creak.
Anticipating, we turn to dust
Whilst the ghost face of the wind
Meets our rattling window panes

We become ash-grey
Skin bouncing off moonlight
Radiating hollowed eyes and hair,
Transformed into a mass of sleeplessness curls.

And so we sit, 2am
Devoured by expectation
Drinking tea
Listening to the flicker
Of black and white film