The drunken trajectory.

For the first time in a while, she looked exactly as she felt; a half-forgotten word smouldering in the back of the throat or the hazy warmth of nostalgia. Both prominent and imminently forgettable, she thrived upon juxtapositions.
The mirror tripped out of focus.. knees buckled on the tiled parapet.. the fourth drink walking the tightrope between drunk and mindless.

"Alcohol is an anti-septic in more forms than one", eyes shut, deep breaths, chanting her mantra as she tried to work out which way was up.

There was an awareness of movement, blurred figures shifting as though they were underwater, the pull of a hand and she tripped, she was Bambi on ice and as she floated out of reality, she felt that warmth come flooding back the one she hadn't realised she lacked until it embraced her once more, her bones aching with its presence and everything felt so charged with potential.

She then narrowly missed throwing up all over her heels.

etched upon your face

she was a windy wednesday morning with the

rain dripping from dusted eyelashes, sighing at

the creak of trains pulling away in all

their melancholy. 

why aren't they allowed to stay anywhere for long

dawn broke and there was no reason

to stop, a solitary figure stretched into her horizons, 

maybe paradise exists amongst

the illuminated crisp packets and cigarette buts

holy in their second-rate glory

An open letter to my friend Instagram

I feel I'm one of many teenagers who desperately need to prioritize, I feel as though people within my age group find this particularly hard because we're at that stage where it feels we're suddenly being pushed out of the nest and dog tagged with things called "responsibilities". 

It's glaringly obvious to me that social media needs to be forced down my list of priorities, I get a shaky, seasick kinda feeling when I think about the hours of my life I've wasted watching cats doing stupid stuff and reading "10 things every Londoner understands" and the like, despite the fact that I do not nor have ever lived in London. 

The most ridiculous form of social media that I admit to using - in my opinion - is definitely Instagram. Don't get me wrong, conceptually it's pretty flawless, a website intended for sharing pictures you have taken with you iPhone, who doesn't want to marvel at the fact that a picture as beautiful as that can be captured without photoshop or fancy lenses on DSLR cameras? It's the way in which this concept has been altered that grinds my gears, it has become a form of social media when I don't think that was ever the intention, the intention being - in my eyes - a mobile form of things like Flickr, making professional standard photography and photo sharing accessible to those who don't have all the gimmicks. 

Instagram can be pretty detrimental in my eyes, like all social media, it has become a form of one upmanship: who can "out-selfie" their friends? Whose weekend looked the most exciting behind that smokescreen of filters and clever angles? It's become a competition, as if the number of likes you get determines your worth as a human being. Like you aren't worth so much more than that, like your charm, passion and inner-strength don't mean more than a bunch of numbers on a picture of your cat. Like the way the sunlight hits your face on a morning and the chime of your laughter isn't far more beautiful than any "no make-up selfie". 

Of course, I'm not going to pretend I don't use it, social media is renowned for being addictive and enticing. Not to mention the fact that the prevailing paradox of our society (this term + that context = me cringing) is that not to conform is also to conform. But the reshuffle within my ministerial cabinet of priorities has proved time and again that I don't NEED Instagram, why do I need to seek validation from strangers through a screen? Why do I need validation at all?

Instagram, it's been great, but it's time we cooled things off. I'm narcissistic and psychopathic enough without you.  

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.