Stead

I’ve thought from time to time that if I were someone else, I could find things in me to love. But I’m myself and I’ve never felt quite right with the idea of living on that plane. If I ever do build a home for myself it won’t be built out of reckless self-love, it’ll be earned in my own currency and on my terms. Just a few days ago I walked, thinking about feeling inspired. I imagined it as meeting a group of lizards that disperse whenever I approached them. Now, I can’t remember why that image took precedent or what the thoughts were themselves. It’s hard to give them a voice.

I take a moment of appreciation, anyway, to know that this time at least I wasn’t left in a worse state than I was found. That’s all I’d ever hope to do, and it still weighs heavily on me that I haven’t always managed it. Without wanting to be pretentious, I keep thinking about Derrida’s little heretic hedgehog, exposing its belly to whatever might pick at it. It’s only because I prised open my uni files yesterday, just for a ginger navel gaze.

If you loved you like

I love you, you’d roll like the

Sea that’s found its moon

I woke up suddenly in the night, thrashing against a dream I hadn’t had in a while. My body ached with it the whole day, and when anyone came close to me I wanted to recoil. If what you said was true, about loving me tidally, would I still be having that same dream? I’m not the sea and you’re not the moon, and I spent multiple moons dreading the day you wouldn’t come back. Where you went, I would have followed. That’s what being a romantic will do to you. That’s where thinking of yourself as the sea or the moon will get you. I think of myself sloshing around, being pulled this way or another.
I head for indignant but I fall short at beseeching.

On Friday the country voted against an option that told us it cared about things like the world getting hotter and people not having houses and that sort of thing. People getting told to go home somewhere they’d never even been to in the first place. I had sweaty dreams about the world on fire and called in sick this morning. On the other end of the phone I got told off for not being proactive enough in taking care of myself because I left my SSRI’s in someone else’s house. When it’s all stacked up like that, it’s like an overfamiliar shadow of an idea creeps up in my periphery.

Unfortunately for no one, I’ve never managed to tame these ideas into anything of any use. It all comes back to that mewing call I make that I hate so much. Beseeching, not a call to anything in particular.

I had to stop by Sainsbury’s to pick up ingredients for a chicken risotto. I used to dream that lost friends would ring me up and ask me why I wasn’t in the car park to meet them. In real life – in life before – we would always convene there before going wherever we were going. Back to the awake present and I’m as frightened of my phone as I ever was. I look for stock cubes and lemons as a sad little heartstring wanders out into the car park, hoping I’m not too late to meet them.

I’m not scared of anything, at least nothing I’ve seen recently.

I wish I’d had the chance,

I can’t imagine him waking up at five o’clock in the morning – chest and head like a box of fleas with worry that he might have blown it once and for all.

No sanctuary in another person, at least that I’ve seen personally.