describing my mental state

i'm sitting at the bottom of a dry well
lungs full of dust and eyes scratchy
stomach cramping with hunger and mouth dry
it's dark
there's a stepladder right next to me
i could reach it and climb out
i can see the light at the top, i can see the sky
(the light doesn't reach me not even remotely everything at the bottom is dark)
but i can't move my arm
i can't stand up
the stepladder is there but it's so dark i can't see it
and my body so heavy and weak i can't move it
so i'm sitting at the bottom of a dry well
and i feel like it's swallowing me deeper
my body barely exists anymore
and i am going to die

boys and their art ii (or attempts at distracting anxiety)

friday evening techno beaten drunken words underground glasgow (refined)
i don't fall in love with people, i fall in love with their art
i am once again inspired beyond belief:
your way of counting the beats with your body
and the rhythm of your bass running through my body
is the sort of thing that turns me on.
whereas just your body wouldn't really much at all
i'm okay with that.
your art was always more appealing and that's what made me interested in the first place
weirdly it's also the stillness of your body against mine
and now i want to watch you dance in these lights you built
inspiration gets me going but it's also the stillness that follows
we don't know what happens next but the presence of the crowd is deafening and whatever follows even more so
how easy it is to remember the roots of an emotion one had thought long lost

(attempts at not thinking about how difficult it is to breathe)
(or to stand still)
(how difficult it is not ripping off one's fingernails scratching off one's skin)
(and how crying is so easy and so hard and it's the smallest things but unbearable)
(like tilting back a chair missing a step in stairs except it won't pass)
(now this is done now i need new things to distract it but i can't really think)
(there's a papercut on my knuckle i'm already biting it open)
(i can't eat)

there was a week (running mind)

Last Friday night I got my nails painted at McDonald's. I got a Furby with my Happy Meal, not a real one, a scary one that's practically haunted, just a tiny harmless furry one that's almost cute (and hopefully not haunted). My friend regretted her chicken nuggets and got jealous and painted my nails bubblegum pink with an American accent. The girl from the next table gave my friend her Furby. Her dad was sitting there with her. Quiet. American, too, said she. He said nothing.

We went to a bar, to a quiet downstairs, drank pints of their cheapest beer and played a writing game. We listened to poems and all kinds of words, one optimistic story about the apocalypse (he writes optimistic like I do, so that someone dies at the end). One boy brought bananas, this is how poetry readings go, right? and another one spoke words from back home about the sort of things I care about, write about, ugly graffiti and junkies in buses and demolition sites and stinking skips in back alleys, "regeneration" and all its brothers and sisters living and departed. And he did it in a way that made me scribble in my notebook, I fall for people's language (boys and their art i) not news but a sort of thing one should regularly remind oneself about.

Someone said creativity is blind. We can't explain the things that inpsire us. I know I can't. Ask me why I have that Greenlandic flag on my wall and I will not say a single thing you would find valuable. Take me on top of a high-rise that they have already decided to tear down and I will feel like I might cry, I might cry, and I will never forget what it felt like. Looking at a view like that.

It pains me that it will be gone.

And I do not know why it makes me feel like that, and whether or not you ask me you will think I'm mad and stupid and pretentious and so bourgeois it makes your eyes bleed pretending so hard to be something else or maybe I'm just boring you to tears how many facts about the Red Road flats can one woman know and nobody actually cares. But creativity is blind and inspiration is a strange thing doing strange things to strange ordinary people

I've wrote about this before. (I should say written but I don't care I'd rather watch you seethe)

I am reading Murakami. What's not to love. No good news in this chapter. It's not the first time I've spent four hours on the yellow sofa in the library with my Murakami and my can of cheap energy drink. I fell asleep and made the can last two hours because I slept for most of that and isn't it strange that the moment you fall asleep in a quiet library someone starts a loud conversation I mean what's that about

Thursdays are eternal. A fact of life I establish every week. A person can change in a Thursday. A person can put on red lipstick in a practice room at 6 pm on a Thursday just to feel a bit better about herself when the people or words that a person claims have no effect on her have dug a bit deeper than a person might let on. A person can feel perfectly content in a cheap fake leather jacket and red lipstick and a cello case on her back. A person might enjoy life more when there is nothing else to do but play Dvorak until her fingers bleed.

Today, a little before my eternal Thursday had ended, I sent a picture of myself with some strategic numbers to someone called Wardrobe. My Friday is hopefully lovely, it could be, it should be, and I will get my hands on Puccini and I will get to sing it on stage. It's just in the choir obviously but I've never and I am excited and even though the picture of myself I sent out was not the prettiest one and I didn't like the look of my body I sent it anyway and that means I'll get a costume and I'll get my hands on Puccini and I will get to sing it. On stage. Grow your hair, they said. I don't need to be told twice.

What an eternal Thursday this was. It's done now, and the next one is as far as is possible. I wonder where my nails get painted on this new Friday, who will do it and what colour. I wonder who we'll talk about and what kind of music we'll drink to before we go to that same bar, that same downstairs not so quiet this time, to drink those same cheap pints of beer and listen to our friends be fantastic and beautiful and creative, and we are all those things too, all of us, and it is lovely.

(P.S. I am writing again and that always means I'm reading less which is a bit sad but then again I am writing)

serving tyler durden realness

We are all three paychecks away from destitution
and we should be careful not to laugh at anyone's misfortune
because it could easily be our own.

This is to remind a few kind souls I've met over the years.
(I say kind, but what I mean by that is that sometimes the words that come out of your mouth make me want to rip your face off you expired jar of mayonnaise)
You are the sort of person I would want to fight but I guarantee that would have nothing to do with destroying something beautiful

You are not special.
You are not protected from the world.
You are the all-singing all-dancing crap of the world
You have been lucky and if you are lucky you will continue to be lucky
but you never know what might happen.
One thing leads to another.
There might be a gas leak in your apartment and your carefully constructed IKEA life might blow up like that
These are desperate times. Insecure. We should all know this.
Our future is held out of reach behind a thick smoke
and we can't even tell what the smoke is, never mind what's behind it.
Someone (life) walks up to you and knocks you out and
we'll see how high and mighty you are
if you still say all the things you did so easily thinking they wouldn't touch anyone (it's easier to deal with those less fortunate than you when you don't really think of them as people who deserve anything good in life) and definitely would never touch you because you are above all that
Right?

Remember. We are all three paychecks away from destitution.
It is so easy to fall on your face, all you need to do is trip
fuck up once lose your job batter yourself to pieces in front of your boss
and getting up is harder than you'd thought because who knew being poor could be so expensive
and it could happen to anyone
it could happen to me (I would not be surprised)
it could definitely happen to you
because none of us are above anything

and the world might have been made perfect but
we have spend a lot of effort fucking it up
and look how well we did
it's fucking flawless now and it smells like piss and blood.

caring is the catalyst for all things unrestful

"I am the catalyst for all things unrestful."
This is something he said earlier today,
with wind in our hair and mud in our boots and I was
looking over a city I never knew and never liked
but loved right then and there
feeling free and happy and a bit awed
laughing at the puddles we couldn't cross
and I thought, I am so lucky to be here with them
and everything is beautiful and nothing hurts.

I hurt myself so often in my carelessness
myself and others around me.
I decided, I will wrap myself in a blanket
of not caring and not feeling and not experiencing
any human emotions
because they scare me and I don't know what to do.

It was always the wrong thing to do.
It always was and never won't be.
I said, I will pretend this doesn't matter
but I always cared and that is because I am human
and because I care I hurt and sometimes
it's not down to me, at all.

I am the catalyst for all things unrestful,
he joked and I laughed because it seemed ridiculous
because he was there to help me feel better
like I mattered and I could be good
but now I can't sleep and there's a dark pit in my gut
my ears are ringing with how loud the music is
and my laughter has lost all the freedom of climbing
jumping and dancing on the hills like a child.

Somehow, and I would never blame him for it
because being there for everything is what friends are for,
he was the catalyst for my slumbering despair
now clawing its way up my throat
and it's not what he said but what I fear
and the way you ache for someone you love
when they are burning inside with a secret
would you ever push them away

I didn't. And this is the surprising story of how my
carefully constructed wall of no fucks given crumbled down
and I discovered that caring
is the catalyst for all things unrestful
and it's not something you can choose to leave behind.

2014

The new year started like it always does, at midnight with fireworks going off in the distance. Nothing special about that but it feels like it's never happened. We talk about change and for a bit we feel like we can change, like we will.

We went out, off into the dark, laughing and playing with our torches like children, slipping in the mud as we climbed up the hill to see the fireworks better than anyone in the city would. We sat in the wet grass and talked about what the year had been like and our resolutions for the next, and somehow what easily becomes just empty boasting was surprisingly sincere. Things we thought we could really do. When we walked back we turned off our torches just to breathe a moment in the dark, in the first moments of the new year, to spend a moment with ourselves, wondering. Another year gone, like that. What even happened? When you think about it, so much.

And then we got drunk and it was brilliant, as you do.

We went back to the hills the next morning, slightly hungover and a lot feeling like we want to walk and breathe and talk. We talked a bit. I got excited about a half torn-down building looking a bit like a death trap, and every sign that told me I shouldn't do something made me wonder what would happen if I did. And I was once again like a child jumping in the puddles and walking in the stream instead of dry land and it was wonderful.

Walking back home in Glasgow rain in silence I felt good. I had a waterproof coat and good shoes on and I just listened to the rain, looked at it fall, and the city might as well have been dead for all the people I saw. It was beautiful. Now I'm turning on the first page of my calendar and curling up with a cup of hot chocolate and a good book and be with myself.