bethany violet's

my digital diaries from may & june of 2024

a picture of me

june 30th, 2024

studied at [redacted]’s house today and she had a mental breakdown about maths in her parents’ room. i ended up with [redacted] watching half an episode of criminal minds before my mum came to get me from across the street. she stroked my hair, and it felt very safe. but i am hopeless again now. because of thursday and because of how much time i am spending on the floor, lying there, thinking. i am starting to pray! also because i know no matter what, i will not do so great in the maths exam as i ought to do, especially based on how excessively i study for it. it knows i am not confident. it? i don’t know. that thing that decides how well you do. the collection of intuition, memory, moment. you know. i have never been assured about my own ability to perform in maths, or logic’s ability to prevail in general. this is not my subject; it does not align with my view on anything. i cannot make it fit right into my brain like i can all the stupid non-sensical things

and before, when i called [redacted], i had a sense that she did not understand me. i always hate that feeling. that opposite-of-desire feeling. it only takes a moment for me to reason with somebody’s own dislike of me, but my own dislike? well, i cannot, and the tables turn so effortlessly when the eyes are right in front of my seat at dinner, gnawing at you. how could you not point it out to yourself, shut down there, and think, oh, what is so wrong with me? what makes you stare like that? because it is not a nice stare. it is the kind that you think about all night. i cannot handle giving myself that own stare. i cannot spend my life as myself if i do not look with love, but god is it trying times of late. god, sometimes do i think i am hateful to all and sensitive to all but especially to my own body, my own wishes, my own kin. i am very certain i one day could grow beautiful exotic gardens with all this disgust and confusion for my mothering toward feelings, nurturing of ugliness, all this wonderful musing about the world — but i know for sure i could cause horrible outbreaks, disease and wreak wildfire, all upon them afterward. already i am there, too. seated like i could kill. i am posed pretty for something much too weak already to hold but a memory, and that is all i’m after anyway; a picture of me

stop visiting the graveyard

june 29th, 2024

we went to the big op-shops today. i bought great new sometimes expensive clothes and i nearly cried in the car-ride home, but i thought about that and decided it was too silly. even when i was thinking about the letter, and what i wrote in it, and how i don’t know if she’ll speak to me again. i made a list of the things i need to do when i feel that way, but it was not so long at all. theo tutored me in maths for two hours in the afternoon. i nearly lost my head. i feel very down. the kind of down which reminds me of being little in primary school, when somebody would run away from you and you’d chase after them and then stop, skid on your heels, and think it was not very funny anymore. noise behind you, all around you. you are the joke they laugh at, that you pretend to understand. a great big slap in the face. i am also made up a little of the kind of sad i get when i cannot take my dogs out because it’s raining, but they don’t know that’s the reason. i promise you, i promise you; i promise you. that horrible burning-at-the-edges feeling

what name will you give me now then

june 28th, 2024

i had sex after all. i cannot help myself. i cannot help telling the truth with her! i have nothing to say about that. i walked her to school this morning after i cut her an orange. and then i bought two new journals from dymocks: one has a blue soft leather cover, like my other one, exactly the same, from flame tree journals, and the other is hard brown leather with a tree of life print. it is called tree of life artisan journal, and it has a quote beneath it by kahlil gibran: “trees are poems the earth writes upon the sky.” true enough, i say. i will not write in them until i’ve finished some of the others i have on the go right now, not including my little notebooks, but my big journals ought to be lessened before i add any more. i read over [redacted]’s french assignment once i was home. it had quite a few mistakes, which confused me. i realize am not sure what we are doing in french at all, really, as i have been doing so much at home. i decided to submit to another magazine, which i haven’t in a while. i assign so much value to that sort of thing. i never know why they don’t take me. i have decided that i will only ever submit to something when i have written something specifically for it. it hurts too much to send personal work and to have it rejected. i wrote a little bit more and i sat down on the floor to eat something. strawberry yoghurt, i think. i watched a youtube video and felt contemplative. i guess that’s it. when i look around my room i wonder if yesterday did happen at all. already i’ve forgotten so much of the why for any of it

but i have not forgotten what she said to me. that my name is less special now

drop-kick then you can panic!!

june 27th, 2024

christ, i am cruel sometimes. to myself. to others. i make myself into a freak-show in case anybody wants a ride. i could’ve sworn i was having fun. yes, i was nervous! to give her that letter. it’s end-of-term, and i’ve been stressed, but i am not rotten. not like i was today

two teachers took me out today for lunch. [redacted] was so cold. we told her she is like sunshine, but she disapproved. i told her it is just because she is cold sunshine. i talked about france. i did not give them much time to speak. [redacted] described her favorite chips, and [redacted] started crying from the description alone. i finished my hot chocolate and went to english. i felt weird. light but my bones were heavy. i sat down on the floor and knew something was coming. when [redacted] came down to see what i was doing, i broke into crying. i did not feel embarrassed, but i felt seen and that always makes me feel disgustingly awake. she took me out of the classroom and we sat down on the sky-bridge connecting the two buildings. i told her about how angry i’ve been. she told me she knows how hard i am trying. or i have been trying. she says it’s good i am letting myself feel things. i cried even harder. it’s much easier to be asleep. i left the letter on [redacted]’s desk because i knew i’d cry if i saw her, and i didn’t want it to be about me

i cried on the bus home too, because i called a couple of people, but nobody answered. i made eye-contact with a girl across the bus from me who was in my food tech class last year, and i knew she was wondering whether or not to tell her friend beside her about me. she didn’t. i got off the bus. and then i cried on my bedroom floor. i changed into my nightie and i tried to find somebody to call and ask to come over so we could fuck. i don’t know why i wanted sex. a couple of boys texted me back. i deleted my account and got into bed, and i cried there too while i listened to sylvia plath’s voice recordings. i always like to listen to her poetry readings. dad’s given me a glass of wine, and i’m waiting on dinner. i asked if [redacted] could come over, because i feel miserable still. she says she’ll be over soon. i cannot stop thinking about my english teacher’s face when i came back into the classroom. she said, “i’m sorry. that sucks”. i felt like she was kissing my forehead

almost got you

june 26th, 2024

i am sorry for how i was today. i spoke to you, as i am always hopeful will please you, but sometimes love counteracts / contradicts intention. i always know it when you need me and i was hideous today with that. i wanted to hide behind my hands when you told me you were happy. i knew it was just a display — me, anyway. when she walked in, i could feel her looking at us. i was desperate to get out of there, but also to show her something. that smile i pulled was just as yours. always fucking regulating. i am sorry for the way i spoke to your boy in the hall; the one in your class. [redacted]. he is so very polite to me, but i could not keep composure on the stairs after the fire-drill. sometimes i am just like you. sometimes i just want to ask you what i should do about that. i will not. i will not. i will simply be better; heal over. you’d want me to be better than that. i want myself to be better than that

tomorrow is my last day of semester one. upon reflection, what really have i done? except lie on the floor and write in all my journals and look back over letters? i’ve cleaned my room; my desk, put my memory boxes in order… i have been trying to be a good friend. or at least to be there, and i think i have been. we have been in front of the fire together. i have showered often; tried to grow my hair and nails. i have read not a lot but some. i have been complimented and i have felt corny and ugly and pretty. i have too many things that i haven’t done that i never will find a way to do, and i am worried [so so so worried] i am not being fast enough. i am worried i will not be chosen in the end. how can i secure my position in the order of time? how can i make sure what’s remembered? and that it is? definitely remembered? so much life and a lot of talent i had i think that will go to waste because i cannot move my hands efficiently around the void of time

i lie to you i am a liar i come to you with

june 25th, 2024

hands unclean and beg for you to take them; care of them. even in the cold. to hold them and love me even though even though even though … something. even though i haven’t been bad all day and i haven’t been good all day, but i have been just like everybody else. even then i want you to hold me and take me inside you. let me be a keep-sake, even when i exhaust you. even though … something. what is that “something” there? unnameable something. i know you feel it too. is it our empathy for each other dwindling? is it the sympathy? is it the lack-there-of? is it your bad habits becoming my good ones? we love each other's jewels! emerald in my soul! diamond of my eye! am i ruby of your hair? the sun in your skin? say something. i dream of you so often that when such horrible fantasies leave fertile ground for truth, i am sure it is my conscience compounding me. just last night i dreamt i was yours and that we belonged in the same captive embrace; that nobody had you like me. i woke feeling so strong, so willing, so much like a bitch that i smiled in the mirror at the thought of it's meaning. it's very inclination. these dreams mean something to me, [redacted]. do i come to you at every unsuspecting hour in the night too? and have you dreamed you'd say "no" to me? or maybe saying "yes" is really what you want. i think of nothing else sometimes. i come to you without thinking. i do not know what to say when you ask. because it is not a question for me. i cannot give you an answer, not because i'm stubborn, but because i do not have one. my dreams take me to you! and all of the rest away. no more [redacted], not that she ever has been. she will write you many letters but none will make you cry like mine. like my little face which holds no blame and could sit right in your palms if you let it. none like my taste for you, which could last eternal cities until you cried hard enough to let me help. finally, let me help you. let's reverse again. let's drive the car off the cliff for good this time. let's land in the water and let's let me finally be clean for you; finally able to tell you "something"

one into the other

june 24th, 2024

i want to kiss people! i want to watch them do their hair in the morning. i want to watch them when they think nobody is near. i want people. to be them and not myself for a moment. to transform and glitch back; to feel goosebumps from the cold wind in a different body. to hear the sound of my voice rising from my throat when i raise a hand in the classroom, and to find a different sound. i want to look down at different legs which shake during a panic attack. but i do not want to be somebody else. i would come back, of course! to myself. i always do. when i start having quick cold showers in the morning i have long steamy baths in the evening. i counteract change with the keep. i like myself too much to jump into somebody else’s skin completely. all i would like is to tease at it. to body-hop, if you will. conscious into one, then another, always returning home

i am no longer a therapy patient as of today, and as of today, i am totally yours! i can’t stop dreaming about you. it’s driving me sideways. i could fucking bite into you. i was going to nap, but i didn’t. i lay in bed, then on my floor and i journaled for a couple of hours while i ate dinner

i wrote something today about the future and how i do not believe in it’s name — i don’t. it’s just time in front of us. the “future” gives it a title which maddens us. i can always imagine what it looks and feels like much better when i realize it for what it is. the rest of life. there is no special period in which i will “live my future”. my future i already live, have lived, and may live. i plan for tomorrow, and i am suddenly in tomorrow and it is unimaginably beautiful because i’m in it and i know what i know before, but even more. it does loom over me with a dagger regardless but that is only one angle. my future’s already behind me and it’s such fun

inside out 2

june 23rd, 2024

i’ll be good tomorrow. bad today, good tomorrow, bad again. today i saw you again for the very first time and we showered together in our best friend’s bathroom. we looked at each other’s bodies very warmly. i did not expect anything. i was surprised but not flustered. i wanted to kiss your collar bone and no part else. i waited for my hug awkwardly and i don’t want to think about it again. i don’t want to think about it again. we sat in bed and i told you about the books i’m reading. you read from yours. i felt ugly today and beautiful too. i couldn’t explain it. i wore my hair in plaits from last night. it was nice to see you again and smell you, but i didn’t say any of the things i wanted to say, or feel any of the feelings i hoped to feel. i am not disappointed, only a little perturbed. other you; we couldn’t sleep. we went to the living room floor and knelt in front of the fire and talked like we normally do. about each other. you told me i am like a wave. i told you that i can’t find a way to sort your strings. as always, i told you i love you and i told you the truth. we saw a movie at the theatre and everybody was sick of each other; all five. you and i huddled together and gawked at the screen as though we were whispering secrets. i just liked being close to you

i will pull it together tomorrow. i’ll march to therapy. forget what i’m leaving behind. i’ll be quick. i won’t cry. i’ll be blunt and sharp and mean and a little cruel with it, too. i’ll say goodbye. the car will be silent and anxious and i will be nervous for my test and for missing my first class. therapy will make me feel bad all day. i’ll feel sorry that i am missing out on going to the beach with [redacted]. i have to. i can’t miss my test. although i know i will fail it miserably! i get the content in class, but the moment i have left the room; it dissipates! it’s like i’m always missing the great general “something” that my brain has not caught up with yet. i don’t feel like running that fast after it, anyway. i will tie my laces tighter and try hard tomorrow. get through it, like [redacted]. like she says. i won’t complain. i will not complain. not even when i’m thinking terrible thoughts with the test in front of my face, and i am racking my brain for sums that will not come. do i even own a fucking calculator? at lunch i will find out where i’m meant to be. maybe. we’ll see. i don’t really want to go to that meeting. i just want to get a seaweed sample at the cold beach with you tomorrow! is that too much? i am complaining again. and neglecting the opportunity to study for my test. i will get through lunch one way or another, and i’ll hide at the back of my science class and dread french. i will go. i will feel bad, but i will try to be good for [redacted] so she is not so sad. i have a horrible dreadful feeling

moments of sameness / ninety & teenage / what do you know?

june 22nd, 2024

by sameness i mean reciprocation. us in the car, stuffing up in the same part of the second verse to the song we once knew by heart when we were seven and seven and two months. us in my hallway, me wrapping both arms around you and saying “i missed you” in that little voice i manage so well; you hugging me back but holding me tighter, not letting go, saying nothing. us, drinking red wine, me sipping, you muttering, me; i get it, i get it. mm… mm. yes staring into the glass. us by the kitchen sink, locking eyes, me trying to understand you, you being too little, too weird, too off-putting, too distant. the ones who cling to me, who want to be me and look up with those big eyes do not have the same effect as you; you have freckles and don’t know why your parents don’t live in the same house anymore. us waiting to leave, back-and-forth, frothing over what doesn’t belong to us yet but will, and how you excite over my future success

the adults know something about the children, a certain kind of feeling, that the children might never understand. when you look at me, i try to find a bit of that. what are you seeing that i am invisible to? or that i am too much of myself? what version of me am i missing out on? that twinkle in the eyes of an adult i love reminds me that i am of great value. that even though i am not treasure, i may have something special that they know their own children do not even yet possess. that i might really be something if i try hard enough. do you know too that i want to think you think something of me? if i balance work and play and prioritize work but never favor it, am i going to do better than the rest of you all did? be the better cousin; the better one of us. the one who never comes to these because i’m doing something too big? i doubt it. what do you see? tell me what you see as i sip my wine finger the spine of the glass and run my heel up my calf and i watch your children make sure they’re not pulling my dog’s tail make sure they’re all happy they’re all looked after i’ve never done this before — i’ve never been responsible for life before. is this the thing you sacrificed for what i have that you don’t anymore? if i create something as magical as a threat to my own humanity, will i lose the magic too? the special teenage magic. the kind that makes you watch after me

that which makes you both want to baby me and mother me, but also submit to me and let me pet you?

boo! remember? you don’t. don’t worry

june 21th, 2024

i watched tv in bed this morning. i should’ve have. as i was so late that i skipped the first lesson. my bus ride wasn’t so nice either, but i listened to a podcast about nietzsche and wrote about “when was the last time i did something i would do for all of eternity?” in the sitting area near my lockers. i did think about going to art, but i was already so late. i bought sour candies instead from the otr and texted [redacted] about when she’s leaving. i reminded her how cold it is here. i can’t wait to see her. she says she is going to cry. i sat with the girls from my mentor group at lunch, and we worried about the maths test coming up on parabolas. i didn’t have anything to eat (i forgot my lunch), so [redacted] gave me her mandarin for recess. i had french, which was fun. super fun. one day you are going to know who [redacted] is! and then i can talk about her and you will make sense of her. she is the loveliest human being i’ve ever met. i wish you knew her. but i also kind of don’t. she’s too sweet to share. i made her happy and left for english. which was okay. i sent a text message to [redacted] about how i couldn’t skip the lesson with her, and i thought she replied kind of mean back. i finished some of my french in english, and then worked on my creator’s statement. my english teacher is so smart. i was very cold today, and i felt so when i was walking through the hallway at lunch; i had to go to the canteen and i jumped the line by giving [redacted] a hug and congratulating her on getting a diagnosis. then i bought [redacted] some lunch, picked up mine from my brother who delivered it at student services, and found her in the new building. we ate and i told her about the abusive relationship i bore witness to at the expo last night. i wasn’t looking for advice, but she gave it to me anyway. only because we were in front of other people

i had action project, where we were meant to reflect on the expo. i wrote about overcoming anxiety. [redacted] made us play a game for the last twenty minutes where we learnt about the names of different groups of animals. a group of pandas is called an embarrassment. i left with her, and made eye-contact with [redacted] in the hallway, who i already saw earlier. i turn into a cunt around her and i know it, only because i know she’s envious. envy or this insatiable desire to have what another person does that you never will makes me totally fucking crazy, particularly as i always feel i am on the receiving end. i have wanted people before. but not through another person. i have never met somebody so willing to admit what is so ugly. have i talked about this before? i was not in a position to take what she had told me, certainly not in a positive way. what did she expect? and now for the past six months she desperately tries to become parasocial with me (perhaps she thinks we are already), and expects it will… what? what?! oh, my god. what? anyway. i am finished. it’s no use talking about it, although i love to; it feels as if i’m getting it out. but it only makes it worse after. in maths, i realized i don’t understand anything. and i’m completely screwed for my test if i don’t find a way to do revision either tonight or this weekend. after school, mum and i bought stuff for the party tomorrow. and i made party bags for the kids and just finished taking a shower. i feel a little tired now, and i probably need to eat something. i wish i had something more exciting to tell you, but honestly i just need some rest and to write something in my journal

i want myself

june 20th, 2024

i am better now. i masturbate on my floor and think of my old poetry and self-harm scars to turn myself on. we had the action project expo after school today and i frolicked around in a skirt in the blistering cold and pretended like i had no secrets! i knew people were angry with me but i didn’t say anything. i got on with it and let [redacted] comfort and love me. i am not happy with the other love of my life. i don’t know why, which is unfair. i do know why, but that too is unfair. and mean. i wouldn’t mind being meaner at the minute. [redacted] always makes me feel like the loveliest person in the world. i wrote poetry today instead of going to art, called “dirty god”. i walked around in the cold again, and at recess i felt like i was having a good time, until i remember something that shifted me. i’ve lost it again. i waited in the morning for the bus. i was late, because i wanted to do my makeup. i felt cool. i practiced french in the morning and we were introduced to the new girls coming into our mentor group today. two are vietnamese, and the other girl is from thailand. they all seem nice. i don’t understand what’s going on in maths. parabolas. i thought i knew, but i don’t know how. i am worried for the test on monday. at lunch i was miserable and made no effort to get better. [redacted] and i sat opposite each other and said nothing. i ate my bagel and she ate her chocolate muffin. i started my creator’s statement in english and left to find somebody with lipstick. nobody had any. [redacted] and i left the expo, which i don’t want to tell you about, and we ate at sushi train and got 48 flavours after. i had bubblegum in a cup. i told [redacted] “i just want myself”. i am eating an orange and going to bed

june 19th, 2024

june 18th, 2024

good old nothing

june 17th, 2024

the time and energy i’ve been taking to get my hair to grow faster is seeming to pay off. nearly three months of massaging and oils and treatments and vitamin gummies, and i see a difference. boy, am i happy it’s growing back. i’m still worried that i am losing it all in clumps each time i brush it wet, but i’d always rather it be long. i wish sometimes i didn’t care so much! because i go back very regularly to look at photos of my hair before it was cut, and to sigh and pout and wait some more. at least it’s given me more time to think about the rest of my body. maybe hair isn’t the only thing that matters, contradictory to all i’ve ever said. my hair isn’t even that great. but i treasure it. i want it to be happy, and somehow it never is. i feel very represented by it. i can’t imagine changing it now for anything. my nails look better than ever; they’re long and strong and i care for them like a doting mother. no more hotel bathroom in singapore ever again, although my toenails could probably do with some more affection. you don’t care about all this

there’s this song i listen to on repeat and at first i liked it because it reminded me of your absence and how i liked the sting, but now i listen because it sounds like your long voice crack in the break between “i think you’d be a good mother” and your little nod before big tears. i turn it on and i always know that if i wanted to, i could cry. and that’s always a comfort to know. that maybe there’s still more. that i will usually always go back, and tell you, “yes”. i learnt about antifragility today when i was bored in class, along with a video actually about boredom. how it can be good. how i’m overstimulated too often. and i agree with a tight chest and itchy ears and bitten lips and a headache and a twitching eye and pyjamas shorts that have a waistband which cuts into my lower-ribs. what can anybody do except strip off all their clothes, tie up your hair, and lie down on the floor for a bit in the dark? no music, no phone, no no nothing, just you and nothing. good old nothing. who i can never get used to, no matter how much i love him. i need something always, or i want it, which is worse. i feel sensitive everywhere. i need the pressure points. i need the stress. i need the itching and the crawling out of your own skin because the lights the sounds the tastes the touches. because nothing speaks louder than any of those things, and how can you quiet a force when it does not have a mouth? where does the sound come from? the void? how does one cover the void’s mouth with their palm? and tell it, “yes”

simple love confession

june 16th, 2024

i get to know a part of you that nobody else knows, and i like my part. i love my part, and i think it is one of the best parts there is of you. it is the naked but dressed version. it is the far-off but seen version. it is the run-away and captured moment. it is the between dry laughs and colorful cries moment. so many people are going to have the new releases and the old finds, and i will not be better-off for it, or worse. they will have it and i won’t know, but i know it won’t ever be what we find wonderful in each other. always, i see them taking too much of you; grabbing and expecting, but you do not really care. i love that! i always knew that, but thankfully, i expected nothing and i waited. i was good and i waited. the impatient bitch will never learn how; to prance to skip to jump to leap without you to watch. but god! you don’t, do you? nothing is all for you anymore. no more than it is for me; raw and tactless you. it’s for us. because we see eye-to-eye when i stand on my tippy-toes and laugh full volume at what i don’t find funny, and you who must go quiet in a room full of disbelievers when i am the talk-of-the-town, when our uninterrupted flow is at once between their fingertips, in the end, ha! we will never allow it. to be reached and taken. you’ll always return half and whole, a hole that i can fill! i fit right inside. thank fuck for a thousand name-callings and street missions and the river seine where i will look down the barrel of the gun and read out that nasty poem which reeks of you

the universe is in the room with us. how do we leave it behind?

june 15th, 2024

i am going to make you happy forever. i say all the right things, and you are going to be happy forever. when i have you between my legs and i stroke your hair to tell you that i believe you and i want you and i know you more and more, it’s so that i can feel strands of your new body between my fingers. i never want to lose all that i have worked for. i never want to lose the scent of you on your side of my bed, on my pillow that’s yours. i never want to come at the wrong time. i never want to make you wait and you deserve to bleed on your bedsheets, but there’s a world where that blood belongs to me. we are crazy, we are psychotic and i am so pleased with you. i am so unbelievably relieved that you are alive and on the other side of the city and that i get to imagine it when i sleep tonight. that i get to fall asleep to the sweet recollection of the noises you made when i tipped my head back, cocked to the side and choked from joy. it was a squealing sort of noise, but not sex. you are imagining sex, but it wasn’t. something better. something like, “i wish this could last forever”. because how do you leave the room that the universe is in? when you know you are an inch away from finding something that not even it knows yet. we know how to make each other laugh and to cry and to make each other want to die but also we keep each other alive so that we can see each other again. as in, “i want to be inside you! i never want you to leave! but go to the other side of the world so i will never have to see you again!” because things are perfect. so wonderful and horrible and hurtful and i could never live to see the day when you are not all mine to me, when we do not feel shameful about our truths and good about our lies

that you could have fucked

june 14th, 2024

you should have seen us today! i gave her so much love. love all over. i gave her her paper back after she told me to write, and she kept it in her hand. i told her i am looking for something more fun than self-harm, and she told me drinking never gets old. she was embarrassed and i told her off for it. although i sat there quietly feeling quite bad for the events that would unfold after class. i know her like the back of my palm; like the gold coin in my pocket. when she says, “beth knows all about that” and all i can do is smile and try to make her better. when she walks me downstairs and i grab her hand and tell her, “you look like there’s something wrong. i want to make it better. let me make it better.” she says, “i just feel foolish.” and i; “you’re not a fool.” because you’re not! if you’re reading this and you are flipping over the back of my palm now, i imagine you reading my soul front-and-back, then you also see me on your knuckle. one in the same. we are both unforgivably lovely to each other

tonight i have gone through my memory boxes. i have made them each pretty and beautiful and i’ve started on my desk drawers — the ones i’ve put off for so long because of the cockroach i imagined was waiting for me. not even it’s corpse. it’s beautiful and neat in there now, and i don’t need any of that junk. a couple pens, an eraser, a sharpener; the basics. i kept most of it, anyway, just livened it up a bit. my floor’s quite the mess. things everywhere. cards with printed messages and handwriting of a name i won’t keep. i keep the rest, though; in a box called special cards, notes, receipts, letters, etc. i’ll clean it up tomorrow. i’ll get it looking better tomorrow. tonight’s about you and us, and how tired i am. and how i know you won’t sleep. i know you won’t sleep. but listen to me; go to bed and dream about me. don’t dream about the dumb shit. have fun and be excited and listen to the album i sent you. i am going to write you something beautiful tomorrow. and i need to submit to my literary journal i’ve been going to for days. well, for hours. come on, now. i am lying to myself. tonight there’s nothing on my mind because i know my mum’s happy and i know you a just little bit better. what else is there but that? knowing

you’re so nice

june 13th, 2024

i’ve been liking going to the floor to have an orange every night. i’ve been liking trying to drink more water and sweating it out in front of the heater and writing in my special book when i have a thought that i know is empty but that somebody will understand and want to hear maybe. possibly. that nobody will care about. i am smart, i am pretty, i am mostly good, and i am late to class. always to english. always english, and i dread meeting her eyes. she knows it! something. i think. impossible to explain how she looks at you. we were going to skip school to smoke but something came up and we went to pod instead while [redacted] sorted her shit. we got stuff from the vending machine. i just finished my pink milk we bought and calling [redacted]. she went to bed because she has a headache. i do too but she always has ones worse than mine. [redacted] read me her poem because i told her to, but i read it to myself and told her “it’s so good. you’re talented” and i continued. she just said i was nice. i should have asked if she forgave me for making her cry on the hill at our old primary school and i should have asked if she wanted to run away with me. but i just told her it was good

we walked the dogs and i might have done something, but i can’t remember. orange. journal. did i meditate? thinking in there somewhere. i waited around. lots of waiting for the call. for her to call me. i finally texted, and i ate dinner with my phone face-up. just finishing something or other. can’t remember it. but, yes. i just wanted to hear the sound of her voice. no big deal

in need of intellectual stimulation

june 12th, 2024

i’m eating an orange on my floor now and last night i decided what i really need is to put my phone down before 11pm and start meditating for five minutes in the mornings. i have french to do, but i really want to tell you about what’s missing; it’s stimulation! today [redacted] cried on the bus home from school after she told us that nobody understands what she’s trying to say. even more ironically, these words she used to describe this feeling were words i couldn’t formulate before she’d said them; any attempt to speak about the same problem with others couldn’t be understood because i didn’t know what feeling i was looking to explain. but here i am now, telling you it’s that common human-life feeling of being misunderstood. of using the wrong words and confusing yourself when you blur the lines between reality and what you can’t explain; but everything’s unexplainable. everything i say as if i’m not sure. i can never be certain you know what i’m saying, but i know of trust and belief. i need you all to believe i know what i am talking about, and that i am not making anything up. because it’s just the wind anyway, and it’s not the tree’s fault that the leaves end up on the ground. just like that; do you understand what i mean? what i am trying to tell you by being unable to explain any other way? it’s just that. i am quoting sylvia plath, aren’t i? when i say that i need some older, wiser being to talk to. i talk to god, but the sky is empty. i need somebody to sit in front of me and say something that i need to hear and to talk about, that i have not thought of before; that interests and alludes me. that proves me wrong and challenges me. philosophy is good, but the sky is infinite there. where is the being that begins and ends, but does not look at me like i am losing the thread of reality altogether? where is a young mother and supernatural entity and nice dog and soulful intelligence hiding from me in a person? why can i not see them? i just want to talk with you

love is torture stretching us all the way to death’s door

june 11th, 2024

a little bit of torture is good in a relationship, right? that’s what they tell us. and what of our relationship? it’s the thing that brings us together at the end of time, right? what makes us better and more full of light. i stay for it. so that i can remember how it feels to be loved by you and for you to call me “baby” when that returns, too, because it always does. it always does. forgetting is the bain of my existence but the more you confuse me, the more i realize the pattern of inconsistency, and that it has nothing to do with me. one day i will amaze you in the same way i always do, and i get you right back. torture as the thing. the thing is that i am loved and you are loved and not necessarily by each other, but at the very least, at least. it worries me sometimes. you can understand that, right? i used to think we were made one-in-the-same. i know we are now for better or for worse, mostly for the cost of value (oscar wilde says “a cynic is a man who knows the price of everything, but the value of nothing”). love makes both of us cynical. i know, of course, that we are not made for this. but since it has come around again, i will have to grit my teeth and make it through to the end of time. for i cannot see you like this. but it makes for a good poem. it makes for a fucking brilliant poem. one day i will have a collection of them about you and they will all be assigned chronological sections corresponding with the week you decided to die away. every once in a while, when you become disgruntled and angry. but i too become you, like i do. like it’s a prophecy. all the good things i have become yours, too, and when you believe there are so few in the world, i start to lose the ones i started with. however, i’ve come to the wall that i can live no other way because it is so unnatural to separate from the mother now. i am an adolescent, and i still need you. you are just a newborn, and you need to be fed. we want to look after each other. it’s undeniable. but can we? that’s something else entirely. i cannot imagine a life where i don’t live like this, because it’s too sweet when all is going well

and i bring you lavender in the mornings, listen to you when nobody else does, write you sweet things that you keep forever in the bed-side drawer. when you understand who i mean to be in the afternoon; after a day of horror and bleeding in the bathroom and anxious waiting. you cannot help but be my little bit of torture and affection, my corresponding colour, my missing atom, my final other half, and eventually the writing on my tomb-stone

is it so bad at all?

june 10th, 2024

nothing's so bad when you're there and we're all tangled up in each other's hair, on the bed and smoking pot and you clinging to my chest. nothing's so bad as of tonight, and i remember when i got there after dark and i couldn't help myself. i jumped right on you and you didn't collapse. i thought i'd lose my mind. it's just that nothing matters if you're not here. i am fascinated by you and i express it badly; the seriousness of it is not conveyed at all. it's only this strong when i'm away from you and we are in different bedrooms across the city. i feel that i am getting so much closer to understanding you, and who you mean to be when you are away from the stage. i undress you on impulse. it's beautiful; a wonderful balancing act. i know you want to know me, too. that's all i want. i just want for somebody to listen and to understand and to connect. well, i don't want anybody else to do that but you

today's been nothing short of fine. i went to the beach again today and read for an hour in the scrub. everything's much prettier from this one spot; the wind doesn't bother you and you have a perfect view of the horizon and the stairs to the left; i am the perfect view-before-the-real-view, and i have of course, never wanted anything more! i guess. i know somebody wondered what i was writing about. i met my mum for a juice and we talked about her skin cancer. it's all over her chest, and she is worried because it itches and stings, and that's an uncommon side effect. i told her it's okay, as long as she doesn't start getting migraines. we took rory and went home, after i called [redacted] to make plans. she said, "maybe" which disappointed me, but i got over. i took a shower and shaved my legs, but didn't wash my hair because it felt like too much work, and i wasn't in the right mood. besides, my straight hair has been making my very happy (although i've tied it into a low-bun for most of the week) and i don't think i could have dealt with saying goodbye today. it was not one of those times. i put on my nice shirt that i bought at the op-shop on saturday with mum and my best baggy jeans, and i changed my earrings to the gold ones with dangly seashells. mum and i washed rory today, and then i lay on my floor and smoked some weed and listened to a ted-talk on creativity and felt inspired

i ended up at [redacted]'s house. we went for a walk in the dark to the oval, sat in the middle of the cricket field, and i was very afraid we'd be stabbed. we talked about her trip to goolwa, and briefly about mine to aldinga. we talked about nice people, and her dad, and the men in her life, and after her dad called her to try and take me home early, we walked up the street and sat down, leaned against a fence, and we talked about how she fears being percieved and i fear being judged; we each relish in the opposite's fears, however. [redacted] fought with her dad upstairs about letting me stay an extra hour, and we smoked in bed and watched arcane then looked into each other's eyes and i tried to convince her red wine was the best alcohol. i know she won't believe me for another ten years. we ate chocolate and sour pencils in the car-ride back to mine and her dad was very angry at the two of us. we are going to drink tea tomorrow. i know it

wasting time doing everything i can think of

june 9th, 2024

sat in my spot this afternoon! up in the aldinga scrub, over-looking the beach. i wore wool tights underneath jeans, my ugg-boots, a sports bra and a long-sleeve flannel, a jumper, and a beanie and wrist-warmers. i wrote in my novel for a bit, then read, and it got too dark, so i had to come home. my parents and i finished the impossible movie, and watched eternal sunshine of the spotless mind. my dad said he thought it was dated. i told him he didn't get it, then. mum made dinner, and i read outside until the mosquitos got too rough. i had cranberry juice and an orange in the backyard while i watched a video essay on dementia and alzheimer's titled "the fear of forgetting" and i was very afraid to drink red wine in front of the movie, because i am back to thinking there is nothing scarier than being unable to name things (including what and who you love, and who you are). my dad is worried he will develop it, because he started drinking so young. i am worried, too. what a terrible way to go! is there nothing worse, maybe? today was wonderful; i had lots of great ideas

it haunts me that i never heard your voice

june 8th, 2024

i’m at aldinga. today’s been okay again. i don’t have much to say. i had a nice conversation with my dad today when we walked the dogs and threw balls for them at the park, about my writing. this place gives me a sense of needlessness, but literally fully-fledged desperation; like i’ve got to do something with the time and there is too little to do but so much time that i cannot bare to do nothing, so what about anything? still, i get a lot of time to myself. i’ve read a bit, and journaled. written in my other book, which i’m using at the moment as a way to get out ideas, and is turning into a bit of a self-obsessed and report-style-like novel. and i’ve done some homework for english. i also don’t feel sick anymore, but i have a lot of phlegm and gross recovery things. my mum says she’s feeling sick, which would suck for her. my dad and i planned to hike this weekend, but she could stay at home with the dogs if she wanted to

i wrote a very sad poem about my dog dying today, and i cried in bed before we watched the movie out in the living room as a family. before i'm glad you're feeling better. i didn’t wear makeup today, and i actually feel very pretty. i straightened my hair yesterday, and straight hair always makes me feel very beautiful. i actually think it might be for me what fake eyelashes are to the girls in my grade. maybe it’s not as pretty as my natural hair, but the change is transformative for my personality. sometimes it’s exactly what i need. a reminded that i can do things, and that i am not permanently one way or another. i can always wash my hair and bring my curls back. it’s nice to feel like a different person every once in a while, when you are able to run your hands through your hair without ripping knots out, i seem to be a much more pleasant person

what kind of person drinks a mocha? or has that many sloths?

june 7th, 2024

i spent this morning off from school watching videos about prehistoric australia, flight 370, and “the great silence” from the rest of the universe. i also spent it on my floor cutting out modigliani portraits for my wall, to add to my klimpt photos. i made tea and journaled at my desk, and i even did some mindfulness. i got through quite a bit of homework, as i needed to catch-up on what i missed this week from being so sick. i did maths and english. i’ve had to draw for english, a couple of comic panels about “changing identity”. because of persepolis. yesterday i did start feeling a little bit better, while i was waiting for [redacted] on the table outside, i went over some of my old scribbly pencil poetry with a fineliner and made out a couple of words. plus, i’ve got some real free-thinking thoughts back. some brain power, anyway, for my usual creative pursuits and general interests. i’m not a sick piece of shit anymore. or as much as i was. yesterday i also cried and put a poem on tik tok; my videos have been doing well, but my following has not been increasing. i don’t mind this. i’m happy that people are somehow seeing my writing at all! i think i do feel a little worse-for-wear, though. mood-wise. my phone addiction is upsetting because normally i am very good with that sort of thing, and prioritizing

i also saw [redacted] today, who i’ve never hung out with before. we went to the coffee shop near [redacted]’s old house, and i got a chai latte; he got a mocha. we forgot to pay on the way out, which was fairly embarrassing. then i convinced him to buy the winter pyjamas from bed bath and table that i own and love to bits. he did! and when we got back to my house, we both put them on. we made hummus on toasted-wraps and watched silence of the lambs because he likes horror movies, and it’s a classic that i’ve seen before — which is important because how would i know if it was a good movie or not? i always end up watching movies i’ve seen before with other people. why has nobody else ever seen a movie before? then we went to the little park up by the road down to my old primary school. we lay on a rug and talked about what we want to do when we’re older, which has been a common theme in my life. [redacted] says he doesn’t know what he wants to do, but he knows more and more that he doesn’t want to do something normal. then we came back, and he did a tarot reading for me, about my dreams. it was informative and reaffirming at the same time. we also showed each other our crystal collections

[redacted] and i are planning on going for a walk tonight, which i’m going to coordinate with her once i finish my english homework. today’s been pretty good. i feel like an evil self-indulgent cunt and at the same time i feel very relieved and like i did when i was a little girl, although maybe i have always felt like a self-indulgent cunt

life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans

june 6th, 2024

[redacted] just left after we smoked a cigarette in my backyard, and i have just realised i left my laptop in [redacted]’s locker, so now i am writing on my phone, which doesn’t feel right or efficient. today was a mess. i decided to go to school and make things okay, instead of having another day on bed-rest. i did french in pod, and we took our learning preference test. i got auditory-infp. i was very assured by this, because i didn’t know it was going to give me my myers briggs personality, so i answered all the questions with total honesty, and i still got infp. and at recess i tried to be good and see [redacted], but i was in a pretty poor mood and so was she. we still laughed really hard together. and i went to leap today. we were talking about cyber-safety. boring shit. i went to well-being for science and talked to my guidance councillor about my fear or failure and being like everybody else. she smiled at me very softly while i spoke and played with one of the fidgets and at lunch [redacted] and [redacted] and i dipped and went to a park down the road to share a cigarette. i felt bad and wet even though it wasn’t raining; a bit glitchy really. i hate cigarettes. they are gross and make me feel bad. but i like holding them. [redacted] cried, like she always does whenever she uses substances. me and [redacted] talked about selfishness. i called [redacted] and asked if she’d come home with me and skip the last two lessons. she said yes, so we caught the bus back. it is a shame that i feel bad today, and that i’m still not entirely over being sick

i have a four-day-long weekend, because of a pupil free day today and the king’s birthday on monday, and i don’t deserve it. i don’t think i will do anything except distract myself, which is a horrible thought. i want to do something with my life that i think is on purpose, and it does not seem like such a hard concept until i am deciding between social media and an audiobook. it should be an easy choice, but for some reason the right answer is never the one i choose. this weekend, i should make the right choices, and i should go outside more. i have this fear that i am missing out on my own life because i am not seizing opportunities, but realistically opportunities do not come along every day. maybe i have said this before. i understand that i am to create opportunities; i know what to do and why i want to do it, but not how i am to get there. my fear of autonomy is not as excessive as my desire for it; i wish they would be more equal. i can feel the unbalance

headache in bed. made you laugh today

june 5th, 2024

i did make it in for my french exam. i came in a little bit before (in the middle of lunch) to see [redacted] but it wasn’t all that good. in french, [redacted] had a go at me for not staying home, but i think i did really well. i think if i had waited to do it until next week then i would have forgotten everything. i said that i have bad dreams, and i wake up a lot in the night. this has been true lately. i don’t know what is actually waking me up, because i can’t remember the dreams. i started watching four daughters this morning, but stopped so i could study. and i put on makeup today. i doubt i’ll remember to take it off tonight. i wish i didn’t feel so useless, or else maybe i could try to do something very important. i’ve been trying to improve the code for this website; it chews up quite a bit of time, and i want to make something that is enjoyable and not painful to read. i want to add a comment section so i can speak with you all or at least hear what you think, but it’s very complicated and i have never coded before really. i will try and follow a tutorial tonight. and i really need to delete social media from my phone, before i lose what good i’ve gained

sickness makes me sentimental for when i was once a sentient being

june 4th, 2024

i have the flu. at least i think it’s the flu. i have been trying to take care of myself so that hopefully by tomorrow i am better and i can go in to complete my oral french exam. i’ve been doing nothing all day and i feel rather bad and sick and stupid. and i feel ugly, because i am so ill that i cannot lie in bed if it’s not with my mouth open taking really long and shaky breaths, drooling onto pillows and old t-shirts and things. i always feel very ashamed when i am sick, and i confuse it with guilt. i have nothing to be guilty about, but for some reason there is that feeling of self-dread whenever i find myself in this state. i have been shaking my leg, lying on my side, and watching tv shows on netflix the entire day. i did have a very good shower this morning, though. normally a shower feels like a task, but today it felt very enjoyable, which is something on the up-side. anyway. i am worried nobody is watching. do you understand what i mean when i say that? if you are a watcher, i hope you will understand. when you are sitting behind somebody you know and there is a delightful moment where all you can think to do is stare at the back of their head and in some weird way, the act is not creepy but it’s in fact very relieving. thank god i am seeing her at this ungodly angle, you know? but i have not been having much of that as of late. i have been having bad eyesight, a poor appetite, dry lips that no dermal therapy will solve. but i want the cold wind to blow through my jacket again and to make me feel very human, when i am walking across the oval toward the building and i know it’s going to rain just by the stillness in the air and the sun might set but i know this building. this building is safer sometimes than anywhere else on the planet. i despise it and i despise you but i’d rather be turned away from the sunset if it meant i could keep watching your nose twitch across the room

horrible feeling in the horrible weather

june 3rd, 2024

three days into winter and it seems all i can bear to do without feeling like i might either punch everybody or become a wet blanket is be horizontal in bed. i came home from school early after wandering around my local op-shop and being unsuccessful. the walk back was very gruesome and i decided to take a bath and drink a milo and try to read persepolis. the book is going fine, but i was meant to finish it weeks ago. i’ve not been able to think all of today. if about half of all human beings’ thoughts are uncontrollable, and the others are conscious, then today there has been a great unbalance. it’s certainly not been 50/50. my brain has not been working at all. and i have unfortunately got a very sort throat, but i am trying to combat it with drinking lots of water. nothing very exciting happened today, and it seems like we were all in a rotten mood

last night at the party i said to you, "c'est la vie"

june 2nd, 2024

i didn’t sleep at all last night and my parents took me out this morning for a pie and to tell me my mother is quitting alcohol and sugar before bed because they thought she had a heart attack last night while i was gone. i said, “okay” and i’ve been in bed since. the party was really great. as in, i had a great time. i had red wine before i left and sat in front of my heater (which looks like a fireplace) and i felt very relaxed when [redacted] and [redacted] came over. i liked the hour before the party started, when several of us all got to hang out in [redacted]’s room. i could make a mental note of who to go to if i needed somebody during the night, but i was actually fine. i spoke and came up to a lot of people by my own volition. i guess i won’t talk about it too much, but, yeah, i had a really good time. i drank more than everybody else there, but i didn’t act like it at all. i was perfect. i did much more looking after people than i thought i would, too. i said wonderful things and i felt very pretty and a bit like a bowling-pin

first day of winter

june 1st, 2024

it’s the first day of winter. i keep on saying i won’t let the weather effect me but then this dreadful month comes ‘round and i’ve got an itchy throat, sore, watery eyes, and i’m counting my reasons to keep living. putting on stupid socks beneath my winter pants uniform won’t do the trick anymore. i’ve been feeling really bad whenever i write, and i can’t explain it to you. it’s not self-pity or angst or even a lesser ego. i just feel really let-down by myself, and it is only when i create art. i’ve got the party tonight. i have finished cleaning my room, and i’ve been doing french for a little while. i’ve got a vigorous urge to fuck somebody, or myself. i can’t figure out which. all i know is that i am horny, and i have been and nothing is curing it and i don’t know if it will ever go away. maybe the only thing that will help it go away is if i kiss everybody on the planet; maybe i will try to tonight in my bad dream. i will remember what i am telling you now, so that i can imagine it into my dream-state. i’ve not been that flirty, though, or charismatic. i never am, though, really, am i? i think i can be very charismatic, persuasive, enticing. probably since meeting [redacted] this has increased

i love to be cold, but having revisited some old photos from past winters, i think i do really understand the reason why i feel awful during this time; or just how it feels. i can only do this by using a comparison. in summer, and even autumn and spring, you feel very present and physical and safe. you feel like the song vienna. you sure can afford to lose a day or two, and this mindset is what means that you don’t lose a minute, because you stop really caring. winter is the opposite. i have this constant looming reminder that everything i do is without real purpose and i am following my own reckless and lost ideology very blindly, and it makes me miserable. there is the combination of the lack of sun and pretty things, too, but that’s a whole separate feeling. i guess in the past winter has always just made me feel wasted, and i don’t want it to happen again. i am wasted on myself, and i feel like i’ve lost all my time before i’ve even spent it

fuck last quarter moon fuck last quarter moon

may 31st, 2024

things have not gone my way today. i met [redacted] for a coffee this morning, because we talked about it on the phone last night, and [redacted] found us and sat down with us. she is very nice, but me and [redacted] just wanted some us-time. i also came into the bathroom today to meet her and when i opened the door, we were wearing the exact same thing for casual clothes day. dark blue jumpers / hoodies and baggy jeans. it doesn’t help that we look fucking identical. that wasn’t a problem. we made a joke out of it. everybody assumed we coordinated, which was arguably the most uncomfortable part of the whole thing. i bought a small hot chocolate, and it left a bad taste in my mouth. in english, i wore glasses and did my french. some girl mouthed off a nerd she was going out with and accused him of being blind, and i felt personally targeted because i was wearing reading glasses — that was how today was. and at recess, i hung out with [redacted]. we sat on the long, thin bench-thing by the oval and i was not very present. or pleasant, probably. it was cold and wet and miserable today. and i went into maths, but i had more important things to do, so i asked to go to well-being and apologized for leaving, and then i found [redacted] downstairs and we did homework outside the drama wing. i did practice for ordinal and cardinal numbers in french. she read memoirs of a dutiful daughter. and i did go to action project today; you all will be pleased to know. it was fine, and i actually worked on something for our expo in a couple of weeks. my poor teacher!

lunch was fine. me and a group of girls sat in one of the language rooms and shut ourselves in. each time a teacher came in to tell us to leave, we told them we were doing a meeting for german club. german club does not exist. i had french after lunch, which was really great. i got to practice my writing skills, and boy does it feel great to have sentence structures and grammar structures down to a T. i know exactly what i’m talking about, but the next part is knowing if anybody else does. [redacted] and i had a conversation about the fact that she probably isn’t bipolar, and that she just has adhd and autistic. i had to bite my cheeks so i didn’t sigh from relief the entire conversation. she was super good at teaching today, and everyone was listening. which, yay! because it’s friday, so i thought we’d all be miserable. as we were leaving the classroom, [redacted] told me not to be sad, because i’d told her before i was going to be sad when we weren’t seeing each other every day, and a kid called out after me, “don’t be sad!” i had pod-line, and some random kid followed me downstairs and asked for a sip of the coke ms bunton had given to me. fucking weird. i used pod-line to finish my sketches for art and use the scanner, and upload the drawings to my folio. i need to finish it in the next two hours, because otherwise i’m going to be worried all night at the concert (mum and i are going to missy higgins tonight). anyway. it was rainy today and i felt generally poor. i even nearly missed my bus stop today. i was wedged between the aisle and the driver shut the door on me, then i had to shout “one more!” at him, before he opened it again. that sort of thing happens, but i didn’t need it to happen today; i already felt like something was wrong with me. stupid, tiny things like that make me feel personally attacked. i find it very hard to remove myself and entertain the idea that the world does not revolve around my positioning in the universe. now i am cold and i’ve put on a skirt and a little top with a bow and i am sitting on my bed cross-legged; i have to eat something and do homework, and then get reayd for the missy higgins concert. tomorrow night is going to be fun; it will be

tu je penses que je voudrais plus d'amour dans ma vie

may 30th, 2024

when is it going to be enough? the more i live my life and am trying my best to be sincere, the harder i find it to care about what direction i am walking; it could be into the ocean. i try so hard to stay focused and looking forward, but i can’t help but to look at the strange footprints i am leaving in the dirt. and how they are going to disappear soon enough. enough enough enough, and when have i had it? when is it going to be engraved in my tombstone? when will i leave a mark hard enough for you to never remove? when is it enough life? i have not had any, yet. i feel like a baby. i am still yours. and i don’t know how to move my body yet; i just want to be shown. but i’ve been fed-up for so many years. nothing is new in spring. everything has died before winter has come. i am in the middle of the universe and time cannot wrap itself around me just quite yet

i gave [redacted] my letter today. she read it in front of me and hugged me, and told me i am special. i stumbled out the door. and i studied all day, but i feel like i haven’t learnt anything. nothing is speaking to me. he is saying, “get up and dig your own grave”. do you believe what i am telling you? i am only writing this so that you’ll listen to my stories, and so that you will visit me when i am old; in the grave. and bring a flower with your name carved into the stem

there is hatred in hiding evil so i get to hold your wrist

may 29th, 2024

i need to take a shower, very badly. things have been weird and orderly and just the right amount of evil, but still pretty unbearable. on the walk to school, a revivalist truck reversed and accidentally snapped a branch off a tree, so as i crossed the road, i dragged it into the footpath with me. then a man in a car turning right rolled down his window to thank me. on the way past my primary school, a younger girl told me i was going to be late for school, but i had a late start. i told her that. she told me again that i was going to be late. i told her i had another ten minutes, then left. but the bus went past my stop. there was only one other girl on the bus with me; a year twelve. we walked down the road quietly and went our separate ways at the gate. i felt pretty good this morning. and french was really great today. for the first half of the lesson, we answered questions at the front of the class that are going to be in our oral test next week. [redacted] called on us in a random order, with different questions. i thought my answer was okay. then for the rest of the lesson, we went outside on the oval and had to talk to each other about anything, as long as it was in french. the exercise was pretty good, and i think i actually got quite a bit out of it. i’m still upset that i don’t have very much of a vocabulary, but at least my grammar is going well; things are always in the right order, i think. at recess, i talked to [redacted] for a bit and walked her downstairs. we got called an “unholy” duo in the hallway. we decided we are going to take [redacted] out for a coffee together. i am really happy that she wants to do that. [redacted] needs somebody at school to feel loved by. then i went to well-being for three minutes, and dissociated. i had maths. which is going fine. we learnt another factorization method today; the quadratic formula, and about the discriminant, and rational solutions. i understood it fine, but i know i will forget the formula by tomorrow morning. X = -b +/- √b² -4 x a x c / 2 x a. we’ve got it for now. i hung out with [redacted] at lunch and we talked about animal cruelty and her mum maybe divorcing her dad. i went to art, and created my character design research slide, and started my sketch for her. then i skipped action project and hung out with [redacted]. we got slushies at the otr, and came back to sit in school together. we talked about team-sports and the party on saturday. then [redacted], who is a kid from the neurodivergency club, came to sit down beside me. that was pretty awkward. i don’t not like him, and i wasn’t embarrassed, but i was talking with [redacted], and she doesn’t know him, and the whole thing was strange. because he didn’t have anything to say, so he just kind of sat there and nodded and listened to our conversation. when [redacted] went away to get picked up, i asked him about the club. he said it’s fine, but not the same without the old club leader. i said, maybe he’ll see me tomorrow. but he won’t. i don’t want to go anymore, and i’d always rather see [redacted]. then i got on the bus with [redacted] and [redacted] and we talked about what’s going to happen when [redacted] comes back, because she texted us last night to tell us she’s booked flights, and is going to stay at my house for a bit, and [redacted]’s house, and then jump around for a little bit. i think that sounds fair enough. anyway. then i walked home and i journaled naked in my bed and finished my art slide, and i’ve been doing french for a couple of hours. i really need to go and take a shower now, and somehow forget about today. i felt a bit icky, even though i was joyful. very plastic, maybe. and i still need to read my book for english tonight

i’ve been a fine version of myself today

may 28th, 2024

i woke up at [redacted]’s house today. we planned to get up before seven, to do homework, but woke up forty-five minutes late. i was so tired. we went upstairs and iced our faces, and ate nutella toast. it was very good bread. last night was fun, i think. [redacted] is very worried about what to wear for her party, but of course it’s not really about the clothes, it’s about other people perceiving her, and how scary that is. i am nervous for her party, only because i have a bad feeling about it, and [redacted] and i talked last night about how awful it is listening to other people talk about either one of us from the other person’s perspective. there will be a lot of me listening to other people have opinions about [redacted] that i am not ready for, because they are not allowed to know her. i’d defend her with my body. literally. we’ve both agreed to do something mutually before i go away to france. we knew it the moment we looked at each other. my favorite part of last night was giving her my present, after i braided her hair and she cried because i was being nice, or talking in bed after she came back downstairs from hanging out with her mother, or going to her grandparents’ house for cake

we got to school a bit late today, but that’s all right. i used her makeup again, and it wasn’t as bad this time. i’m getting to know how to use her things on myself. i was late to the socratic seminar in english today, about lady bird, but it worked out fine. i joined the second group, and got to do both prompts, so i didn’t miss out on anything. i got really mad at [redacted], the kid who used to dress up as a nazi in primary school, because he was making offensive points about julie’s character and sexist remarks about marion and was just generally confusing “unconventional ideas” with “unconventional ideas about gender”. but apparently everybody said that during the first prompt, i sounded very intellectual and “like i had a large vocabulary”. so, whatever that means, i did well! after recess, i had art, and i’ve got a bunch of stuff to do for my folio before friday, so i’m going to be busy at home drawing so that i can get it all scanned by next lesson. i might do that after i finish writing this. in leap, we watched the smoking ceremony assembly, which was incredibly interesting and enjoyable honestly. we did it for reconciliation week, but hearing about aboriginal australian culture is something that i love about glenunga. whenever we have kaurna people come in to educate and speak to us, instead of a random scripted student; it all just feels a little more natural and so beneficial. we talked about the referendum last year in the last bit of time we had in leap

i had a pretty good lunch and sat with [redacted] and [redacted] for most of it, underneath a tree. we talked about the party, and doing pres at [redacted]’s house before the party. i had pod after, and did my french. [redacted] came in! and i got to show her what i’ve been doing. she said what i’m doing is baby-baby, but i explained that so much of it is stuff that i don’t understand about basic grammar, and i need to try so much harder in languages than everyone else does, it feels like. i love languages, but i need to work at it consistently, and doing A1 has been helpful. but she did make a good point, and we are doing A2-A3 level french in our class at the moment. she left, because she was distracting me, and then [redacted] came in to talk to me about exchange, because she heard about it from somebody. i had a good conversation with her, but i felt really tired by the end. science was hell-ish. i saw who our relief teacher was, and he was so insulting and vile that i stood up and said to him, “sir, i’m going to leave” and when he asked me where, i said “well-being. bye, sir” and i can literally still see the look on his face as i turned away. it sounds awful, but if you met this man, if i could explain to you all the things he did with my five minutes of being in the class, you’d get it. i, frankly, don’t have it in me. i went to equip after school, and somebody stole a boy’s laptop and broke it a little bit, then put a sticker on it and left it on the top of his locker. he blames himself for it. we talked today about how to look at mistakes. when it ended, i sat with [redacted] in the next room for twenty minutes. we talked about neurodivergency and what she thinks. i love her. i am going to be very sad when she goes, and i’ll miss her so much. i’m going to write her a card to give to her on thursday when i see her last! and my copy of the unbearable lightness of being. maybe. i haven’t decided… but she is such a wonderful person. she deserves nothing bad

[redacted] is going to read my letters tonight. i am so nervous

baby’s birthday, and they’re saying i’m a bit bubblier

may 27th, 2024

it’s [redacted]’s birthday! i’m writing this in science, as i doubt i’ll manage to write tonight. she’s just called me to ask if i want to come and meet her in the city in an hour, so i’ll do that, and probably end up staying the night. my morning has been okay. i was going to wake up early and finish her present, but i failed at that, so i packed it in my bag and missed action project this morning, and i went to pod instead. i’ve pretty much finished it. although, on the bus, maybe i’ll add another picture or a drawing or a conclusion or something. i talked to [redacted] in pod this morning, and i learnt that her special interest area is geography — specifically rivers, and how they’re formed — which i think is possibly the sweetest thing in the world. she’s so wildly passionate about it, like you couldn’t believe. she spoke to me about how smart they are, and what her favorite river is, and why she loves to be able to speak about river formations. i think she makes rivers sound very exciting. she helped me with maths this morning, too, and i had my maths test after! i would have struggled if i hadn’t revised with her, but i think i might have actually done quite well today in the test. there were a couple questions i struggled with, plus getting them all answered in time, but i did quite well, and i’ll be surprised if i get any lower than a “b” grade, and not surprised if i get higher. but anyway. [redacted] is lovely, and i’m going to be very sad when she leaves and goes to europe, but of course, very happy for her; like she will be for me!

i’m not sure how i feel, but i want to try and write about it so that i can understand it myself. i feel very out of time, which is nothing new, but also very out of touch, oddly. i’ve started reading the news, and watching, but that hasn’t seemed to have helped. i feel disconnected from life and things i want to make me happy. like being a good person, or at the very least, a good friend. i don’t want to hurt anybody, but recently it hasn’t concerned me, which is frustrating. i am sorry that i can’t use their names for real; it has being weighing on me a lot, whether i ever will. maybe i will change them all back one day — i have saved all of my entry drafts which are pre-edited (i have not changed names to [redacted]) but i guess we’ll see how my life pans out. i haven’t been making an effort to be around other people who i find difficult to talk to, which is something i value. i want to be respectful and open-minded. but i’ve been shying away from that. maybe it’s a sign i need a tiny break. not from permanent challenge, but from the challenges i’ve been throwing at myself; maybe i need to slow down for a second and write poetry a bit more, and in my journal a bit more, and talk to people about how they’re doing; not always myself. i think [redacted] will be in a good mood today, when i come to meet her; she sounded like it on the phone. i am, too, i think. everyone’s been saying i’m more bubbly recently. i am behaving a bit more like [redacted]

a very pretty blunt in the park

may 26th, 2024

yes, i feel like rubbish. i’ve needed to do exactly what i haven’t. i needed to finish [redacted]’s birthday present, but after i called her last night, i felt mad and tired and exhausted, and i went through all the contacts in my phone looking to have phone-sex with someone. i can’t explain it. when i am angry, i am so horny; it feels like that, anyway. i’m sure there is some logical link between those two feelings. the heat, maybe. but yes, i felt like i could fuck something. the feeling did not carry on to today. i felt bad for calling people and harassing them late at night, and i gave [redacted] bad advice when she texted me about her situation in america. sometimes i think i don’t make any sense when i am speaking with her, but she seems to think i am very wise. maybe i just am very wise. it’s a mystery to me, anyway. i lay in bed for most of the late morning, scrolling on my phone. i got up to wash my face and get into some jeans and a shirt, and then i walked to [redacted]’s, since her parents were having my parents over in the afternoon for wine and cheese. we decided to take some weed (only a couple nugs) from her younger brother and smoke a blunt nearby. we left, she paid for some food at woolworths, and we went to a school nearby, but we realized we only had two matches — since she lost her lighter, we had to bring matches. anyway; the blunt went out. but it was good weed, and even a few drags had us a bit lighter and happier on the way back to hers. we stole some more matches, went to a dog-park up the road and sat behind a tree to smoke the rest. [redacted] sent me some voice-messages, which i opened while we were there, and i had a good time. [redacted] showed me some traditional bosnian dancing, and i imagined i was resting on a very safe patch of grass in the village i’m staying in on exchange, away from the main road and from any people, and i tried to imagine the smells there. i described to [redacted], “weed makes me feel like the world is not so angry at me all the time”

middle kids with mum, and me on mortality (don’t forget who i am)

may 25th, 2024

mum and i just left the middle kids concert, and now i’m writing on my floor. we passed a graveyard on the way home from the concert and my stomach started to hurt, and it hurts now. how could heaven be better than sitting in the car with my mother after scream-singing all night? the thought makes me so uneasy. it makes everything hurt all over, and i feel like tensing up and crying. nothing is more beautiful than the beauty i know that is all around me. how could all of that be gone to me one day? and how will it continue without me? the little tree i watched grow up in my backyard? the nice old people i’ve met; great, big clouds which tell stories; dogs which know me by name… and the flowers i see on the way to school which i think are growing the happiest. the ones i pick to give to you

god, everything is great, but what is the point of living if i do not have a baby? how is it possible that i know i won’t be able to sleep tonight if i don’t call [redacted] to tell her i love her; what a really lovely thing. i want to do something special on monday for her. if i had a baby, i would give everything i had worked for. my whole body. what is bigger than that? the idea of losing my life is not so terrible when i imagine it is going into something, like the ground; to grow the next tree. to be underneath it. and i love all that! but how is it i shouldn’t cry when i imagine not being? how is it you’ll all forget about me? and the love i possess, and carry with me everywhere; that i pour into what cannot love me back!

nothing is lots to do! actually

may 24th, 2024

oh god, i’m so fucking tired. my neighbors are paying me fifteen bucks to look after their cats while they’re away this weekend, and i have to go over later. i don’t want to get up to do anything, and i’ve got a massive headache from looking at my laptop all day at school. i don’t get a break either; i have so much homework to do tonight. i have to update my art folio, finish my book for english, revise for my maths test, study for my french test (plus, more french), and i also have to finish making [redacted]’s birthday present all in this weekend. i think maybe when i finish this entry i’m going to get something to eat, drink some water, make a plan for the weekend, and work on some writing. i have to open [redacted]’s videos she’s sent me, too, because i’ve left her on delivered for several days

i had a really lame day. some of my lessons were fine, but action project killed my mood, sucked the life out of my spirit, gut-punched me, and then i took the bus home to miss maths so that i didn’t lose my soul completely. but my good lessons were art and french today. english kind of sucked. in art, we worked on our folios, and i scanned my drawing i did of emily from corpse bride yesterday. it was just quiet and i got a lot done, and i liked doing that for my first lesson. after recess, i had french, which was actually so so good today. i talked [redacted] through my paragraph on the war between france and new caledonia, and i didn’t make that many mistakes! most of the errors i made were things like forgetting to use a reflexive pronoun, or putting an adverb in the wrong place, or not using a preposition. but i wrote a really hard paragraph on my own, and got most of it right, so i’m pretty proud of myself. i also think [redacted] can see how hard i’m working, which is really nice. yeah, english after was a bit of a bore. i just started reading our class book. i know why it’s important to read, and also why it is objectively a good and clever book, but it’s not the kind of milk i put in my cup of tea, if you know what i mean. lunch was pretty fun. i had [redacted] around, and i ate my sandwich. and we sat in our spot where we watch the girl from behind with the long blonde hair take out a brush and slowly work it through every strand. i felt very twitchy though, and very watched. and yes, then i had action project. it was totally fine, except i feel like i’m going to die in that classroom. i feel like i genuinely have crosses for eyes and i am slowly descending into the floor beneath me, making a home in that chair of a casket. i spent this lesson complaining to the smart girl across from me about the loud annoying boy and yelling at him every now and then to shut up. no wonder i have a headache. then i caught the bus home because maths could not have been a worse idea. i had a pit-stop at vinnies and i got some kind of soft cotton square box jewelry case. so sorry for that brain-rot word-jargon. i have no room in my conscious mind to write comprehensible imagery. anyway. i’ve been at home for about two hours, and have walked the dogs and finished some “shape language” sketches for my art folio which i’ll scan next week. sorry about the lack of energy. i need to be put down right now

but i don’t feel that well, so maybe i should have meat for dinner

may 23rd, 2024

hey! i am going fine today. i re-painted my nails today, since the colour [redacted] used was too bright. i re-painted them a dark rouge colour, which my mum said is called pinot noir , like the wine. i also ate a muffin for breakfast, which i don’t normally do. i felt like telling you. my hair was a little bit frizzy, even though i put it in a braid and put some oil in it before bed. i don’t know what else to do. it was fine, though. why is my hair getting so thin all of a sudden? i have told you; i’m afraid i’m going bald. that’s what really concerns me lately

in my first lesson, i did lots of french. i also printed out my english socratic notes, but in english, which was my last lesson today, i realized they were all wrong and i need to re-do them and re-print. but yes; lots of french. i will never be able to remember all of this shit. then, when i was walking out to recess, [redacted] called me. she was crying and asked me to come to well-being. i walked very quickly and she was in the room at the end. she asked me to shut the blind. once i did that, i sat down next to her so we were very close, and i asked her what was going on. [redacted] has realized she has a superiority complex, and that she is different from the people around her. she talked to me about a lot of things, but her biggest concern seems to be that she won’t end up where she thinks she’s meant to be, and she feels very discouraged by other people’s successes, and it’s manifesting itself in being very angry at people all the time. i told her all of that and she said i was right. secretly, i was looking on the wall behind her head at a feeling-wheel sheet, which has a list of very general feelings in the center which branch out into a more specific, and then an ultra specific feeling. i was using it to help understand what she might have actually been telling me. she doesn’t want to say what she actually is trying to say. it’s very hard to watch, and i feel bad for her. we went for a walk around the oval and skipped our leap lesson, and we talked about our pod tutor [redacted], and why it’s fun to know other languages. we talked about what she’s looking forward to. i wanted to tell her recently i have only been thinking about being a mother

i had science after, which was anti-climactic and boring. i tried to use the time to think, but i just zoned-out. nothing kept me stimulated today, really, just talking to people about things. when i was on a walk during science for a break, i ran into [redacted], my old french teacher, and i told her that her lunch looked really good. she asked me if i had any lunch, and i thought she was asking me if i had a break soon, but she was really asking if i had something to eat. i remembered that once upon a time i had an eating disorder so monstrous almost all of my subject teachers were aware. at lunch [redacted] bullied me for taking such slow bites of my sandwich. it had a pickle in it. we sat and watched her year twelve friend from german school play some kind of sport that i don’t know anything about. i went to art. my art teacher was very nice to me today. she told me i have very exceptional natural drawing skills, and that i should do visual art next semester instead of creative arts B (i am doing creative arts A right now). she said it would offer more of a stretch, and it’s very experimental and critical. i will have to see, though. i don’t want to change too many of my lines in case it interferes with my other subjects, and plus, i am not going to be there for very long before i go to france anyway. still, i liked that she was nice to me. i talked to her about my mum, since she is doing coaching at the school, and [redacted] is a year twelve mentor leader

nothing went on in english, except i talked quite a bit to my english teacher. nobody was really there today, for some reason. i think there might have been an excursion and a drama play both on today for year tens. but after, i got excited and went to see [redacted]. i love that woman. i gave her a hug and we talked for about an hour after school. we got into some deep stuff about her childhood, and her family. her dad’s a psychotic narcissist, and her mom is mentally unwell. i told her she and my mum seem to have had very similar childhoods, and maybe that’s why we connect so well. either way, i love to be around such a vulnerable person. as i have only just realized, she is even more sensitive than me. i always want to show her my insides when we’re together so she knows i’m like her. our conversations are too sacred to recount. in itself, they are almost like some kind of oath we are taking. very sworn to each other; i am so happy to be trusted. i left and gave [redacted] downstairs the rest of my lolly snake. then i took the bus home and listened to a very sad song called true norwegian black metal by sprain. i had to bite the insides of my cheeks so i didn’t cry. then i walked home and wrote in my notes app. i’ve so far changed out of my school clothes, put my homework out on the kitchen table, had a glass of solo, put my headphones on charge, watered my plants, fed the dogs, put on a gel shine top coat for my nails, and put more lipstick on. once i finish this sentence i can say i have written an entry, too

you’re as blessed as a child’s cat roaming the oleander-forest

may 22nd, 2024

time does not exist with [redacted]; we always get exactly where we need to be in exactly the right amount of time whenever we are together. we did go on our walk this morning. i rolled out of bed, put my shoes on, and we left. but we woke up a bit too late, and didn’t quite get to see the sun. we met four elderly people at the look-out, and then we decided to get coffees from the juice-place down the road. (except we don’t drink coffee, so i got a hot chocolate, and she got a chai latte). as we walked, we looked at all the houses and decided our favorites and the ones that would look like our future dream houses. we talked a lot about how cold it was. this morning felt very nice. i so like being with her. we could be anywhere and i’d be okay as long as it was with her and we were like we always are. i took my shellac off last night in her bathroom so that she could paint my nails this morning, so after we walked back to her house, we got ready pretty quickly — i stuffed around with her makeup and ate a cheese toasty — and then she painted my nails a very bright red. we did the first coat at the dining-room table, then got in the car with her grandma and she took us to school. i have decided as of today that i will start reading the news, because i had a very interesting conversation with [redacted]’s grandma about what was going on, and i want to be well-informed. we sat outside on one of the lunch table’s and [redacted] did my second coat. they dried fairly well. i took her to class, and then i did french in the pod. i went to maths, and decided to go home so i’d miss french and science. mum picked me up, and i showed her my leather jacket, and told her all about yesterday. she started work, and i went back to doing french. i wrote something about the war going on in new caledonia, and i drank tea. i need to eat something. i have been forgetting too often lately, and eating just a little bit makes me feel full. it’s very weird, and it’s why having a day on the weekend off from the meds is helpful. i just posted some writing, and now i need to work on [redacted]’s birthday present and eat something and not throw up and not get a headache and not have anxiety and go on the dog walk and finish everything i’ve ever started and then it might all be okay!

hey, there. i do love you. i do think we’re friends

may 21st, 2024

hey, there! my misery is gone. i am not soulless; i just needed my imaginary friend back. [redacted], if you read this, i love you infinity — you are across the room from me and you are very tired in your bed

i am a mentor, apparently. as of today i am something i have always wanted to be. i am [redacted]. i am the full circle moment. i am something that others want to be. this is perhaps the most astounding. and yes, i love them all! this small following of unbroken (but precious) children that are looking for a safe landing, i will be it and more for them. but it has been a weird twenty-four hours. [redacted]’s little brother, sibling, sister, sister, sister, sister — sister, is deciding to transition. we are very close and very similar. i took her out for milkshakes this afternoon, after her grandma picked us up from equip, and we talked about the fact she has decided to use my name, and how she feels about everything. this is not so interesting, but i didn’t mind being interrogated; she was very intensive and assertive and questioning of me and i could not understand why until we came back to her house, and she told me she was sorry if what she was going to say was weird, but that she wants to be me. i did not say a whole lot after that. i ate dinner very quietly and when [redacted] came home we tried on her mum’s clothes; i scored a $600 vivienne westwood leather jacket for free. it feels very illegal. we retreated to her room, and sat outside on the cold balcony in a rug and smoked weed and i relayed to her what [redacted] had told to me. nothing damning; i did not break confidence, or say anything she did not already know. but i felt very weird and different. i love to sit and talk to [redacted]. she is the entire universe when she is sitting beside me. we both agreed that our life is only a movie when we are together, and the rest of it is some kind of strange filler. i felt very grateful that i don’t feel like my whole life is like that. [redacted] smells like the back of the person you love most’s neck, except everywhere. each time you are breathing the same air as her, you feel like you are being embraced by her entire body

we are going to go on a walk tomorrow morning to see the sun. i am going to make peppermint tea and try to fall asleep

sorry for feeling sorry about being sorry -- what do i do!?

may 20th, 2024

i woke today with news that a submission i sent had been rejected from a very prestigious poetry literary journal. they do other things, too; art and film. i really wanted this one. i submitted some prose and some poetry. both were rejected. i also found that some poetry i’d put on tik tok on a whim last night had blown-up. i think i am going to use the account as a full-time writing log. i have nothing else to do with it, and it gives me something to put the recently miserable energy into. i got ready in a rush because my mother said she’d take me to school, and it’s nicer than taking the bus. i wore lipstick, but ate it all off mostly by the end of lesson one. it’s been so dry. i ate two pieces of toast for breakfast, one with almond butter, and the other with golden-coloured jam. it tastes a lot like how i imagine marmalade probably tastes. i’ve been giving more thought to my host family situation. the house seems big, and it says i have my own room there. if things are ever bad, i am going to take their dog for a walk around the neighborhood; there are fields and fields past the house, so there will always be somewhere new for me to go. if it’s too cold, i am going to stay in bed and journal. in french, i read my book and the relief teacher got mad at me. in pod i did french, and went through some more A1 nouns and articles. i finished the list that kwiziq gave to me. at lunch, i sat with [redacted], and [redacted], who cried after signing-in at student services because she’s broken her foot, and she can’t play basketball anymore. we were all cold, and i forgot to eat my lunch. in maths, after lunch, i felt bored. i had to sit at a different table than i normally do, because somehow the whole table was full today (even though it never is), and i couldn’t see who had replaced my seat. the work we did today was very easy. in action project, i sat outside to write. i lied and said i had an assignment to do, so i got to miss the second-half of the pitch presentations which was a delight. i have listened to simulation swarm by big thief about fifty times today

i went to vinnies after school and bought a vintage designer sheer delicate burgundy button-up-at-the-back while i waited for my mum to get me. since we got home, i’ve been writing in bed, waiting for her to come in and ask for help walking the dogs. i know i won’t write this later tonight if i don’t do it now. i’ve got french to do tonight, and then i might write something in my journal. i’ve had a boring day, and i feel both unsettled and stressed about the state of things. i feel uncomfortable, and not like myself. doing regular things results in me really longing for my potent abstraction from normal activities (the self i am usually). but sometimes i need to function, and i should get used to that

bankrupt busy-body

may 19th, 2024

today i did not take my medication, and i stayed indoors. i didn’t feel like leaving the house. not even to take rory out. i simply lay around and re-watched old episodes of tv shows i’ve had previous obsessions with. i didn’t feel sorry for myself, but i felt pretty down about the state of things. i didn’t listen to any music today. and i felt bad being on my phone. my lips were dry and i did not get up to put vaseline on them, even though it was in the bed-side drawer right beside me. i just felt very pitiless. no energy for anything severe. i did do maths homework for an hour in the afternoon, which was good of me. i finished it all today. but i did no french. and i ate a lot even when i wasn’t hungry. because i did not have any proper meals. i lay in a position today that i will attempt to describe. i was horizontal on the bed with my ear to my pillow, and my knees pulled up to my chest, and i had my laptop also on it’s side and the keyboard right up beneath my chin so that the screen was merely inches away. i had the rest of my gum (what was left in the packet)

maybe this was what i can only describe to you as unfortunate. i’ve recently taken a turn away from the important things in my life, because the constant reminder feels too difficult. why should i remind myself to continue striving for happiness? why should i at all? the world doesn’t devastate me but life does. i can’t find belief in anything most days except for myself, and should i be righteously self-absorbed? should i pretend my superiority is not? is it anyway? what measures what? i’ve been laying horizontal but i feel vertical. the system i have in place to decide where i am is one of feeling. i tell myself this, but is it only illogical to represent one side of the equation? is it illogical to side with prosperity? and should i side with the poverty, the stark nakedness of misery, the side of saturn where the ring is a blade? is it a blade everywhere? the only truth to me is the ugly — but what a disgusting way to live. only seeing the deficiency and want; searching for reason behind hunger rather than accepting starvation as a part of life and cause of natural death. my goal for so long has been seeing the lack-there-of joy to create more. i have accepted a long time ago i will never eliminate the side of the wall i am on; the one of distress and necessity, but with work i am able to build a great ladder and sit on the fence, and take in both sides. does this ever happen? could this be possible for me? how do i do it, when i feel so miserable so often? it often feels like my work has me bankrupt

a detailed account of life lived in desperation

may 18th, 2024

i have felt very spent lately. i talked to my friend about it, but there isn’t so much i have to say. other than i know that it’s winter, and the dryness is making me unpleasant to be around. i get so upset when i’m disagreeable. all i want is to be nice. i think. today i woke and rolled out of bed late and sent [redacted] home. i cleaned my room and lit my candle and i returned to civility mostly. but i was plain and boring. i got dressed and looked at myself in the mirror, and i did homework for hours. french and maths. not much maths. too much french. i decided to go to the city and buy books. before i left, i washed my face and put bright lipstick on and oils in my hair. i sprayed perfume on my neck and wore a billowy blouse and a black -pleased mini-skirt that i normally wear to work. i bought four books at the store, but i felt very awkward walking around (more than usual) and i felt like everybody was staring at me. i didn’t bring a big enough bag, so i had to carry my books home underneath my arm. i started reading one of them on the bus back. the edible woman by margaret atwood. so far, it’s boring. but marget atwood wrote in her introduction that she wrote it with a strange fascination in symbolic cannibalism, specifically with women, and at some point the main character falls in love and cannot eat anything. i am waiting for that to come up. when i came home i undressed and ate at the kitchen table, little things. then i did more homework, and lay on the bed with my laptop. i felt very gloomy in the evening, when theo made us dinner. he gave me a glass of vodka with tropical punch juice. we finished uncut gems from ages ago. i thought about tomorrow, and i meditated with a cup of tea on my floor, then i cried real hard. i lay on the bed and listened to billie eilish’s new album. i replayed a few songs a couple of times, then i wrote in my journal and terrorized myself. i took my old razor and dragged it along the inside of my thigh a couple of times, but i didn’t much feel like it, and actually it bored me a little bit. i enjoyed looking into the mirror after, and then i collapsed onto my bed and sent [redacted] several messages

the rest of life is going to endure the rest of me

may 17th, 2024

[redacted] is asleep and i’ve woken up in the middle of the night. i planned to write tomorrow morning, but i’m seizing the opportunity now. my brain is on. i’ve felt bad all day, really. things have become dull and tedious again, but i am doing much better at pretending not to worry so much. except last night, after my mum and i watched tv, i went to my bedroom and planned to write, but instead i couldn’t stop staring at the wooden frame of my fireplace and wondering who will live in my house next, and not know that i stared at the same spot on the wall as them? i want that kind of thing to matter so much. i get very hung up on it. what you think seems to not be very real, actually. when you can’t say the things out loud the room is very quiet but i am always bursting. recently i haven’t been. recently i’ve just simply been sad. today i wandered around the hallways looking for a place to sit down and breathe but there were none. the world is just never empty. everybody is always alive. time is always continuing. i am lying to you now, because what made me cry last night and what is making me cry so intrinsically and violently recently is death. it is a topic so over-done and apparently not worth thinking about that my mind has avoided it my whole life, but now it’s causing me to go into bouts of great hysteria, almost. i am so full of dread. i wrote once that life is a waiting room for death (which of course i’m sure has already been written, but that’s besides the point), but that can’t be true. some people think the opposite of life. but i simply don’t have faith in life. [redacted] who is sleeping beside me sent me a message today that was simply “i just feel like nothing matters”. we’ve been playing trouble in my backyard all night, drinking big glasses of water and watching movies, and it’s put her to sleep. again, how could it be that that doesn’t matter? that beauty and attentiveness is so easily put aside, and that difficult things are so disturbing we won’t speak about it, and so we let the fear build? everything is backwards. doing french at the kitchen table and drawing until midnight is not going to get me out of this mess, so how does it ease it? nothing i can do can ever be worthy of the absurdity that is my being here, so how do i compete for what we won’t know forever, but is my eternity?

that's one dream

may 16th, 2024

i got my host family today! just this morning. i didn’t ever consider how truly kind of weird this whole process is - it’s really like i’m being adopted. they (the parents) are only thirty-six. there are two children, a boy who is nine, and a girl who is six. i want so badly for them to like me! it seems they had to have liked me just a little bit to choose me. i had the day off today, too, for parent-teacher conferences, and to talk about my eif identity product. so for the rest of the day, i did homework, for french and action project, and i’ve been laying in bed freaking out about the whole thing. i could tell you a lot, but i figure you don’t really care. when have i ever cared about you caring, though? you read it, anyway! i sent [redacted] a few emails back to communicate, and i am downloading whatsapp again so things are quicker, but i’m actually a little nervous. i am entirely at their disposal. to think last night i dreamed of death! they seem to live in the middle of nowhere, in a tiny town that is at the very top of france, and close to germany

i called [redacted] this morning when i found out, and we talked about how when she’s over in her small german town, because it will be at the same time, we could meet up somewhere. we called for an hour, and i ate breakfast. it was a sesame seed bagel with almond-butter. i watched [redacted] squeeze oranges into a glass, then i showered and washed my hair, even though it’s the wrong day for it; it felt too gross not to wash. then i sat down and did homework for the rest of the day. after i finish writing, mum and i are going to start the new season of bridgerton with the pizza we ordered from up the road and then i am going to crawl quietly into bed and read something for the first time in a little under a week. mum went into the school today to deliver one of her workshops for the year twelve mentors, and she had quite a few of my teachers. she said that after she’d given a speech about self-care, when she was leaving, she saw my maths teacher sitting outside on the oval looking up at the sky

maybe what i am looking for is a u2 song

may 15th, 2024

i feel very unexcited about things going on in my life right now. i don’t know what is causing me exactly to feel this way, but i have an inkling it has something to do with [redacted]. and why have i still not found what i am looking for? the short answer to this question is because i am fifteen, and i don’t even know life yet. but i’m trying really hard to keep myself awake. i mean, look at me. have you seen me? i think about things. i write them down. i try to do my best. i wake up and i get up. i go to bed and i fall asleep. i shower and i don’t let the water run for too long. i brush my teeth for two minutes in the morning and two minutes in the evening. i do things on impulse and i act with integrity. i am independent but i know who i love. but i still haven’t found what i’m looking for. and i need to play that song, so i will. i almost want to cry. do you know when you want to turn away from the page in your book and let a deep sigh out into the pillow just to feel that exploding warmth all through your face? then turn back and find you’ve let go of the book? and i am waiting one day to dust the blades on my fan, and to not look at my phone every chance i get. i just can’t look at her without feeling gut-wrenching pain in my chest. it would help if we could be in the same room together without the sounds of other people going by, and it would be helpful if we could relax into the silence, instead of telling ourselves to relax. it would be okay one day if maybe i didn’t cry when she started to, or felt happy only when she was. if i blink now i am going to start a new fresh life where i don’t need to worry about things like the clothes thrown into a pile on the chair in the corner of my bedroom, or why i always felt so nauseous

everyone has been making me feel angry. everybody is such a fool. do you not have any self-respect? looking at me for the answer? looking at me to tell you what you’re trying to give? if i knew, i’d probably have left by now anyway. everybody is making mistakes. and i fucking hate it. it’s not humbling. it’s not amusing. it’s not an experience at all. because the mistakes are basic. they are mistakes i made when i was ten and a half. i feel like screaming at people all the time. in my last lesson today, i almost had a nervous breakdown, because i forget often that some people don’t have the skills to write a script for a fucking pitch about food waste. i have to re-write the script and edit the slides and put in extra work now for people that i could not give less of a shit about, so that they reap the benefits. it’s not like action project means anything to me, anyway. if i pass or don’t, it doesn’t matter. what matters is that they can’t write a script, and that they have indecently low communication skills between the two of them. it’s disgusting. yes! that’s it. i’ve been walking around and feeling disgusted by people, even the ones i like. what is this phenomenon? and why can some people not do anything by themselves? have i been sheltered from such vile people all my life, and so i am only now discovering them? i feel as if i’ve come up from under a rock. i am seeing some people as they really are; deserving of kindness but not deserving of any respect. i want to quite smoking, but i don’t want to quit doing weed. this is all so mundane and so pointless. what do i do? what do i do? where do i go to? is there something i’m missing anyway? what have i done if not tried to combat this feeling all my life? it’s not nice or ugly. it’s nowhere in between. and it’s not worth feeling

if you have cancer, i’m going to fucking kill you

may 14th, 2024

language of the present-future

may 13th, 2024

i'm on my bedroom floor and i had a bad day. my favourite colour is green and yours is i don't know what. i'm a little high, and i am eating the sandwich that i didn't eat at lunch. but i want to do a good job at recounting today's events. i woke up late, and had to rush to wash my hair. it's something i don't even really remember doing. and i didn't have much time to look at myself naked in the mirror this morning, which messed up the whole day maybe. monday i save for physical self-actualization. i am body dysmorphia's worst nightmare. i could draw my body perfectly without using a reference, probably even with a concussion. if i shut my eyes right now and thought real hard i might be able to think of all the worst and best places. i know where needs to be put to rest (my upper-arms, my cheeks, my neck), where's just okay (my ribs, my hands and wrists, and my lips), and where i love more than anything else (my eyes, my breasts, and my legs). i put on my uniform and got breakfast, then mum drove me to school. a teacher gave me a late slip, which apparently i needed to hand in to the pod at lunch and stay there, but i ripped it up and put it in the bin as i walked away instead. i had action project and felt so sorry for myself, so i read a little bit. i talked to [redacted] about her sixteenth party at recess. it sounds exciting. i am going to get very drunk before, though. parties make me so fucking anxious for no reason, and i don't want to ruin it for her. i had maths after. it was such a long lesson, and there was a lot of content. but i got it. i hate that i can never grasp concepts that easily. i can't just see something and know what to do, like i need to really practice before i understand and can apply it. and at lunch i felt miserable talking to [redacted]. she's not a bad person at all, but we are both so self-centered and... i don't think we really care about each other that much. i think we're both so self-reliant and we are not in any way dependent on each other that it makes it hard for us to be level and grounded when we talk. i'm not explaining this right, but basically there is a thread missing between us. in science we did a practical experiment. i love my teacher so much. and french was actually good today, which was surprising, because, you know... but! now i'm high, and all my candles are lit. everything's better now, because it's taken care of, and i don't need to be uncomfortable or think too hard about tomorrow. i just need to rest, and then i'll be good again

can you see me? across the room? i made a video that i want you to see, but i won't put it anywhere. i swear. let's have a staring contest until we start to see eye-to-eye. where's our blunt we'll never share? have you met my daughter yet? did you ever have one like we said? did you ever find me lying face-down in the bathroom at the party, and did you need to take me home? did i ever get tired of being treated like a commodity? i'm getting tired of writing. does this mean i'm bad at it? do i do something else with my life? with what? out of what? who is going to stand at the door and wait for me to decide except for my silhouette in the mirror, or my shirt pulled up and the water running? who is going to say it like i do? like all the people that could say it better, if only they knew the language

mother's day

may 12th, 2024

worked all day today. 7:45am until 4pm. i thought it wouldn't end but it always does. my hair was okay today, and i did my makeup as extra protection. i said some embarrassing things on my shift, but i made all the mistakes i thought i would (that i do every time). at least i can normally run away to the back. there's someone at my work who i want to hit with a frying pan. she's nice enough though. on my break i texted [redacted] to see if we could hang out, but after work she said no, because she had too much homework. i lay in bed watching desperate housewives until the evening instead. theo made pina coladas, and dad made steak. i don't remember what we talked about. mum and i went to watch mother's day but we had to stop because the script was so bad. i decided to go back to my room and play the sims, because i rarely do anymore. i have nothing to read that i'm excited about reading. i don't want to go to school tomorrow. i'm too tired, and i don't want to see anyone

drunk and crying again

may 11th, 2024

my dad tells me what to do if and when he gets dementia; when he starts to forget me and himself. i cry about my dreams alone on the floor. all of the big ones, when i walk down the street clutching my dog's long blue lead in the dark, i can imagine coming home truthful. when i watch mum in the lounge-room on the brown leather couch as she does not meet my eyes i just can't help but be madly in love with her. when rory and i lay horizontal on the bed together and i spoon her, kiss the back of her furry head i have never been more close to tears. it is hard and i lay in bed because it is so hard; so hard i don't want to see anything that might make me happy. but you get home and we drink on the front porch 'til we're drunk and i'm screaming at you about the doritos we don't have, until i cry into my palms because i can't take it anymore. the good or the bad. bed-rest and patting my own head, returning for dinner to drink more red wine. i don't remember. i don't remember. we talk about things; we watch her. she won't. she won't. do we actually say anything at all?

turns out i don’t have all that much to say

may 10th, 2024

today i skip the final two lessons of school to get high and a little drunk with my childhood best friend in my bedroom and we play five games of uno together; i win most of them. i get properly drunk that night with my dad and while we walk the dogs i tell him about the girl i have a sudden crush on when we are far away. we go out to dinner with my brother and have more red wine and some thai food. we talk about the war. my dad says “thank you”. today i feel worried about what’s to come and who i am going to be, because everybody seems to bore me lately

i would rather die than admit to any beauty

may 9th, 2024

what a complicated day. once you hear about all the people i’ve been in a matter of ten hours you will understand why i’m so frightened and delighted with and by myself. it’s the afternoon now, and i’m at the dining table with all my homework beside me, and a whole lot of other things to do. rory is at my feet, telling me it’s time for dinner and a walk. i have promised her that in fifteen minutes i will get her some food. all of my entries turn into love letters to myself and to you, to you is a matter of great importance, for i’m not sure i know who is listening most or any of the time. you is to me, transcendent and dying me, and to you is to you. i speak for every self in the world when i say that you know a great deal who you are. i am just trying to get your attention, when i say that i want you to understand; my life is no bigger tragedy than i make it out to be be seen as. i am writing with as much neutrality as i can bear. bare? without going mad

i was late to school and did maths and french in pod beside [redacted], who tells us every time we are there that she is going to drop out as soon as she can, and work full-time. i hope she doesn’t do that. she is ridiculously smart. but that is not my choice to make. for french i practiced memorizing prepositions of place. i’ve forgotten how to memorize ever since i stopped doing acting, so it’s been a bit of a struggle. rory is so hungry; i wish you could see her. i can’t keep giving her dinner this early, though. at recess, i ran into [redacted] and he tried to pick my lock, because i got a blue-lock on my locker (somebody stole my lock last term and i still haven’t found it). my school does it as a punishment every so often for not having a lock on your locker, which seems a bit counter-intuitive for some reason, but oh well. he couldn’t do it, so i ended up just putting my things in [redacted]’s locker, and i’ll sort it out tomorrow. after break, i went to leap. everyone worked on their mind-maps for eif, but i’d already finished, so i started on my identity product. i just stole an old self-interested poem i wrote a few months ago and put it in there. then in the transition to science, i began down a philosophical and nihilistic youtube rabbit-hole. i started with a video of a man talking about how it feels to approach death. he says that there is no reason for it, and there is no logic to comfort you. i watched a couple of videos on self-awareness, a man who wrote the book of disquiet, and dostoevsky’s life. i had to go outside to reconnect with nature, and here is a short bit of prose or something i wrote while i was out on the oval doing so;

i go outside to see the beauty of life but it is too bright for me to see. i squint my eyes and try to be just enough to feel everything you spoke of. i felt you in the dark. it was just us. you asked for me to consider and you would hear of it all later on. but i know you didn’t mean it. the air is dry here. but still? to die instead of breathe. i don’t think i could decide. when will the bomb come? when will you know what i am? when is it going to be over, and what was that like for you? how much longer will i be sub-man? subjected to oblivion. i am looking for everything in the threads of being, but it seems to unravel just before i can quite grasp it. i am losing all purpose beneath thought. have i been doing it wrong?

[redacted] and i hung out at lunch, after i left science and took a break from my mini existential crisis. i gave her half my sandwich and we imagined about the young girls in front of us. we have decided we will learn to clone ourselves one day, so our friendship can live forever, and so that we will have two equally cool people to hang out with every day. it’s a lonely existence when you’re so much in favor of one person. why would i talk to anyone else? i know they won’t get it like [redacted] will. an unfortunate blessing, a fortunate curse? the latter sounds more right. we were going to our classes, but decided it would be more fun to sit down in front of [redacted]’s locker and talk to each other. that’s what we did. we sat crossed-legged over the top of each other’s thighs and laughed so hard we collapsed in a choking pile. then i went to well-being and had a heated debate with one of the counselor’s about the existence of god. jesus christ, i cannot talk to to christian people without feeling aggravated. i don’t know what it is about this specific religion that gets people so riled-up. everything is “a hypothetical” with christians, because when you ask an intelligent and thought-out question that they don’t have the answer to, they revert to something stupid and unrealistic. anyway. she had to leave early for a doctor’s appointment, so it wasn’t much of a chat. i went to english and started reading helen keller’s autobiography. but the environment was wrong, and i felt hateful, so i left the classroom and went to [redacted]’s class instead. she was in the middle of a mental breakdown, so i sat down on her chair and watched her class with her. there are so few pleasures in life, but watching her teach is one of them. the desire i have to express to you who [redacted] is and the immense beauty she brings to my life is something i can’t ever explain. if you knew her, and if you really wanted her to know you, you’d get it. there is something so tangible about her that other people don’t have. when her class finished, one of her student’s came up to me to say, “i wanted to tell you that i think you’re really pretty, and i love your hair.” i didn’t know what to do, so i gave her a hug and thanked her, and i asked her a few questions about herself. i told her to come up to me in the hallway any time. then i stayed and talked to [redacted] for our weekly after-school chat. i wish i could understand it myself. i wish so much. i want to tell her so much. and you so much, because i know you’ll be reading this someday soon enough. so i want to tell you that i know about you

i know that you cry because you are so in love with the world; i cry because i am there to witness it. once upon a time this joy has been lost on us, but here it exists and it has so much to give. we give belonging a new name in this classroom. i have never before seen someone cry with such euphoria. “i feel fucking crazy,” you say, but i can’t help but smile when your eyes go red. i know you’re not! now, i know it. you’re not. you’re just more human than me. than anyone could know. please, show us all. you cry because i tell you that i think you will be a good mother. you cry harder because you agree with me. i want to see you like this forever. just you and me, stripped of all our rights to hate any more goodness. infinite love, in possibility there is. you tell me, “this is the best kind of tired”. i want to believe it. the kind of tired that comes from you. i want to believe we are here, and i can make you breathe like you deserve to. you do, you do, you do. don’t you? your madness is beautiful. i am inspired. we get lost in each other again. how i love you at all times, at any cost; despite the spite of still being strong enough to look at each other without folding in. can happiness last forever? can i hold onto this moment and make it last just a few more minutes, even? will i announce inevitability like it’s a folklore; have you seen me yet? dressed-up in the pub telling you that “dreams really do come true”. have you known me before birth? and i you? love can spill out overnight; i feel it soaking the sheets. in i with you, bliss ignites deep inside trapped airways. could i breathe without knowing your pressure? your firm gaze? your consciousness and affection? no. no, not any longer

another day of trying to try

may 8th, 2024

i am happy [redacted] slept over last night. i was surprised that she wanted to. the power was out this morning and the bus i take to school wasn’t running because of a crash on that road, so we had to walk to school, and we were late. but it was okay. we lay in bed and listened to gratitude meditations, then listened to kate bush in the bathroom when we put on our makeup. i nearly forgot to take my meds. we also met [redacted] in the morning, too, because she didn’t have a lesson. [redacted] forgot her test this morning, so she had to retake it in the pod. i powered through action project and at recess i found [redacted] again so i could catch her up about my thoughts in the previous hour. we also got to talk to [redacted] about me going on exchange, and him and [redacted] going to europe later in the year. he is incredibly bubbly and extraverted and it baffles me that he is friends with who he is friends with. i had maths, got some homework, which is fine. it seems easy and i’m going to do it after i publish this. at lunch i nearly had a nervous breakdown in front of [redacted], who is stressed enough as it is, but i complained to her about the situation with [redacted], and how i feel pretty awful and delusional but also my savior complex is taking form at a new angle. had french. recovered a bit. bro, i don’t know. there’s something in the air. i got an anxiety rash all over the left side of my face just sitting in that class. i feel so physically sick about not being able to help her in any way. what do you do when all you want is for a person to be happy, because they literally deserve it more than anybody else in the entire world, but they don’t make themselves happy? like, what can i do to show them that i think they’re deserving of an unattainable amount of love? because i try, but it never seems to work. let me know when you figure it out. we got into our oral test revision, so i should start some of that tonight as well. in science i got lazy and did some more of the work that i could’ve saved for later so that i didn’t need to pay attention to science, and it was kind of a viable excuse as well. i hung out with [redacted] after school and we went to the otr and got slushies while she waited for her mum. i thought i could outsmart the buses and the literal fucking roadwork so i wasted an hour of my life trying to get two buses that never came, getting on the third bus, not listening to the driver when he said he’d need to re-direct us straight to the city and off the regular route, freaked out when we diverted, and had to get another different bus home from the city. so, an hour gone. i’m just happy my headphones didn’t die. i don’t know about today. this morning i felt boring, and as if i needed to do something a bit out there so i didn’t feel so normal; i just felt unsurprising. and i hate that. i still kind of feel like that. i wrote a poem before though, and i think it’s kind of okay. i feel discouraged from writing online lately any more than this. i think i’m going to get drunk and do my french homework now

we used to know each other

may 7th, 2024

today has made me realize that life is going to be both extraordinarily painful and prolonged for me, but i am special enough to make the pain pleasurable. let me explain to you the three things i’ve experienced from today that factored together mean that this is true

number one: at lunch today nobody showed up to the club. [redacted] ate her sandwich and stole me chocolates from two different rooms. and in the hallway outside [redacted]’s office i realized that i am never going to become her as long as i have her in my life. it’s a lie that you turn into the people you love. you turn into the manifestation of all their best parts, and it means that you can see their worse bits a little better. that’s okay. it makes them brighter, and you love that about them. but it’s okay to feel hateful sometimes. i know that i love her with every little thing inside me i am capable of exposing, and i know she does too, and i know we show each other, but i know that also sometimes being with her makes me feel physically ill because we’re face-to-face with what we should and shouldn’t be. and you should never look in the mirror that long. the reason i want her to be so happy is because i want to believe i could be happy, too. sometimes i don’t understand her. but she doesn’t understand me either. we don’t want to, because we’re so alike it would be agony to tell any real truths about ourselves to ourselves. it’s why we lie to each other all the time. it’s why at the door she apologizes and insists i am going to be okay, and she tells me she loves me, and it’s why at the door i have to walk away. this is factor one from today, because as long as i know this to be true, i am going to have her in my life for a very long time, and the absolute joy and strangeness of it is going to nearly kill me. but without her i will die too, and in any case, in much more pain

number two: i had equip after school for an hour. i don’t know what else to say about it other than the fact that it’s nothing like what i had in mind. i don’t really know what i imagined anyway, but it wasn’t that. it’s not bad. it seems positive. but i felt ashamed and this bring me to point two, that i am never going to belong anywhere to a large network that is already made. i mean by this a clique that has already been invented, or a system in society that i do not actively strive to remove myself from / participate in. my life is going to be a series of efforts to be who i need to be to go where i want to go, and i can do that, because it turns out i am ridiculously special. i had this idea that going to equip would be some kind of fairytale where i would meet at least one person who understood me, and who made me feel like i belonged. i hoped it wouldn’t be what it was. i have never been in a room of only neurodivergent people until today. the thing is that i can’t remember fitting in anywhere. the people i have access to, who want to be my friends, who could probably fit in somewhere for me, are not people i’m interested in; they are ordinary, spineless, appropriate, and measured. i thought coming to this group would be an awakening - “oh! these are my people” - but definitely not. it was not that. it only made me realize even more that i’m different. compared to lots of people i don’t have any problems. compared to the ordinary people in my life i am almost to much of a problem-zone to go near. it’s confusing and i don’t know where to sit at my own table. do i have too much of something or not enough? who wants me to kneel in front of their chair so they can play with my hair? who is so hideous i am enticed by them? this is factor two from today, because as i mentioned before, i’ve discovered i have something unusual. even if it’s not a talent or a craft, it’s a person inside of me who is going to stop at nothing to get me where i want to go

number three: life is going to be long and joyless for the most part; i will need to find people and things to indulge in and stay alive for. i have realized this from factor three; the car-ride home from the psychiatrist. i refuse to be a person on the street. i am going to refuse to behave for somebody else’s liking, because it serves nobody. i am going to be polite, but i am also going to be violent. i am going to be unserious, but i am also going be honest. i realized that i don’t want to say or do what people want from me. like, that i actually don’t want to do that, and that there is no tutorial or method for how to get there. sometimes people care, and sometimes they don’t. i care a lot, but not about this; not about being honest. i am a liar but i will tell the truth when it matters most. i have never looked someone in the eye and felt the need to hurt them, but i am a child, and i make mistakes. but they are not unreasonable. and they are never on purpose. this thinking makes me depressed, but it also makes me clever, and gives me the ability to break the self-insisted rules i know exist for me, but that are not necessary. since i know i am honest, i can lie sometimes. since i know i am kind, i can be hurtful sometimes. my actions i take responsibility for, because my intentions are only temporary and get lost along the way, but i am going to try and be sensible and sensitive

why am i telling you all this? because i want to believe that anything i got out from this day was worth something. i nearly lost my mind several times and i can’t dance with insanity just to stay silent on any kind of potential self-improvement. all i mean is that i want to be of use to you and to feed you now so that one day when you’re dying you won’t frown at me for not being a better person, because i really did try, [redacted]

sorting my life out / ignoring my overall state of being

may 6th, 2024

i am noticing more and more that i don’t breathe in the hallways at school. i get to my next class and i’m like fully heaving for air, and it’s not that i walk fast; i just literally am forgetting to breathe. my predictions were right - three of my nails have already broken so the gel is all fucked up. i just finished washing my hair, but i wore a beanie to walk the dogs so now the ends of my hair is dry and the top is flat and wet. i look like an old science professor who has such oily hair that it sort of always looks sopping wet at the top, and is in a mad outward frizz at the bottom. i did a lot of work at school today, even though i wasn’t feeling like being there and i came into the day dreading it. i was going to wake up early today, like i always do on mondays, to wash my hair. it’s my once a week hair-wash day. but i slept in too late and couldn’t, so i had to throw on my clothes and wash my face, do my makeup haphazardly and scoff breakfast. mum drove me to school which was nice of her. she’s not going to be here all week. she is in new castle visiting my nana. we went to get my birth control script at the pharmacy before school started today, and then i hugged her in the car and went to mentor group. boy was it awkward after the sleepover on friday. all i could think about was everyone in their pyjamas, in the opposite of a perverted and erotic way. just in a rather sad and unfortunate way. [redacted] wasn’t there for french today, and neither was [redacted], so we had the mean-looking kind of dubious greek relief teacher who has a bad french accent and thinks she’s fluent, and my table only had [redacted] on it. which was fine. i felt pretty done, though. there’s no point coming to french when [redacted] isn’t teaching. i did both things left for us to do, a translation task and a writing formative. after recess i had pod, and i did my eif mindmap, eif stands for exploring identities and futures, which is a leap thing, compulsory for sace. you have to complete it or else you don’t pass. it’s easy stuff, though. i just had to write about my values, my dreams, my career goals, my past, present, and future self, and connect it to my learning at school. the kind of thing the school loves to do. “yes, yes, you’re an extraordinary person who has achieved so much and likely will go on to do incredible things, but why do you like [redacted] high school?” it’s good, though. i have fun doing that sort of thing

at lunch i was hanging out with [redacted] when [redacted] came over to us kind of stumbling, and she told us she didn’t feel well. i immediately remembered her before asking me for a pad. she’s got endo, so i was pretty worried. she told me she’d forgotten to take her pill the night before. me and [redacted] took her to well-being, which was beneficial because i got to show [redacted] how useless the lady at the front desk was. i told her i needed to bring my friend in, because she’s got endo — she’s in a lot of pain, is what i was saying, and she just stares at me dumbfoundedly, blinks a couple times. i say, “so, can we have a room?” and then asked for a cup of ice. when i was self-harming they told me to use ice because it’s a strong sensation, so i was trying to be helpful and get her something to distract from the pain. the front desk lady stares at me after i’ve been going on for multiple seconds explaining and goes, “i can’t hear you. so many noises around,” and makes no effort to lean forward and listen. at this point i was pretty fed up and just said “A. CUP. OF. ICE. THANK YOU.” and showed [redacted] into well-being myself. we calmed her down a bit, but she was crying and in a lot of pain still. we managed to get her to call her mum. she signed out at student services and got in an uber home. i went to my new maths class! pre-methods. but i felt like the smartest person in there. i was so worried i wouldn’t understand the content. i was nodding my head the whole time. it felt like we did nothing the whole lesson. in fact, i was bored. some kid in the class was taking the piss and getting our poor teacher to explain really basic content that he already understood so that we wouldn’t move on from the topic. i fucking hate people like that. my last class was action project. i had nothing to do, so i coded some of the archive and watched some youtube videos. the girl beside me was trying to catch a glimpse at what i was editing; some old entries. as much as i love that this is anonymous, sometimes i feel lonely not being able to talk about how much time and effort i put into this. i took the bus home and found a dead cockroach on my bed, which was a nice surprise. i got rid of it, and as i already mentioned, took a shower, washed my hair. i wrote for about thirty minutes, then i gave the dogs their dinner and theo helped me to walk them. he’s got a lot on his plate at the moment and it actually makes life sound a lot easier, which is somehow nice to hear about rather than self-loathing and the “you should do more!!” kind of thing. i’ve put quiche in the oven and now i’m just waiting for my dad to get home, so i can finish my maths homework, eat, and hopefully if he lets me, have a glass of wine with him

does distraction aid recovery from accidentally foretelling one’s own fate?

may 5th, 2024

i’ve spent this weekend distracting myself from what is coming my way, what is pre-destined and not worth this time, but time is going to be up anyway, and i have to do something; i am choosing to bite my tongue and hope for the best. something that’s not even worth giving the time of day over but that i dread. all is pointless when you live inside yourself so thoroughly, but i worry there is no other way for me to live now that i’ve seen this side. how can i ever go back to negligence and the failure to observe? i worry over things nobody else cares about; things that objectively don’t matter. not like the women in my family worry, either. it is not excessive, but it is always there as a fallback thought option. i don’t want anyone to talk to me when i get like this, but i need the distraction of another audience and voice. that day is approaching faster than ever. am i letting go a little or am i so persistent that i would never know anyway? my eyes are tilted behind me, at the future, but suddenly they’ve had a change of heart; i’m wavering to what’s in front of me. the only clear past. i can’t stop thinking about what i’ve been doing to you and to everyone. love is a very mean thing. it makes you mean and generally awful and greedy and vain and twisted and all around you feels only dark but limitless the same. does what i say make sense? i can’t track what’s been going on as well as i used to. all that’s in front of me is what’s already been; i’m starting to see things as if they’re one big circle. when i shut my eyes the anxiety you told me to imagine as a ball of light in my neck is branching out and turning into a sphere that cups my skull. i have to be detached to tell you all this or i might go crazy. i am losing the thread. i am undoing my good work. i am making room for something better; something more hideous but better nonetheless. sometimes i feel as if i only exist to hear you call me by my childhood nickname and to imagine your voice when i cannot sleep; can this also be already known? it must be. somehow everything i’m just finding out to be true has always been breathing beneath my lying living body. i am worried i’ll grow out instead of up. and i am worried i will see you at the door in twenty years and still remember exactly who you are

sleePOVer at school. isn’t everything the coolest shade right now?

may 4th, 2024

woke up at school today. forgot to include that in the last entry. that’s what i did after i wrote that; packed my things and headed to school to sleep-over with my mentor group. felt like a joke, lying there this morning. [redacted] got cold in the morning, and we ate breakfast downstairs with everyone. [redacted] and i stood outside while i waited for my mum to get me, and we smoked a bit. she got very high from just a little bit of weed, and i was pretty concerned about leaving her to walk home, but somehow she got home fine. took a shower. felt shitty about yesterday. i was just awful. i feel just awful about it. i can’t even tell the days apart anymore. i want to forget about it; will you please forgive me please please please? i feel so terrible about it. i can’t even think without feeling nauseous. after the shower, i unpacked my things, then packed my bags for aldinga. mum and i decided to go, because we’ve got nothing on. dad was going to come too, but he has an event for work that means he drinks a lot of wine, so he’s staying to do that instead. to that i say fair enough. i really have to do my homework this weekend so it doesn’t pile up, but i know it will. i know i won’t do it. somehow i always get it done. i never get in trouble for not submitting; i never have. anyway. i went to the dentist, as well. the lady was pretty nice; she says i have perfect teeth. she also polished the chip in my front tooth off, because it was a little rough at the corner. it feels slightly better now under my tongue, but also just weird. i want it gone. there’s no point getting a filling. mum made polite conversation with the desk lady. nobody uses checks anymore. they both remember learning how to cash a check and so i watch them laugh about it

on the way home i felt really bad. almost as if i’d vomit. i came home and felt sorry for myself, lay down on my bed for a bit. mum and dad needed help bathing the dogs, so i bathed rory and took her out after. mum and i left pretty immediately after that, and i played her rise and fall of a mid-west princess by chappell roan, which she thought was awesome. it kept us very nourished for the car-ride. since we arrived i’ve been editing this archive and scrolling social media in attempt to distract from yesterday. soon mum and i are going to go out and look at the sunset, and then light a fire and watch something on tv. we’ve bought curry for dinner. i can’t imagine i’ll stay up late tonight, but if i do, it’ll be to write

the day i got so angry i singed someone else's skin (your skin)

may 3rd, 2024

things have been a little dark today. somehow i always find myself cyclical. i wish i had all the answers. i cried today about how i treat other people, but at the time i thought i was crying about how other people treat me. i was very anxious in class today and exploded in my last lesson. i upset someone i care about. in case she ever ends up reading this

this is what i meant to tell you today... i'm sorry for giving you that mean look when i left, when you were being so kind to me. i had to leave because your kindness gave me an allergic reaction, and otherwise i would have cried in front of you. i know that's okay, because you see me cry a lot, and i like to be vulnerable in front of you, but i felt as if i needed to be the bigger person today. but leaving just made things worse anyway. i should have stayed and talked. we both would have felt better. instead i behaved like an idiot. i tried to find you after to tell you how truly sorry i am for being such a cunt and for being anti-social and ignorant of your attempts to be inviting, but you weren't where i thought you'd be. i cried in your chair and picked up things that had fallen. i tried to make up for the anger and the anxiety by being kind to someone else. my selflessness is selfish. i needed to go home and drink a cold glass of water and get in the bath; not be at school today in that moment. i couldn't tell you that, so i said nothing and i shut down like i always do. i bit down on my lips and worried you a lot. and i hope you're over it. i hope you don't care that i did it. i hope you don't mind that i've been evil to almost everyone all week, and i've been doing it so that last year doesn't happen again. but instead i've made a monster of myself. i want you to know how sorry i am, and that it will happen again, because i'm growing and i'm changing and i love you. i want you to be so happy. i know i am a bad friend sometimes. i am difficult, at least. i tell you that i want you to take more time for yourself and to stop doing so much for other people, but i shove myself in your face and beg you to baby me. to please look after me. to show me love. to give and give and give. i try to give back, but sometimes i take too much all at once. i huff and puff and blow the house down. forgive me for today. i love you. i love you. i love you.

i don’t know what to do with myself when i do this to people. why can i not behave kindly almost ever? i lie about it. i need everyone to think of my otherness as a self-defense. my strangeness. why am i doing that? what does it mean? but it simply makes people worry, and think that i hate them. please never think that. i am so sorry for the way that i have treated you . if anybody knew everything i did we would never be like this; not with each other. you’d never love me like you do now. you’d never breathe me in like a sigh of relief. you could have choked me down before. i am simply the air you breathe now. but i can’t tell you how i did that. it’s too disturbing. it’s too dark and awful. you wouldn’t like to hear about it. because honestly what is disturbing is that i have forgotten. how i weighed you down and kept you to myself. i was posessive. oh, god. what have i been doing that you don’t know about? i need you all to remember me. will you please tell me about myself? will you please give me seven kisses again and tell me what each one means. is the baby dying? so the baby doesn’t die, please tell me what i mean by this; i want you as much as you possibly deserve ownership over my cravings, for it you do; yes, you do. forget about me until i am good again; it'll be another week before i smile at something pretty

smoking a blunt in the park with my long distance friend's ex-boything

may 2nd, 2024

title may be self-explanatory. i skipped first lesson with [redacted] and [redacted] to go to mcdonalds, which was actually so fine. i learnt a lot about [redacted], in particular. we are kind of similar, but also polar opposite. i think i made good impressions, but i never know what to do when i’m with people like that. we went to the park after though and [redacted] basically invited himself over the phone (i actually said he could come, because he said he had a blunt). but me and [redacted] got it to ourselves because the other two weren't smoking, so we caught up for a bit. i learnt he makes music. i don't listen to rap, because i hate rap music, but i think his tracks are actually pretty good from what i can tell. it's not the worst thing ever. my brother has listened to worse. we came back after recess, and i went to class. leap was good, aside from the fact i was still pretty high and zoning out every so often. i went to pod and did my maths homework. blasted through it, actually. a pod tutor helped me with it. after lunch, i went to english and art. if i’m being completely honest, i actually can’t remember that part of my day. i literally felt like i blacked-out. not that it was bad, or anything, but i just kind of was so relaxed i didn’t truly exist

on the bus home from school there was some annoying girls behind me (it wasn’t their fault, they’re just in seventh grade). they were making fun of an old guy who passed by. i dreamed of telling them to shut up, but of course i didn’t. i was tired, coming down, and pretty overall done-in after the day. i did my homework at the counter and then helped mum walk the dogs. we drank red wine in the kitchen together after, and then watched the crown. i had a weird-ass day today. a very normal one, though, oddly enough

non-monic quadratics

may 1st, 2024

it's may! and hey, i'm doomed. nothing has really been civil for a long time since i've been medicated and creatively inclined, for i've learnt the world is exciting and very alive; i also feel like a raging ball of fire that could propel itself at someone any given moment. after yesterday, i'm picking my battles. i'm explaining things. i'm giving you a little bit of myself hand-drawn. french this morning was cathartic. the classroom is my therapist's office and also my own personal hell. i can't decide anything. i am so distracted. i am trying constantly. i am being dismissed, roasted (literally, hell-like). but i always have the best time. i spent the break with [redacted], as if we hadn't caught up enough yesterday. she simple can't get enough of me. it's lovely! as i said, i'm doomed. she showed me a website for t-shirts that you can shop for based off mental illness categories. i had a nice interaction with my old english pre-service teacher. yesterday she made a strange kind of frown at me after school, but she saw me again during the break and came up to me to say, "hi; you probably thought i was frowning at you. i wasn't. i was actually going to come up to you to say hello and ask how your break was, but i was nervous, because you were talking to [redacted], so i just made a strange face at you. so know, i'm not mad at you; i just wanted to say hi." what a nice human being. i learnt [redacted]'s masters program is starting next week on tuesday, after school, and [redacted]'s little brother is gonna be there. so, that's kind of interesting. i had maths. they messed up my timetable, and the classes haven't changed yet - so i had to talk to someone about that. i needed to stay in my old class for this maths lesson, but they'll have moved me to methods by next lesson this week. i just did the mathsonline homework i haven't finished yet and got [redacted], the nice pod tutor, to help me out with a few things

at lunch, [redacted] brought us a picnic! what a nice word. picnic. it was fresh bread with cinammon and butter, a kiwi each, and french early grey tea. i've told her that i feel like i am learning to be around people in a way i haven't before, and that i can't tell if i'm becoming awful or if this is simply what happens when you shed old skin. i expect it's some kind of horrible mix. my last two lessons were art and action project. art has been treating me fine, and i made a break-through with my teacher! she is particularly inspirational, but i've tried explaining before that she is very self-sustaining and avoidant. i think she prefers boys. but today she seemed to think i was very smart and knew some things. i won't elaborate or it might destroy the image for me. and in action project, i carried! my team. on my back, i mean. i got us started on the pitch and everything. and we worked pretty well. i can't wait for it to end. god, it's such a terrible class. so fucking useless to me; i don't have the words. got the bus home. went to an op-shop and absolutely scored. i got two blouses; one is very thin from laura ashley, and the other is a bit more dressy. it's checkered black and white, and has a sinched waist, then it comes out like a bit of a skirt-thing beneath the ribs, so it brings me in and then out. i'll probably wear it a lot. but the grand-prize of them all is a red velvet dress-coat that i can ony describe as the kind of thing victorian children wore over their dresses in the cold winter weather. it's a child's size, but i manage to fit just fine. it looks lovely. and best of all, it had a few marks on it, so the op-shop volunteer reduced the price and gave it to me for only $5. it should be $60, honestly. and she gave me a book for free! de profundis by oscar wilde. mum was at her friend's house a few blocks away from our home when i started walking, so i came by and showed them my clothes. we talked about gold jewelry superiority and they finished glasses of white wine

in the evening i've been lonely and depressive and partly it's from extreme dehydration but mostly it's just from homework. i've managed to round up a shocking amount of homework from just two days in that ridiculous building. mostly it's the maths that's been knocking me down; i want to be good at maths but it takes so much time and effort for me. i can never understand it just as it is. i always need tricks and tools to help me comprehend what's even going on. but also french is rather exhaustive. it's a lot of cognitive overload, and like i've mentioned before, i feel bad that i am learning such basic grammar structures over and over again. of course it's the foundation of their language. i wouldn't be able to advance without it, but it's also a little discouraging. i've got art homework tonight, too, and the fact this archive isn't the way i want it to look is bothering me a lot. i need to find time to do all of the things that matter, but i'm so bad at instantaneously working them out, and planning of values is foolish. so maybe i'll never get anywhere. maybe i will stay rocking back and forth in a desk chair wondering what non-monic quadratics are

my digital diaries from july & august of 2024

august 31st, 2024

august 30th, 2024

sleep-deprived, flight to abu dhabi

august 29th, 2024

i’m on the plane; it’s all very normal now. you should have seen me this morning. i got onto the plane to melbourne and realized there’s nothing like it — anticipation and waiting around, and the combination — sitting stuck in your seat waiting for a life your left with only to build, abandoning a good one you loved, knowing you’ll come back for it, but how will it be then? [redacted] and i keep turning to each other and saying, “i’m so excited,” only to say within seconds, “i’m so nervous and sick,” and that must surely sum it up. i’m most nervous for school, but i have a rational feeling that it will stay constant. and i know it’s real. maybe that’s the most comforting part about all this. all my feelings are real, justifiable, sitting in me and i can ask them who they are, and they will answer. it’s a good feeling when you often feel crazy. of course, there are extreme feelings, but no. mostly, no. mostly i am ready for them, and i understand all the important ones; i discard the rest. there is too much going on for me to wait around, hoping they will leave. again, it’s nice. it’s horrifying and disturbing, but in the belly of the heat, there is underlying knowledge it’s going to be okay

last night

august 28th, 2024

this is my last night in my nice room. this is my last night in this bed, wanting things. this is my last night thinking about you here. this is my last night feeling the cord of the electric blanket through the sheet. this is my last night dreaming. this is my last night looking at the journals stacked on my bedside table and thinking, “what if this was a bad idea?” and being relieved in the morning, waking up here. it’s my last night struggling to fall asleep. it’s my last night crying and turning over. it’s my last night feeling guilty for looking at my mum in a vulnerable moment. it’s my last time being alone in this house. it’s my last night

making myself cry

august 27th, 2024

i imagined it like this, like an ominous doom that strikes eternal a wound i’ve never crossed before but i’ve seen in somebody’s eyes. i’m seeing it all before it’s happened. i’m crying on my bathroom tiles and it’s not enough because i’m not sad enough thinking how sad i’ll be, but i know i need to cry. if i don’t cry, it’ll be stuck between this void and the world

i know it’s pointless to cry. i know it’s worth nothing and everything from me, but that’s why i do it. it’s visceral and it’s all of me and none of you. this has nothing to do with the rest of the world. when you lay yourself down to cry, time goes away for you because it knows you need it. it’s spiritual and this heaving cannot be explained beyond want. i know it’s helpless. i know it fucks me to sleep. i know i leave a damn on the floor i shed skin on, but is it better than a movement behind the reckoning? is it beyond forgiveness and understanding? no, no, no. i just want to listen to the memories beating against one another

romanticism — be sad in france

august 26th, 2024

lots has happened today. i dealt with the [redacted] thing at school, by talking to [redacted] and sending a direct message to her, asking her to please cease all contact with me, as it was making me uncomfortable. it is funny how simple adults make things for you. it is funny that they are still right about everything. [redacted] replied to the message with a thumbs-up. i blocked her on everything else i could think of. [redacted] also let me try some of the mochi she made, which was very full-circle in a way, as i remember last year [redacted] pacing back and forth across the road by [redacted]’s car, waiting for her and i to finish talking and to be noticed. i remember that as she got into her car, she told me she would be making homemade mochi for the first time with the ingredients she’d bought that day. apparently she makes it a lot now. funny, i think, that i was eating it today as i reported her for harassing me online

after school, i also got very far with packing my bags. all that is left is some toiletries and my laptop, and any more books i can bear to take. now that my poetry account is no longer being stalked, i was also able to post on it today. some strange man is sending me dms and calling me “blue eyes” despite my name being in my username. grotesque as it may be, i find it strangely romantic

and i facetimed [redacted] on my bedroom floor, and showed her all my packing. she stress ate the entire call, which was impressive as well as concerning. then i texted my host mum about school, and clothing. she’s let me know that the first weekend is going to be completely diabolical. i arrive on friday morning, and on saturday is their little son’s birthday party which he is having with friends at the house, and sunday they have a family birthday for him. as well as the italian exchange student they are letting stay over for a night until her host family return from vacation. this girl, [redacted], i’ve made contact with now. i’m excited at the prospect of walking around the little french town with her in a twenty-four degree night, not being able to communicate all that well together and both being completely beside ourselves with homesickness and anxiousness. it’s actually a pretty romantic and profound thing in itself. she is european; i hope she’ll understand immediately after meeting me that this is all it’s ever been about

depraved individual

august 25th, 2024

i am not depraved, i am not because i know that. because people would tell me if i was, or at least they would look at me like i was. i am not depraved; i will tell myself. the word has come to me in a dream at last, as a means to describe my journey to infernal peace-of-mind. after all my hard heartless searching, i realize this morning it does not exist. it did not exist, not even when i scoured for it. if it was, it would be too far from home and i would not survive the trip

nothing out there like waking to nausea, awaiting a trip to the bathroom so you can hurl. your entire body, lurching. nothing out there like it. somebody making you sick, knowing even though it came from the alcohol; the white and the red(s), it was only mistaken for the reason. the real reason is somewhat of a plague. and how can it be? if she too has a mind and a soul and a body that hurls, that she also wants to listen to. wants you too to one day listen. we are fighting. i’m not sure i’m any better now, now that i have cut off her only life-line. i am doing it to win, yes, but something much dirtier, because i want her to lose. so today i woke up and felt shaky in all my joints. i still feel like a bad person. how can you shake that feeling? i have spent my life devoted to it. i have tried everything. i have embraced it, ignored it, lived with it, divorced it, reacted and denied, i have accepted it as part of me. is that not the right thing to do? i mean, i have cowered, too, of course, and i have

walked on my knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. still nothing. nothing out there like it. who is this person that i seem to like? that i cannot shake despite all hatred? what is there left to do? god, i cannot express it ingeniously. they all tell you that you cannot fix it, so you leave it. your realize it is not a problem you can ignore, so you do the opposite of what you want to, because you know you’re fucked up a little bit, but you realize you should’ve trusted your gut all along. you follow through, throw the punch. now here you are. here i am, and i am so sick i could die. i’m going to wash it off in the ocean. we’re both going to get over it. will this terrorize me forever? i am making the guilt worse by writing it down

sorry for putting you in this position

august 24th, 2024

i’ll be drunk pretty soon. i feel sorry for everyone who has spent time thinking about me. i know lots of people must. i told you it would rain and we’re playing terrible music. i can’t stop thinking about you; i am just like her. i can’t stop thinking about you asking me to do things for you. i can’t stop thinking about you wanting to do things for me. i feel sorry for you. i feel like a terrible person. and i’m so sorry you forgive me every time, because it’s not as if i’ve done anything wrong

i leave for exchange in six days

august 23rd, 2024

regulated anxiety is a wonderful part of life, so it’s a shame how much it manages to ruin mine. i can never outrun it or rationalize it. you have to let it run it’s course, and let it laugh about you. while i was packing my things this morning i felt the urgency that happens whenever you think about it for a second. because anxiety is amazing in that way. the very word brings it back into your body. just like saying the word “tree” brings to mind an image of a tree, saying the word “anxiety” brings to mind the picture of anxiety. but for somebody who has never had anxiety, it is a difficult image to conjure up. when you have anxiety, you can very easily think of your own experience, and that experience transports you. thinking of the symptoms is almost so impossible that the existing anxiety, buried now, says “oh, let me help” and you feel it again. so i live each morning clutching my stomach until i have food in me, enough sustenance to move to the bathroom, then i cringe at my face in the mirror, picturing her prancing around school. it’s laughable again. school makes me anxious again. i feel paranoid about the day. the rest of it. going to bed again after all of it and to wake up again tomorrow to the very same thing. when you get really good at thinking, you can lead everything back to anxiety, and you can make everything good in the world make you feel completely nauseated and stupid in a matter of seconds. it’s fucking paralyzing. that’s all i have to say

fighting the flu

august 22nd, 2024

guessing is one thing. my entire life has been a reach. and i used to think everyone’s was. and i used to think it made me very selfish to think that other people were handed things i wasn’t, and that they live easier than me because they do not think about things how i did. and i am not denying this is a self-centered view, i am not denying it is impossible to know anything about other people’s lives. of course it is. of course it is. but i am tired of trying like this, and i have not seen it in anyone else. this effort is not relational, but more importantly, it is not passive. everybody around me knows of my infection, and i have not heard black despair in anybody else’s breath when they give up speech, blatant disregard for a placemat and other shit you eat off. everything is important and i just seem to carry it around with me in the sore part of my chest and the back of my throat. that awful morning i woke up with chest pain, i thought this is it and i thought i wonder if it would make sense i died from a real illness? but i think maybe that is the only extraordinary physical manifestation of my internal groan that’s ever shown up. it hit all the areas i hide the panic. i did not question it at the time, but it did feel good for everybody to ask me now and again how my chest was feeling—if i could breathe—if my voice was good enough that i could speak again? and it felt good to say, “yeah, i’m starting to feel better” in such a croaky voice

how to go about disgust without self-righteousness?

august 21st, 2024

i served my sentence this morning in the pod room. i did some of my french workbook and felt real sick when i saw [redacted] go by outside, with her friends. her friends who definitely know that she is clinically insane, and borderline-stalking me at the minute. i googled what does it mean when a white girl has only brown friends? because i was curious, but got brought to an online forum which was essentially a twelve year old discord server for racist white parents. and then i googled how to deal with physical disgust for another person? but the first result told me disgust is helping to keep my morality pure, and i realized i might actually just be a highly critical and judgmental person, so i shut down my laptop and went to french

[redacted] and i talked after class about the course she will do next year, which is the training she’ll need to be a school counsellor, or something equivalent. she told me that i am still one of her biggest achievements, and i’m one of the inspirations for why she decided to finally go through the course. it feels like a very big compliment. we talked for all of recess about my exchange and our lives. i’m not sure if today might have maybe been the last time i’ll see her for another three months, but i hugged her twice for good measure. i’m really, really going to miss her. i’m going to miss seeing her all the time. i’m nourished, though. i’ll still have another two years when i come back. i fear now that i know she keeps things in boxes to keep people alive, and my jar of things right above her head, i am forever indisposed to her. indisposed and wildly devoted. what luck to have met my all-out inspiration for love and life at fourteen

stellar part 2

august 20th, 2024

[redacted] came over after school today. we made pasta which looks like tiny balls, the size of couscous; looks a lot like it. she made a sauce and we ate at the dining table. i hate that i like who i am around her. i hate that i am more comfortable with who i’ve spent all this time building over than who i am now, who i’ve built up and who i really do want to be in theory

full moon jargon (for the virgo-libra cusps)

august 19th, 2024

today is the full moon in acquarius. it is the blue moon, too. this moon is extra special because not only is mercury retrograde in leo, but uranus is in taurus (what is making the moon blue, i believe)—so what is meant to normally be quite a fresh, easy, unexceptional full moon is a completely feral one, and it has directly landed on the dates of my period. for those born on the 23rd of september, and who understand the pain of the cusp, the virgo-libra cusp, here is my self-ceremony for a hellish full moon: i’ve taken a bath with lavender oil, held a burning sage stick around my head, washed my hair and chest and back well, and attempted to cast out my usual sins: greed. nothing much else. i’ve put on my lace camisole and sat at the dining table, drawing, coloring in those drawings. i advise that if you, unlike me, lean more toward virgo, you read instead. intuition still feels high to me, but i feel as if it’s extra difficult to go through with what i know will be helpful for me; creativity, romance. i want to shut my eyes and get away from it, without leaving anything behind. god forbid i miss the end of the world

packing

august 18th, 2024

i picked out the herbs today that i will take with me to france. i have ten days left, i think. i’ve been absent-mindedly throwing things into my suitcase for the past week, but it’s time to get serious now unfortunately. so i assigned my jobs for the day: write out my favourite charms and miscellaneous incantations on some scraps of paper i can carry in my pocket, ration and decide the crystals i will bring, and the teas and my other special things, and collect some herbs. i might call [redacted] tonight, and see how she’s doing in terms of packing up her life

so lucky that i have to die

august 17th, 2024

succinctly the memory of ruminating on death as a child, crying and being told to forgive life’s debt has been visiting me often, at moments of the day where i cross the road or tilt my head back when mum reverses from the driveway, i remember time’s sheer generosity when it comes to my filter on the world—how grateful i am every morning it wasn’t my brother, that it won’t be my nana for a while, that it hasn’t been my mum or dad. how this frightens me; probabilities. it’s not true that nothing bad has happened to my family. but my irrational fear has grown from the realization that my family has in all actuality been very lucky, and better-off than most. as we know it. so far. the old people are healthy, the fuck-whits have disbanded; left us all alone, and good health has always followed us. maybe there is more to think of my christian grandparents for thanking god every night than i’ve realized. but whatever this means, it is extremely unlikely. is it just my thinking that a family always has one big tragedy? i pray it’s not mine to befall, but like i’ve said, i pray to nothing. where does it all go but back to me when i will the taxi to the airport not to crash, the plane struck by no turbulence, that my family is still here when i return?

what is it when i scribble hope into a journal, lay a listening stone under my pillow and cry? is that a prayer or is that my simple torment? what is a writer with not yet one reader?

i can’t wait to go home and put on my sweatpants

august 16th, 2024

i just remembered who i am again, and that wonted rationality has returned. knowing your person is so different that knowing your body: it’s painful and i remember that feeling now. that overwhelming clarity of your own voice in your mouth. it lashes you like it brings you to tears like it is the only thing worth a dime. what use is this vessel when impersonal? hobbies are a good thing. they always remind me when i am in the mood. free-writing. reading from the naked shelf. touching your naked self in the bath-tub. wine with the parents. i nearly cried tonight at dinner because my dad told me that i am everything he wanted to be at my age. i can’t stop myself from frowning, though, and being generally unpleasant in school. i feel very rejected by other people, even though they’re perhaps the most inviting they’ve been in some time. this is only because i’m also inviting the challenge. i can’t deny that i sometimes miss other people, but i do not miss the dulling of the mind, and i normally only go back to make sure i still have nothing to learn from the groups i ran away from. still, it disappoints me to know there’s a lack of blistering or blossoming, and i cannot stop myself until post-eruption that their bore is not my fault, not caused by me. they are simply like that. and i am okay like this, too, though a little alienated: indrawn

longing

august 15th, 2024

it smells like flowers here. it hasn’t been hot in months and yet in the last stretch of winter we’ve had four days of heat and rain. i’ve been walking home in summer school uniform and as i said, the flowers are blooming. the bees are working hard. it’s hard to comprehend that so very soon i won’t be here. not for three months. not walking home and picking flowers. not seeing the lavender bush when i get off the bus, before i see myself in the window of the office on the corner and i cross. today my eye was nearly taken out by a pencil in art when the girl beside me stood up and tripped on the back of my chair by accident while she was walking past. my fist moved so close toward my eye and i thought, “wow, i could’ve just been blind in one eye.” i could’ve just screamed from pain but i kept on with annotating my sketches. it’s so green everywhere i look. all i see is green

youngest child syndrome

august 14th, 2024

i’m a convicted truant, and have a detention in the morning next week! i’m not ecstatic to say the least, but i feel very excited to have been recognized for my sins (a rarity), and the level of care assigned to the teacher who was to investigate my mysterious disappearance from media studies—friday last week and monday this—is almost endearing, and i have an uncharacteristic fondness for teachers who manage to be both strong leaders and not total assholes. so i am not salty, but i was simply surprised to hear my actions would have consequences. me? i live without perception, and to have a relevant reaction is completely stunning. i cried in class after because of something entirely irrelevant, but [redacted] took me outside and i got to talk to my english teacher. i realised as the youngest child, very clearly, that i simply just do not have repercussions for my actions normally

nice warm feeling i got today

august 13th, 2024

hearing the two people you love most in the world talking to each other about how much they love you—and will miss you—is enough to make you burst into tears. i imagine their conversation now in my head, and i can see them this morning both interacting with each other in the special tones of both of their voices. their little mannerisms each; how they smiled when they realized they were in the same room and started thinking up what they would say to each other. i would’ve killed to have seen it. to just have been there, one time. to have seen them imagine missing me

i would make a very happy bear, and i’ve always thought that

august 12th, 2024

today was warm. [redacted] took me on a walk and bought me a cornflake cookie after recess, and we walked to class real slow. tomorrow i will give her a drawing of me handing a log to her, desperately trying to keep a wood fire going. above the log i will have a speech bubble above my head and it will say, “don’t burn out!” she’s going to laugh and hold it to her chest and do a thing with her lips to say, i love it. i’ll keep it forever and this way you won’t die

i always worry i’m getting stupider. i always worry that everything comes from something, and that by stopping now i will stop forever. like, by deciding to go home early because i want to lie in the sun; i am setting myself up for a life of skin-cancer and withdrawal from life events

with the breakfast club

august 11th, 2024

if i’d spent more time hanging around with the wrong crowd, i don’t ever think i’d have fallen in. i know now that i don’t like drunk people. i hate them. i find them obnoxious and melodramatic for the sake of drunkness, of bending over at the knees because somebody said they wanted to make sure you were okay—because they saw you fall on your face. alcoholism is not romantic like they say it is in the movies, and not because it destroys lives or makes your face red, but because you become embarrassing; everything you say you believe is a great spectacle, and what romance is built on egocentricism? no successful one, anyway

smoking is much classier. keeping quiet about your absurd fucked-up childhood fantasy when you’re a drunken mess is always much classier than taking it out on anybody who is willing to listen. i don’t care that you are not full of regrets, but is this all you can say for “letting loose”? haven’t you ever taken your clothes off in front of someone who doesn’t want to touch you? at the dinner table an hour ago my brother almost outed me for smoking weed in front of my parents. i believe sometimes that if i sat my parents down and told them i was doing cocaine, they would laugh in disbelief. i can say anything and have them relieved that i am such a trickster. i could have them relieved for having such a funny daughter

mess, over and over again

august 10th, 2024

not much time left, and i’m laying around as sore as your thumb. it’s so good to hear it’s healing. fiona’s never hummed louder, i’d break into a waltz if you were here. if you weren’t. my nice dress is too short, too low, too bizarre, so pretty. it allows for suggestion, but it hides me. no tit popped, no ass out. in fact, frill and poof, but still; they know my body and they want to imagine. just like i want to tell it’s story. from womb to earth to this party at your house in the hills to one day tomb, to a great big emphatic kiss—i finish knocking on the door. you’ll never let me inside. you’re the kind who opens the blinds and draws shut again, the bridge like a banging of fists like, “i never want to see your face again”, but you were never too sick, and you used to think my poems rhymed

untouchable eroticism

august 9th, 2024

what if they knew my pussy was this wet? and this loose? is it erotic or gross? is it only gross when i call it a loose pussy? would they squeeze their thighs together and purse their lips or look to one another with spite, wanting it? would they go quiet with a chill, for they thought it would smell like a sad rose?

the power i posses is something i will myself to never give up, not even when i am dying. i think only of such a thought if i can write it down and know it used to be real, or was there in lack-there-of. one day i’ll know that in an english class i put a leg over the other and as i packed up my things, i thought of the boys on the next table reacting to me. or did this happen? what if they knew me? what if anybody knew me like this? what then? couldn’t they put their hand there and do it themselves? couldn’t they fix me with that hand? if not, if sex says nothing to me, then where do i find the tissue-paper? where do i find the shower-head? where do i find these things that belong to my sex and not to how i have it? do you understand? do you imagine it?

at her house, in her bed

august 8th, 2024

it’s just you and me but we’ve only got five weeks left until childhood is over. i’m counting down the days until we’re not babies anymore and my heart is no longer bright in my pocket. until you’re a grown thing and i’m still downstairs, waiting to put the label on your dad’s glasses, waiting for the camera to turn to me so i can crack a dry laugh, we’ve got this and it’s not enough time, but for some reason i find it passing anyway. i find it like it finds me: just okay, just waiting, just hoping to see your car as it comes out of the parking lot

my usual comforts aren’t soothing. i cannot say, “oh, but i can’t wait until christmas” because by the time i’m back for presents yours won’t be under the tree, mine will be wasted, and we’ll both be gone. so what if? what if i stayed and you stayed and we lived together, together forever? and i made you toast in the mornings, and at night we’d fall asleep in each other’s beds by accident, even though we had our own separate rooms? we’d take deep breaths as we lit the fire and dried off our wet hair under the dining room table, shaking like dogs. we’d miss ours but this would be better

deathly hallows, part one

august 7th, 2024

i watched the first deathly hallows harry potter movie with my mum after school today. we started watching it a couple of nights ago, but didn’t finish. i have not experienced real dread before, only now in the lead-up to escaping the proclaimed prison to my unconsciously decided paradise—my small city in australia to the empty french countryside—now i’m thinking, what if i miss the burning, and the smoke and the suffering?

stellar

august 6th, 2024

my childhood best friend is for the gods. i don’t know in which way i mean that, because after my dad told me that not everyone is linear, i decided to pick-and-choose; she belongs to revolving ring around saturn which when rung like a bell holds her dry, squeezes her clean. perhaps the god will one day pick her off and say, “this is a place too dangerous for a saint,” and bring her back to earth, and there she’ll be. happily married and there’ll be a home and a chimney and three boys with sweaters, and each morning she’ll bop each one of them on the head and call them by the name of her brother and her father and her real dad, and ask them what they want for breakfast. one day though, maybe will never come. if she stays listening and spinning and letting her wet clothes be wrung dry, i imagine she’ll stay with her eyes up at the stellar stars and that’ll be it forever. she’ll never remember the other planets and she’ll never remember what breathing feels like. she’ll be taken farther and farther away by black expanse, and the last time i see her will be a random tuesday evening at the sushi train, where she tells me about being angry and all the things she’s looking forward to, but she’s only ever looking up

in the prime of life

august 5th, 2024

it’s good when you squeeze my arm and i reach out like it might go through you again, and you watch my wrist hang there like a dead thing. it’s good when i walk away from you and feel where your thumb was pressing down into my forearm, enjoying the still pulse of the little vein. it’s good when i act like there’s nothing wrong with me even though i used to squeeze crystals and whisper into my knuckles at night, “moon. tomorrow afternoon, make her good to me. condemn me to doom if it means she’ll kiss me sooner. moon,” and i used to make it happen. i used to want it so bad that we’d find a way through the storm. it has all amounted to this. so that i can look up at you and call you a cunt, and so you can smile so big the moon can see

coming home and making everyone proud, making them all so happy: it’s my job. to not make sense and to then say something so smart that my knowledge is in fact the thing with the most laughs. and i know it’s not how it really is. i know that they’ll die for three months without me to lead them through a great dinner-table discussion centered on the political climate. i know that my mum will miss me when she misses my dad, and i climb into his side of the bed so that we can watch the harry potter movie she first denied me

miraculously, the comparison between self-harm and hedonism is inevitable

august 4th, 2024

i could talk forever about all the things i want and i could talk forever about the emptiness, but to tell you that those things are in any way related is a fascinating lie. i am going to ask you a boring question that has infinite answers (such things exist): what other way is there to live but one of self proclivity? it must always depend on the impulses and tendencies unique to each one of us. there are obvious links between desire and self-pleasure and human suffering, and we know it, but to live a life of eating and giving and re-feeding or growing and birthing is something, are those things not all out of desire for life? this life sounds like a motion to me. when i imagine a life that isn’t raptured by insatiability, i think of the pac-man video game. would it be a lot like collecting dots?

the controversy of hedonism as a faith is understandable—wanting too much leaves you intoxicated and unhappy in the end, we all agree—but where is the line that must exist between wanting too much and then also having the will to live in such a way that it only brings you pleasure? and that doesn’t mean there is no pain and suffering in a hedonist’s life, because surely a hedonist understands that their self-destruction is inevitable, but that it is all part of the pursuit. what do other people want out of their lives?

sometimes i live so that when i finally decide what to wear at 5:30pm, and it is a red-wool jacket that when zipped up looks like a sweater and the ass-shorts that belong now to a ghost, and i find myself stumbling madly to the shower and i pull it all off everything i put on, and i wax it all first my whole body and then i shave over it in the shower and cough out the steam but i feel it seeping into my face, and i am violent to slather my scalp in oils and peppermint scrub, i am doing it out of love for myself. i do it because although the violence itself is nice, although sometimes it only exhausts me, i don’t know or care about any other way to live, and when i have tried i have been half-hearted in my efforts and felt depressed about the change and about feeling fine after all of it. i am employed to treat the wounds by making them; i get over my big emotions by grinding them out of me and bearing witness to them

it is all i’ve ever wanted, anyway: an audience

j’oubliais prendre mon somnifère hier soir

august 3rd, 2024

it’s easier to think in english when i’m listening in french. i can very clearly hear myself. i have a narrator’s voice. i don’t normally write and listen to music at the same time, but when i do always find my art mimicking the music. i’ve been listening to french radio to fall asleep at night and whenever i can, really, and it’s just a side-effect i’ve noticed

at around 5pm today i had to drop what i was doing (which was not very much) and do a smudging ceremony. i can tell you it was about a strange and sudden fear i had of [redacted] dying tonight. she is out with a friend. it came very randomly and in an impossible way; i knew it had to be dealt with. i wonder if this is how it feels as an obsessive compulsive? to understand an uncontrollable idea and despite knowing that it’s no more of value than it was yesterday, or than tomorrow, you still feel you must feel like you’ve done everything you can. and everything right. without bothering the thing or anyone else. i can’t explain it yet

unattainable desire

august 2nd, 2024

i wonder all the time what it is like to be so crazy that you upset people. i often think my whole life is a series of failed attempts to have people upset by me, as if i am trying to undo the years i lived in my box of kind and shy. but as i said, they are all failed. i am not a bad person for this. annoying, yes, but everybody wants a reaction. it’s a gift specific to humans: expression. today i clutched her hand so hard that i dug my nails into her palm and i did it because i wanted to see her squirm and i wanted to see her show me the marks. i don’t enjoy hurting people, but i enjoy surprising them. somehow i can never do it in a way that makes me satisfied, and i know it is because they don’t know i’m doing it. my surprise is always cloaked in a mirror; they only ever seem to watch themselves and they don’t realize who i am in the plot to observe their lives, and find answers in my own. but i would never pry an answer out of someone if i felt in my gut they knew i was coming onto them, and it’s only ever been different with [redacted]. even when i realized she felt me aroused by her intellect and her softness and her brilliance, i never saw her closure, so i never doubted that i could go in and out of the dance as i wanted to. i make a good flirt and she makes an even better admirer. but still this has not satisfied my passion for reaction, although it comes so close. no sought-after practical satisfaction i am finally clear on is ever actually attainable when it comes from another person, which in desire, it always is

i’ll be there

august 1st, 2024

dear you, i passed by my reflection in the window of the church i used to throw tennis balls at in the forth grade and i felt okay about the person i saw walking by me. before me. the person i saw. the person i might be. the person i am forever. i felt okay about being on a plane soon and about letting my shin-high socks fall down around my ankles into my boots at the end of the day. i felt okay about feeling bad through the best of it, and the best during the worst of it. i felt like my hands were not so dirty and my mouth, not so bloody. i felt okay about the pain in my throat and the bleakness in the air, and the sunset which though never amazes me as one moon-rise, comes to see me each evening to bring me down to earth. to yes, the moon in the street which rains white light for me to know. the girl on the other side of the universe who is honest and open and believes in me too, because she has to leave to love. i felt for you, and i felt as you. i want you to feel me too one day, when you read these and know i whispered, “i’ll do it, i’ll do it, i’ll be there”

fantasy of mine

july 31st, 2024

i have always imagined myself marrying someone who is less than me in animosity, and more than me in loathing. when i was younger i pictured a man who secretly wanted nothing from me. in the morning he’d shower in the same bathroom that i put my makeup on in, at the very same time, and he’d beg me to join him. i’d tell him i wanted to, really, but if i did, we’d be there all morning. we’d eat real fast, the breakfast he made us, and he’d kiss the back of our two blonde babies’ head and give me a long kiss at the front door—putting his hand in the crease of my back as he did it—then the front door shut and he’d leave me alone all day long. normally in the fantasy i’d forget about the kids, and instead i’d write and drive to the beach to read and i’d feed the dog and take a bath. then he’d get home and only love me. i’d think to myself, this is all i want and that was it

i want fixation, not a brilliant love. i want vapid hunger that is fed when empty, not a constant streamlining of fulfillment. i want attentiveness in bed, not a warm body. and i want to feel sick when he leaves me, not angry

an observation about balance

july 30th, 2024

i cannot believe how uncomfortable i am still by obligation. responsibility of any kind seems to be my mortal enemy; i start to lose my way. i know it’s ridiculous because admitting it is shrinking me, but it’s the truth. any time i am swamped by external factors, by must and not maybe i should? i start to feel like i am living a simulation, and like i am going crazy by act of confirmation, or even worse, congeniality. i am a child who will grow out of it, but the person, and i promise you, we are familiar enough now despite my adolescence, is clearly not persuaded by controlling these factors either. what obligations i opt for, i continue to be insufferable because of. the responsibilities as well that i complain about are scarce and also by my own volition, but still i am about ready to jump into a lake with weights on my ankles when i have a day where i am only doing. yet i have no problem with commitment when it comes to love. disappointingly so, i would give up any and all of my endeavors for it. [redacted], my best friend has this problem’s parallel. her burdens and ventures and labors do not tie her down like they do to me; they ground her. but in turn she doesn’t love as easily. like obligation traps and suffocates me before i can get to having a relationship with how i feel about it, this is what love is like for [redacted]. i do not envy her for this—even though loving plagues and overwhelms me, i’d never give it up—but her sense of duty is lucky, i think. it keeps her tough, just as love keeps me soft. without these essential illnesses by nurture, and i really do think it is nurture, we could not love each other so well naturally. the bad is the most obvious always, but i forget to thank it for humbling me and being so fond toward my daughter love of balance

give me a sign! damn it

july 29th, 2024

it’s not nearly as bad as it should be. it’s not nearly as bad as i want it to be. i just feel like shit. i look okay, though. i’ve been feeling prettier than lots of other people, and they know that. it’s the only reason why they still want to talk with me. fuck those merciful shits. fuck how the others see past tone and colour, and they see my unintelligence. they see i am just a sadistic brute. and i am such a fraud that it mortifies; they can smell it. and she doesn’t touch me anymore because of it. i’m sure my grossness is the reason. she says she will love me forever but she won’t. she forgets she ever said that. that i ever felt that. they we might’ve been alone and lovely together. there’s too much time between our hearts and her pulse is only growing weaker with age. mine gets fonder in it’s youth; i need to chew myself out a bit. i think we’re going and going and i think we’re going to know each other forever until there’s this and it rushes over me again. that doom. that dread. that disastrous intensity which can only be cured by distraction. nothing about it can be said that i haven’t already tried. it would only be to console myself with. if i didn’t feel like i needed to fix it and to be what she wanted in order to have her, i would not be so deep in shit. now i am confused. am i changed or am i hurting her? what have i done that means she no longer finds me a fascinating superior species? one worth studying? watching over acutely? how can i prove i am i am i am any more than i do try?

i’ve been hopeless before. this definitely isn’t that, but it is a generation of hopelessness; insatiable, voracious hunger for love reciprocated. for a sign. what is hopelessness if not putting all of yourself into the home of “a sign”

artistry; perhaps my job is only to think

july 28th, 2024

i sometimes think i could write forever, until i begin to write with the intent to and i am able to transcribe but a mere few sentences, all of which say something i was not trying to say in the first place. when i begin with a physical appearance to symptoms, i lose the disease somewhere inside the form. but everything i know about writing, which comes from another writer, is that you must start with a body. a painter is just as mystified by their blank canvas as a musician is by their unfinished chords as the writer is by the space between their empty document and heaving heart. but what if i cannot allow my writing the comfortability of a body? i wonder where it leaves me then, because as i get closer to a tangible idea, i begin to understand that it’s all pointless. my job is better well-done when i am the book, for i cannot in so many ways understand my own point when i begin to transform the ideas into literacy. no thought is great enough for a product, but they are all wonderful suggestions

roller-skates girl

july 27th, 2024

i’m outside today. i’m looking out at the garden of our aldinga house and i am thinking about how cold i feel, but how much time i will waste if i go inside. i watched the aristocats in french this morning, while i drank a spiced chai and waited patiently for my meds to kick in and for the world to look more alive. at the op-shops with mum and theo i bought eight different clothing items (a long denim pinafore, a denim jacket, pink ballet flats, a thin grey jumper with a bunny in a wool hat, two long-sleeve see-through rib-cage blouses, a checkered tube top with sleeves, and another lace camisole) as well as a mint-tin. is that what they’re called? while we were in the first op-shop, a girl with roller-skates came in and the shop owners knew who she was. i thought, “i wonder what that’s like; to live here and to have that”

my parents are going to walk the dogs along the beach in a bit, and i’ll come with them. i just want to smile about something today. maybe a joke or something somebody does. it would be nice to not need a drink for that to happen. i’d smile a little easier if the wind wasn’t so hellish. reading has been bothering me. i’ve picked up three different books and despised them all in the last week, but i’ve been writing. and doing lots of french. surely i cannot be too hard on myself. i found new ballet flats in an op-shop today, for christ sake!

all the pulsing around us

july 26th, 2024

friday is the worst day of the week sometimes. it is only good when the day is long gone and you can say in the trenches of the bed-ridden afternoon, “thank god it’s friday today,” as if it should not be in the past tense. as if you did not sob in the hallway when you came home and listened to your dog whimper at the front door. i look forward to the day i understand how i might not generalize something. i am doomed to even things out at this age, and the worst sits at the front; it drives the plane into the towers and the rest of us are all simpleton cabin-crew. the hairs on my arms might be the awkward bystanders. everything is complicated does not give any sense of justice to just how complicated everything actually is. while i am thinking of scenarios to give to you, i am thinking of the scenario that i am just an ornament. that last night i actually died and my underwear wasn’t eaten by my dog. that tomorrow i’ll wake up again and it’ll be the same day it was three weeks ago, and i won’t know. that perhaps there is something pushing me backwards over-and-over and i have no memory of it. you could tear yourself apart with any idea, even if you do not use nihilism as an argument for any self-imposed complication. you do not need to be a pessimist to know that doom is approaching every living thing, and every living thing around you is pulsing with anxiety

prolific consciousness tumor

july 25th, 2024

the many voices are occupied with what we don’t know, so i let the grasp slip on a wide-tooth comb that drags by my own knotted ends, ends that don’t ever meet—but could they?—in the middle with me and a ghost’s prayer: blessed be who knows no end to proliferation! cheers to eternal growing, and let’s have something to look forward to that isn’t death

baguette and brie at the park i believed i’d die in

july 24th, 2024

mum and i talk so open when we are wine-drunk and slurring and it’s only half past nine. she says to me, “you’re so clever” when i tuck her into bed from my pillow, and i want her to take me away from here forever. just me and her, away from the girls and the treats after dinner and the rainstorm outside (i wish would last forever, but not here, not now) and the grossness and the guest pleasantries and the, “no, no, please don’t cry” look in both our eyes, “don’t talk about death, please, please not at the dinner table.” we would go to scotland and talk about what was pretty and what was… not so much. and we’d laugh about something that happened next year, which would be so many years ago by then, and somehow when it was quiet we’d be the loudest in the room. i’d never be embarrassed again about it. i’d buy her something at night and she’d return the favor in the morning. we could make each other really happy if it was just us all the time

at lunch [redacted] and i took a baguette, brie cheese, a cherry plum kombucha, and a chocolate mousse to the park by our school. we ate there and talked about simone de beauvoir and sylvia plath and our shared love of our english teacher. i read my name poem in english today and [redacted] looked at me like a wet wounded animal, so i just said, “it’s all right. thank you”

today, if we kissed

july 23rd, 2024

there is a particular level of intrusion which comes about with a glance at someone you love when they are with somebody else. today i witnessed that; the becoming of something new. i want to be a fraction inside her mind. in days of accusation and suffering because of social exclusion (a fantasy world now), to declare any of these practical thoughts i have about having her, someone would burn me—so you think, then share! but if now i were to explain the lust of our unconscious affair, you’d think worse; that i were normal. you’d mistakenly excuse me for writing about something so erotic and distasteful. so much of my own impulses are vulgar, not different from any of yours, but they are not naturally romantic. i shape them that way, manipulate the itch; i tell that itch the story and all of it’s bones click into a place. they interact with something so entirely cruel it would be obsolete for me to think i had a right to interfere. i do not think about sinking my teeth into her upper-lip during a fight with her father because i believe it would be extraordinary or allow a grandiose explanation of attachment to form in both our hearts and her mind and my body, and despite my own best efforts i also do not think our sharing a kiss would answer for all or any of my sins. i do think it would be something, though. i do think i would perhaps sleep better at night

growing up

july 22nd, 2024

time goes by very fast. alarmingly fast, i guess. i guess. and it’s just a guess, anyway. nothing to feel sad about, but you do anyway. you feel sad that your dog doesn’t get up so much anymore, and you feel sad that your fan is so dusty, that your toenails have grown so long, that your plants are also dying because you are too, you feel it too, and you feel sad that nothing is new anymore, and you feel sad that you’re getting so close to growing-up and having none leftover, to hitting the final mark on the wall, and sad that you want more because you should be happy with this. and you feel sad about the future, and your past, and what’s in front of you, but you also feel just as happy with all of it. with everything you just said; your plants and your toenails and your dog because it feels good to move. you know that, but you’re still sad. you’re still sad because forever is waiting, and there’s not enough time

but i guess everything is relative. i guess you also always feel sad when your hair hasn’t grown any longer in a couple of months, and when you’ve been fifteen for too long, when your book feels like it’s going on, and on and on, and on (and it should stop before you lose interest!), and when the bruises on your knees haven’t healed from last week, and when france is just a month away, which is way too far away because you’re ready now like you’ve waited your whole life, and way too soon; way too soon because you’re only fifteen you’re only ten still, only nine and three-quarters and waiting to be a “tween” still, as if that might’ve ever been a real thing. i guess you’re still sad because forever is waiting, and there’s so much time to fill

sorry, goodbye

july 21st, 2024

she will tip-toe out the door late at night and then she will be gone. she is. she’s gone. i lie here thinking about it because i won’t throw up, i won’t wretch, but i will get it out another way. all the pain and the confusion and the knowledge that i don’t have, but i feel is there. another year, another year, another year, i say. fast and slow. because i want them both to hear it but i don’t want to know i said it at all. everything is late with her. all the right way to feel. it comes after the fact. i haven’t known a person like that before. there is no immediacy in how we interact, and how we sit with each other. last night we sat and spoke about sex. we said the word as grotesquely as we could. we listened to each other and we weren’t offended, but we looked at each other’s bodies through our clothes. we imagined what it would have felt like to touch each other on a night like last night, but we didn’t let it swell up inside out. we knew she’d get too hot, and that she’d burn and crash and that’s exactly what happened. goodbye at the door like an apology for being alive, for making her come back for this, only so that she’d need to leave it again. goodbye is what we say when we put our hands around her heaving chest and i listen for her heartbeat one last time, but i’m sorry is what we mean when she shuts the door and we listen for the pain in our ankles; and while we wait for it to rise

drunk on wishes

july 20th, 2024

dear dad, i love you all the time. know it forever, even when i don’t. next to nothing by this limbo is the space you take up in my soul and my only wish to live has been fortified by your nearness of death and the hearth of the fire you keep going, you keep going, on and on. your closeness to the heart of my issues which stem from what you couldn’t resolve before maybe our only great love fell pregnant a second time, and mum’s the first. sorry to see you see me like that, but i’m getting over the hedge as if i trimmed it myself, not by your own teeth but these sharp nails of mine; i couldn’t have cut any cleaner. let’s talk and talk away until you can forge my name in the sleeve of sanctimonious hell (which you, thank god, escaped for me, and you did it beautifully), with a sense of duty unbridled and i see you as a hawk which watches over me. you know me like another body you had only to harvest. mum knows me like a blunt angle peaking out over the mountain, looking down while walking up to the winery that named me, sweaty craven as the angel you bled out to protect me, and i bet the sky she thinks to herself that i am so good and so understanding and so bitter sometimes

it takes nothing to cry and mean it when we are sharpening our knives. heat splashes wet on our cheeks; your plays, my story-books. my one-day of writing that i drag behind me like a child’s rag-doll and entrust my life to it. if i lose it. god, if i lose it. you tell me, “that’s so beautiful”. and it takes nothing. it takes just that for me to believe in a heaven that wants to take me, or else why would you weep so large for a mere daughter? “i forgive you,” she would say as she ascends, a quite sexual and serious thing about the filthy rag-doll that she will leave behind in the dirt in space of reaching for the clouds, but i am not her so, dad: i’ll never forget about all this time left and right or forget myself and where i come from. i am heaven in every little way what you lost, i’ll put it together for you, i want to, i know you wish i cared less for it, and you are the only one i’ll take with me upstairs when i can’t exist (in these moments) inside our lovely little limbo anymore

blackout-side, there’s rumbling in the sky again

july 19th, 2024

lots of horrors but tonight there’s no power, so they are all hid in the deep dark. the candles frightened them and it all seems very sacrilegous. we are warming the spirit sat by the winter fire. [redacted] and i’s fingers stained with pot and horrid malboro gold smell. unsuccessful evening we spent out scavenging for papers to get high buy we didn’t know what we were looking for was a turn left up my street only to realise the dark spell plagued the whole neighbourhood. it was not just us. my chest aches as if it knows (really) what i am doing to it. i wish [redacted] were with me. i wish she was in her happy snuggly munchkin mood and she asked, “can we make hot chocolates right now?” but this night is [redacted]’s last. i am worried that i won’t cry or do anything worth her having come. maybe she’ll forgive/forget me by then and [redacted] will resent/remember me. a lot can happen in two hours of nothing. i could just hold it under my tongue like a poison curse. if i let it out, my parents would never laugh in front of the tv while eating dinner again, and my brother would never wish i’d stop speaking so much nonsense at the dinner table. i’d forgive myself for lying. i’d be clean again and salty like a rinse in the sea. i’d put my pen down and my rib-cage would stop hurting beneath my armpits

i’d write you a poem so they’d remember all about it. the fireplace and smoke flannel pj’s. a bad goodnight against the temple of your only hope of joy’s head? the reasons you thought you’d make it? and then how come you threw it away? because the song got bleak as the tune? the one her mama sang to tell you, “i love you. i love you.” even more than the beast can bear? because only big fools wear towering crowns. they think themselves to mighty to wield a fang of poison to one poor calf’s head. then they bite down hard on a killing creature and They Could Be God! if they might’ve only tried once upon a time when the boy was but a teen, and the girl had not yet learnt the meaning of “queen” or to clean herself off under the rain-storm so as not to bathe for the seven watery hells

longlegs

july 18th, 2024

i give up my view out the window to sit across from you on the way there and back. i do this because i want to believe i am taking in all features of you so i will not ever forget, but i know it is not that simple. it could not be, even if i tried. i know with a glance away i am just as ill-informed about the freckles all along your nose; the big fading ones, mellowing to blonde, and the little ones which sound like hollow wood if you put your nail out to scratch it. it is a broken record. and in the city we wait around eating burgers in the booth waiting for the thrill inside the little dark room filled with strangers, to feel it like a hand that reaches up your spine and grabs you, shocking you back. we sit outside in the dark park at the bench and talk about what we want to do. it is not pessimistic when we say we could never because we know that we will, we know we know we know because it’s you and me. and i know you could do anything, and you know i’ll be anyone

now i wait around for your call which i hope won’t ever come but i’m waiting like it’ll never end like i’ve not got a life beside me breathing and writing itself to death. i’m waiting because i love you and i am trying not to be scared about the way your voice sounds. like his very own rattle; i imagine that sound now but it hurts my chest

ça ne me dérange pas

july 17th, 2024

[redacted] has made a home in my sheets, and i’m starting to feel very comfortable resting my limbs on hers and talking honestly about my camisole addiction. i have been laying horizontal far too long in this bed with her to not feel a strange sense of becoming a rotting corpse, like i was made for this (a putrid red line in the fold-over of my sitting body, a trashy television show and a video game open at the same time, picking the skin off my lips instead of reaching over for vaseline). i suppose it feels vaguely like how everybody understands we are made for death at the end of the day, so we keep on living like we know it’ll end. i am lying down like i know it’s the truth skyward, like if i looked up god would tell me “how”, or to let me know if this is a willing break, or simply the epitome of pathetic. he tells me that i already know. yeah, i know

last night we were laying down and looking at the ceiling and i kept on telling her “i don’t mind”. i can’t remember what that was about now, but i remember the words kept on repeating themselves. she is very apologetic and it gives me a drowning stomach ache, so maybe this is my attempt to empathize: her sorry for my i don’t mind. we both knew it was late, but to fall asleep to the sound of her voice and well, to have dreams about it, that is nicer than saying goodnight like it’s final (we know it might be one day, but we’re hopeful still)

who ever once said i wrote another?

july 16th, 2024

french in my bed. je n’ai pas envie, i murmur sadly over and over to myself. what good is this mess of life when i cannot care to understand what i am trying to say? and how will they? and still hollow is the cruel underworld outside; the one filled with people and the other unhappy objects i notice when i walk my spotted puppy-dog, which all frown at me and want me to write about them so i say with many blinks, “no, sorry, sorry, no, i’ve got no ink, sorry”

you can only dream of seeing my underwear

july 15th, 2024

bought things for exchange today. two pretty bras, one pair of underwear which matches the blue bra, and one t-shirt bra for the airplane. and i also bought the presents i wanted to for my host family; an australian-scented candle for my host-mum, tee-tree oil for my host-dad, because it’s used medicinally here and he is a doctor, some gold-flakes in a bottle and a platypus toy for the nine-year-old boy, and a wombat toy and some cute hair-clips for the little girl. all that’s left is to buy an extra pretty card (which i will write on), and maybe some australian snacks for the kids to share. i went looking for some sweat-pants as well, but couldn’t find any that were the right ones. they were all too high-waisted or they just looked funny or came in weird at the knees. i’ve been writing since we came home. i would like to finish my book once i make this entry and hopefully do some french until dinner. this is boring to explain. i feel as if my ideas are better on paper

mum’s art teacher

july 14th, 2024

this morning i went on the hike with my mum’s art teacher. she is very interesting. of course, artsy, but not pretentious or stuck-up about her art. i don’t think most artists are, but she was on the very opposite end of the spectrum. she was exciting and flashy and raw and energetic and free-thiking. she’s kind of like a ghost now, because while i was there it all felt so open and i did not need to pry for information about her; i just knew based on her character or it just came out. and now i think maybe i didn’t know anything about her at all. very allusive. we walked to the pine-forest in belair national park in the post-rain weather, with the sun just poking it’s head out. it’s so beautiful there. the trees were planted in commemoration for the soldiers of world war 2. there were pictures along the pathway which showed people walking the same route we were but during the time the trees were just growing; eighty or so years ago. most of the time we talked about nature and art, and it was nice to have an artist to talk to who is happy, very genuinely happy, to be an artist. she doesn’t wish she did anything else, even though she seems highly thoughtful. she is just engaging. she asked if i would walk with her again, and i said yes. i hope we get to go again before i travel to france. i think i felt very comfortable, very relaxed. with her and with the nature

but i have happily played the sims 4 all day otherwise, which seems very ironic considering the healthy morning i had. i don’t think it’s unhealthy to play video games or stay in bed, but it’s unusual for me now. i haven’t done that kind of thing in a while. [redacted] also came over around 5pm. we played trouble twice, and i sat in front of the fire while i peeled and ate two oranges. there is something about eating oranges that is so satisfying. she talked to me as well about her new obsessive friend-crush, which she often gets, and i just listened. later on she ordered us mcdonalds and we ate it in front of scream because neither of us had seen the first one. i was hoping to read today, but maybe tomorrow i will. i’m going to bed now, at any rate

time is a trap

july 13th, 2024

very excited to write this evening. ideas are coming to me without such a heavy blurred-vision in their front, but i do feel as if i am sometimes walking into a trap lately when i allow myself to explore them. i woke up very early to do the five hour first-aid course with my dad this morning, and now i am burdened with time! more of it to fill, thank god. all anybody wants is more time. time is terrifying because it’s all that matters; you avoid the expensive creature. it’s why i waste it like i do. tomorrow morning i am hiking in belair with my mum’s old art teacher, [redacted]. she seems nice, from what i’ve heard, and i hope there’s no silence; i want someone to talk to. i always do. new people are fun. new women, adult-women. artistic women. it’s such a shame i’ve finished no books this holidays. i used to read so quickly! what’s going on? too many big gaps between my picking-up of the book and thinking about what is in front of me. this will be it for today. i plan to save my writing capabilities for my novel draft, one of the fleshier scenes i have a sudden unexpected enthusiasm for, and transferring some poems from document to page

self-obsessed. you only know you

july 12th, 2024

some fate it is! to know who you are may be no more special than all great others unknown, but it may be. and it is only fate because you hold onto that may as if a useless heirloom. well, you say you say, it could be. but sometimes, really a lot of the time, you are no more special than the lady beside me with the folded hat in her purse, or the little boy holding a sandwich opposite his young blonde mother in the park, or your dad and older brother fishing on the jetty — last time they ever did. the very real fact is that what makes me feel shiny and real is that i know where i came from. i do not know where the hat came from (a country abroad? the convenience store? a late grandmother? stolen from the road-side?) or how the sandwich was made (in the kitchen? with what knife? by the boy, or his mother? is he even old enough to hold a knife?), and i do not know why it was the last time they fished (did the brother get too old? did the dad get too busy? did they drift apart? did the world get much too loud for the jetty?) but i know my own stories like you know yours. they are yours to tell, to know, to own. and perhaps special is the wrong word for it, then

there’s nothing wrong with some self-obsession, some pride, some underlying belief you will be worthy and good at your life—or the art of living in general, that you will potentially master it—but my belief lies in the idea i am born for it; that i am more talented than everybody else in the room. and what happens when that idea goes hungry? because of course! it is not. and even if it were, i meet people all the time who leave me star-struck, envious. and i realize i am not the game’s creator, i am just another regular player, and my belief does not make me right. being wrong does not unsettle me, but the idea that i will never see past myself and my dreams does. i am worthy of something more than that, and i do not want to be lonely forever

hungover from being alive

july 11th, 2024

last night was lots of fun, i think. i slept very badly last night and woke to [redacted] in bed with me. it was fun when we left the oval at 8pm-ish and we were all still a little bit high. when we sat down in the middle of unley shopping center and the piercing white bright light came down hard on my brain like a horrible parasite was eating it, then i felt i was very close to dying. i talked to [redacted] about art and how i think it is great he has a passion for something, when so many others forget themselves in substances; he remains seeking to produce a certainty for himself. we also talked about time (after [redacted] and i bought a pack of four ice cream sandwiches (that melted later on into the night) and hugged each other in the biscuit aisle) and i freaked myself out talking about the expansive universe and he told me about an acid trip he had where a humanoid creature revealed a swelling ball at his outstretched finger, and it became the unfolding of space

i have to obtain a usi for the first aid course my dad and i are doing this saturday, but it is proving very difficult, and i will need also to complete a four-hour-long enrollment, which i can’t start without my usi, so i am writing this instead while i wait for my mum to come out and help me. even though [redacted] left this morning, we’ve decided after my art exhibition tonight, which my mum is taking us to, i will come over to hers very late and we will play minecraft on her tv and pretend we are little kids again. i remember post-school afternoons in [redacted]’s front room, her old art room turned bedroom, how we sat limbs-curled-in on her maybe black definitely worn-away leather couch with controllers and blankets right to our chins, and she would scream my name so damn loudly (”beth!” “BETH!”) in that shrill voice when i made my pet wolf-dog in a magenta collar attack her. and she would kill my ocelot after. they are some of my best memories with her, when we hurt each other with nothing so real i shunned her after

breasts

july 10th, 2024

i danced around this morning in my room to a song i haven’t heard in a while, post-shower and i thought of how much i am going to miss my breasts. from when i was fifteen. you know? i know that one day i will think, “wow. it was extraordinary — those boobs. i used to hold them and they used to be mine.” poor men, who don’t know the delight of taking your top off and holding them up as you march around your room, collecting missing clothing items from the floor, throwing them onto a chair, looking back into the mirror every now and then just to see for yourself. massaging oil into your chest with always a level of friendly eroticism, but mostly maternity. so i am like the rest of us, i want them different! i want them changed. i want them better fit to my body, to my soul. these are not a reflection of me. they are too big, too round. they take up too much of me; i am sure the people who meet me would agree, which bothers me. but i often delight in them when i am just alone. the pure shock of them. across my chest. this morning the rest of my body also amazed me, just as much as my breasts always do, and i think it so notable i should write it down. i felt feminine, spectacular even with the breakout on my chin. always in that spot on the left under the lip. and i did read on my floor, but not much. [redacted]’s birthday is tonight, and i do not feel like going. i know that is a sad thing to say, because i’ve not left my house all day and i should feel excited, but i don’t feel like drinking tonight, not after yesterday and how good it was. how beautiful wine always is with my family. teenagers ruin that kind of thing with sick over-indulgence and i would know. it is just that i am not ready to return so quickly to blunts and bad vodka sodas that do not get me drunk, or even happy. at least, not tonight. but what else would i do? i’ll dress-up before i leave underneath my winter clothes, put on a nice lipstick and maybe even wax my pussy

the wren, the wren

july 9th, 2024

i’m drunk! and i’ve eaten a small mandarin that has made the roof of my mouth very itchy. my head is resting against the edge of my bedside table. it’s my dad’s birthday today, so we celebrated in the dining room with a bottle of champagne, a glass of tempranillo each, and some of theo’s port. [redacted] slept over last night, and all her stuff has been left here, but she is spending the night as somebody else’s house, and when we woke up this morning we stroked each other’s hair and the tops of each other’s arms. we could not fall asleep and so we watched an episode of parks and rec which was purely for my own purposes, and i did fall asleep shortly after that. i had a horrible dream about exchange. that my host mum died and i could not find directions to the house, or that i couldn’t remember the suburb, or something like that. it involved google maps. i woke up very stressed and uncomfortable and worried. so after this morning when [redacted] and i had finished showering, dressing, and eating, and after we had gone to coles ( and i bought my wonderful cherry-vanilla candle! which i buy once every six months as it is $20 for the single candle! and today was the day! it is my favourite candle scent and it made me very happy to buy it today! ) i made an effort to come home with her and do my french homework while we started watching normal people , which i’ve already seen before but i thought i’d introduce her to. i’ve been trying to memorize my important conjugations for verbs for a few days now, and i haven’t gotten around to it, but today i think i got very close to memorizing for my être imparfait and futur conjugations in the indicatif, which is embarrassingly more than i’ve done for a while. but when she left, i went to my grandparents’ with theo and [redacted]. it felt good to do. they love us a lot and i don’t see them very regularly. i feel very ashamed around them for some reason

but tonight was good. i love my dad a lot. i hope he feels very loved and known when he reads my letter

in longing, i seem to forget things

july 8th, 2024

today has been my first normal day for a while. i spent the day with [redacted], who i haven’t seen since year six, in primary school. she is different now, and looks a lot like me. we’ve always looked alike, but especially now. she is very talkative, outgoing, and artsy, in a non-intellectual way. a drama-teacher way, i think. bubbly. optimistic. we got coffee and sat in the cinema, then went to the botanic gardens. it is weird to “catch-up” with people. i think so often it is a very adult thing to do, but not really. i found it at times boring. but for the most part, i felt very mature and also very level. i have not spent time with somebody so energetic and generally happy for a while. it is difficult to explain how she is. we sat in the gardens for a while, just talking, then went to a place nearby for pizza. it was cold outside, and when we waited for the bus, i thought i’d pass-out, but it was important i wore a skirt today for some reason. a homeless woman come up to me when i was crossing the street and asked me if i was cold, and i told her that i wasn’t. she asked me for change, and when i told her i had none, and that i was very sorry, she moved closer to the gutter and i thought for a minute she was going to run out in front of the traffic

it’s 6:16pm, and [redacted] is meant to be coming over in about three hours. she’s staying for the week, so that’s going to be interesting. i might walk the dogs before she comes over. my parents are also back tonight, from queensland. brisbane? i can’t be sure. they’ve been gone for three nights. i can’t wait to see my mum and tell her about everything in the morning, crawl into bed with her and debrief, and i will need to write a short letter for my dad for his birthday tomorrow

i’m thinking that after two weeks of hanging out with at least one person every day, i will need to coordinate a break for myself. i have curated a list of five or six books i want to have read by the end of my two week winter holidays, and i think this will allow me some time alone. i will be motivated to slow down, at least, i think. [redacted] is going away to some kind of retreat with no internet in the last week, as well, and i doubt i will want to hang out with anyone either in that week. and of course i wish i had learnt more from this experience of being so completely absolved in love and illusion, but that is how i often think, anyway. i always wish i did not move so quickly from things. time is what everybody wants. more of it. and we cannot help but always seek it out. i am better than lots of people, i think, in taking what i can from things. i do not want things to pass me by, so most times i do try and keep a hand out. i do hold my keep-sakes tightly. but i am sick of not surrendering. i am tired of feeling struck so easily. i need at least one thing i can devote myself to, and i think love is too lonely of an art now, and i am too prone to losing myself in longing

deciding not to kill myself and to be honest instead

july 7th, 2024

i was honest today! i said it. some of it, anyway, and i could not have said all of it, so i will settle happily for some. i woke up late, exactly on the dot for the hour i was meant to start working. i cannot believe the irony. i am normally never late for things. last week was my french exam, and this week for work. i also woke up on my period. blood had stained my favourite pyjama pants. properly soaked them. after i got changed, i had to rush next-door to feed my neighbor’s cats (extremely late from when i was meant to be) and let them outside, and then i raced to work. it was okay. i only worked for three hours, because i made up an excuse to go home. i felt contemplative and i walked the dogs and showered and i waited and waited and waited by the phone, and i pretended not to because i thought it might help. but it didn’t, so i waited more

i sent another message and got high on my bedroom floor. i cried and rory licked off all the tears from my cheeks, and she lay down on my chest while she did it, with her hind legs resting on my belly and knees sticking into my abdomen. i felt very unlucky for a moment

then i said something stupid and made her come over. i told her the things i’ve been writing about, that i feel very confused and it is because of what we do. she agreed and said more things, special things that i am going to forget. but we are back to basics. i want her to be free and i want now more than ever to have somebody that is not just her. it feels very powerful to have closure on this thing i did not know for so long was causing me distress. i knew it caused unhappiness but that was something i relied on, and was even at times proud of for enduring

insomnia — i wore something cool today

july 6th, 2024

i decided to stay awake last night, for the entire night. it was not hard at all. my insomnia has been in full-flight. i have not had it this bad since year six. but i do remember it a lot in primary school, and how it started when i was nine. my problem is not staying to sleep, but has always been getting to sleep. it is always when i am stressed and i become over-tired, and more stressed. as of now i’ve been awake nearly thirty-six hours. i am not feeling any effects but i did while i was out today. i saw [redacted] at the gardens, met up with her and the other girls and we had a picnic. it was very weird to be with her. we went into cheep store in rundle mall and [redacted] was there with [redacted]. i just pretended not to be completely there. i had not planned for that, and besides, i was extraordinarily out of it. i bought a five dollar t-shirt and [redacted] left to go home. we went to the park afterward, and after [redacted] left, i cried very softly and [redacted] did not know what to tell me, but i told her that was fine. i was listening to a very sad song until i caught the bus home. for the most part today was awful, and i don’t know how i did anything. i told my boss i would work tomorrow, for a couple of hours. and [redacted] told me she might come over tomorrow, which is potentially quite terrifying. i am handling this all, which i can’t explain to you as anything more than a horrible confusion, by thinking and writing and going out. i have never spent so much time with so many different people, daily. this is not me at all. i hope i sleep tonight

bluebelle

july 5th, 2024

it took me until 5 in the afternoon to lift my spirit. i think the wine helped. it was very good wine. i knew that because i didn’t like it. i felt ugly today, too. everything feels ugly at the moment. a product of winter, maybe. all the death. i need to do something urgent about that. it’s intolerable, not seeing beautiful things. i went out with [redacted] tonight, in tune with my seeing somebody every day until emotionally available again. i had a good time for half-an-hour, but when she brought me home all i wanted to do was get back to writing. every day we all try to bring ourselves a little out of the gutter, but today i’ve really really really tried to change the angle, like oscar wilde says, a little more toward the stars again. i feel like i’m failing epically. i know it is about my method. i am in no space to correct the way i am seeing things, and until i am, i will continue in negativity. i am not meant to be this way, like i am now; i am born looking for good. as is everyone, surely, but sometimes i’m doubtful. good old faithlessness. even though i do feel so stuck and anxious, i will tell you, i am trying hard. i am fighting off winter and lovelessness with my all. i am using so many words to describe my state, because they all manage miraculously to participate in some small way

i’ve also started writing something big and i think it may even be some good to me. big because i do not write stories, not easily anyway, and this is a story. maybe this one feels different because it does already exist, like authors say, it wrote itself, but i need to find a way to bring it out. for now, i am calling it bluebelle

trying again, feeling less alive

july 4th, 2024

this morning i experienced that awful feeling of waking up and being disappointed by yourself, and then the thought that such a feeling used to be every-day reality. i sat at the kitchen counter and patrolled instagram (for two hours) until i gained the courage to swallow my pills and shower. a long shower. i decided early-on today i would shave everything. i like to do that sometimes, like a clean slate. it’s nice to be smooth and to feel as clean as ever. i thought i’d straighten my hair, but the thought of the hour-long process and how gruesome it can be was too troubling. then i lay around and started writing. writing really is so fucking cool sometimes. getting comfortable, having a brilliant idea, working on executing it. some days nothing else seems as tangible. also, i had [redacted] over in the afternoon to get high. i am trying to do something social every day. it’s absolutely too much, but i cannot think of anything else to do while refusing my mind. she cried while talking about her mom, and not having friends. we bought drinks at the otr and snacks, and ate them in front of the oval. i felt alone while i was with her

i have been so good at letting myself feel things but i am worried this one is simply too painful to give into. i am worried if i make some attempt to let it pass through me, it will hurt everything else inside. it is just that huge. it is a storm and i am waiting outside with no defenses, just watching it get closer and waiting, feeling shameful

justus

july 3rd, 2024

i need today to die with the fact. god, you will never believe some of these feelings—they are so juvenile! i even don’t. you would like to hear about my afternoon first; i have decided to get stoned and read the book [redacted] gave to me which i should’ve finished light years ago. my mother’s friends daughter is roaming around in our house with our dogs. she’s getting paid by my mother to dog-sit them while she works online. i’m eating popcorn and i’ve also been writing poetry in my notebook

for my epic morning i decided not to set an alarm last night because i left my blinds open. i figured the sun would wake me up and i’d have hours to get ready for my exam. but actually i had such trouble falling asleep last night that i put a pillow over my head, so i saw absolutely nothing this morning. and i slept in until 10:54. you don’t know the horror that became me when i saw the time. my exam was at 11:30, and they make us get there half an hour before it starts as protocol. luckily, mum left her work to drive me there. i put on my school clothes and literally nothing else, meds in my hands and dry-swallowing. i was at school at 11:05. closest thing to teleportation i’ve ever experienced

rest of the day was quite shit. cried on the walk home because i went to see [redacted] after my exam to say goodbye but a random feeling of complete worthlessness and self-absence hit me hard as i came to face her. wasn’t myself and i acted a fucking fool. couldn’t explain it any worse for you, but as i said, i am so fucking done with today and there is also no better way of putting what overcame me. besides, after yesterday, i’m tired and a nervous wreck and i’m making everything so confused. more confused than it is meant to be just left as a volatile mess

tuesday sex & love

july 2nd, 2024

there’s something wrong with us, i think. maybe we’re not really the very best at all. it evens out. we’re the worst and the best. i’ve told you that before. we’ve talked about all of it. but it doesn’t make it better. it makes me sicker. it makes me think it’s okay, but maybe it’s not. this is all a big, confusing mess. you are setting me up to fail. to look at love and gag. ugh! because i’ve had it better before. of course, i know this isn’t normal. but friends fall in love all the time. and somehow we have never fallen out of love? i can name some things why; we are friends always, limitless, ‘til we’re not anymore, and then we’re something more but only ever when we can’t contain our friendship, when the foundation has some real big cracks and it’s not because it’s old and empty and caving-in, but because it’s too much to house inside. then it explodes. and that feels good. weird and wonderful, i guess. bad after always. always bad after. after always bad. and you know when we do it, fuck or orbit, that i know you wish i was a man for you, and you know deep down i wish you were a woman who only loved me like a woman. the two sides battle. we both have desires that each other can’t fulfill, and we try. i try to let you relax in my arms, allow you to be feminine. i try to let you rest on me. lay it down. it’s hard for you. and you try to give me consolation. you try to be a warm body and a mother on the phone. but we’re mad for each other. we don’t fit like that. we slot perfectly into the crooks in each other’s ribs and hips, but not into each other’s souls. you make mine so fucking frustrated, like i would like to tear you apart. i make yours disturbed, and you would like to leave me. i know it when i do things with the intention of hurting you; making you watch things. making you try to understand and fail. confusing you. i know it when you do things that make me feel alone and dreamless

you don’t know i think of this, right? that this all makes me feel quite unwell. the general understanding of what is going to happen to each other. you’re going to grow up and be comfortable in it, question who you’ve ever been(!), then you’ll find a man who doesn’t bore you, and that’ll be good; you’ll have kids and it will make you happy and destroy you. i will stay trying to hold onto things, like dreams, and i’ll chase them and you’ll laugh at me but mostly you’ll ignore me — you’ll be successful, more than me — until i stare at you grown and it’ll be all empty and quick and you won’t consider my judgement. you’ll realize you’re suddenly simple to me

farenheit 451

july 1st, 2024

in the break between my maths and english exam, i took [redacted] back to my house and we shared a glass of red wine at my dinner table. i talked to her about actors making performance art, and how interesting it is; the judgement they receive for it. i felt quite depressed while i was lying on my bedroom floor before we went to the kitchen, because i noticed i was very skinny from the angle i was looking at my body. not because i do not like my body. i like being thin, but because i still am not used to it looking like that, and i often am able to ignore the changes. when [redacted] commented on my sad look, i told her i was feeling hopeless, and followed it with, “i’m wishing i had something to need, and not so many wants”. this is true

my maths exam was fine this morning. i did not do well, though. i didn’t get much sleep last night, despite trying. when i walked into the hall, [redacted] hugged me from the front and told me she read my letter. i didn’t know what to say, and i let out an awkward, “well… what did you think?” as she ushered me to my desk. she told me it made her cry. i don’t know how that makes me feel. i wish i had written something different now. i wish i had told her the truth about how she sometimes makes me feel. which is not so good. she forgets i am not an adult. but i forget, too, so i can hardly blame her. i don’t know how to tell her that i need to grow up more. i only say that because i cannot help her when i am in this body, and that is a very unfortunate feeling

my digital diaries from september & october of 2024

it is halloween, and it is the night of the new moon

october 31st, 2024

i have felt resentful all day. i am trying to practice kindness, but the moment i allow myself to make choices without condemning myself after, i choose something which only makes it harder for me to live. i don’t do anything that is good for me. why do i do that? do i really have so little freedom that when i escape my own claws for one moment, i return to complete failure? my harshness is absolutely seething. i know i have to let go of all this. i’m angry about school next week, about my aloneness, about my lack of joy, about everything. i am not calm like i was yesterday. why do i have to change so often? this is so trivial. i’m disappointing myself

it’s different now. it’s night now. to know what rests beneath me is what holds me is the greatest gift i have given myself. i am hungry for spirit. i sit still with my fingers in positions to cast away pain and suddenly the sky opens up to tell me there is purpose waiting still out there for me to claim. it is halloween, and it is the night of the new moon, and though i am not many things i would like to be, i am going still. i have been going since. i will go until. i have all the time i am meant to have, and suddenly i understand why you loved going to church. why the beach and imagining it with me, softly in it, submerging barely, all of my hollowness pouring out into the wrestling match of water and salt, is the only thing which has offered me the chance to let go. this time, i will. i am doing it all again, and i cannot wait. for the tiredness to end; to wake up in joy. to feel earth like a mother again. to feel love like a tongue again. oh. it soothes me! i am forgetting all of today’s sin, and my monster of a body which roared and heaved all afternoon; and was caught in the threshold between life. i have been thrust here, and i make it well. i vow to myself to stay good, to stay cruel, to stay weak, to stay strong, to be brave, to be frightened, to be trusting, to be desperate. and it will stay like i do, like a good dog. like a good daughter. like a god. always in my own ear, saying “do not do it again”

my practices will save me. i cannot wait for a rebirth as good as this one

making room for the new cycle

october 30th, 2024

sent [redacted] the message today. i wrote it last night on paper and decided to translate it to french this morning, so i got it out of the way, and then i just sent it. i know that i didn’t do anything wrong, but still, whenever you do something for yourself to protect yourself or because you know it’s right for you, it’s hard to escape the feeling of selfishness. i know that i felt cornered, and i’d gone through every scenario; sending this message and being forward was the only way i could move on. i know it will be awkward now in school, but it beats feeling like i owe a relationship to somebody when i am completely in the wrong headspace for it, and it would only be a lie. a massive relief has been lifted from my shoulders, although i have destroyed someone for a moment. i imagine him reading the message and almost want to plummet my face into bath-water to drown. it is good to know i am capable of guilt, and that i am not a narcissist

good news from [redacted] this morning! i have two moon ritual schemes set up now for when i’m back at home, with two different people. i couldn’t be more excited. i also received an email from [redacted] last night about leadership, which i got around to replying to this morning. i told him i could come into school at some point after week six, or we could make a zoom call work. i can’t think about how lonely i am right now; i just have to keep reminding myself how proud i am, and all the good things to come. this is my new way of “getting through it”. i am going to be so happy to hug my parents again

two months gone

october 29th, 2024

have i really been here all this time? i am wilting. i do not like this sensation that i am becoming part of here. i feel more lost than when i began. i am losing touch with my activities. each day, i return to this place to write and i see the days i have laid out, waiting or full and gone, and each i remember; it does not feel like such a long time since it has gone by. my awareness is slipping out from under me despite it’s presence, more now than ever. i do not remember any of the good things unless i try very hard, and it all seems useless in the end. i know i am not depressed, but i feel i cannot help it. i can very easily remind myself when i am in a dark room, and i forget where i truly i am, that i am well. when i forget my responsibility to myself, i stop letting myself down; but i waste the freedom in the end. what am i doing wrong? i know i can win the game of endurance, and by so many lengths, i already have. i have been at four weeks ago, at three weeks ago, at the first week here, and i have managed it. each in those times, in the daily bouts of frenzy and longing, i have reminded myself of the same simple fact: i will go home soon. and so often i manage to console myself. i win back my control and i do it in a mostly healthy way, but i am full of dread. i dread that dreams won’t come true, that i am secretly losing, that i am behind, that i am living to die at the end. i dread reality, and i cannot stave it off. i fill myself with thoughts that destroy reason, and i surrender my will every day. i am frightened of it all, and i don’t know when i will find a place to belong to. i don’t know where my home is. why do i begin to question things when they only force me into blueness? nothing makes me happy except reminding myself of a half-truth, and forcing ideas upon my already very tired mind

my wonderful mirror

october 28th, 2024

called my wonderful mirror today for fifteen minutes. i hate everyone else in the world but her. i am proud of her. i am happy for her. it is not difficult and i imagined it would be. i am catching up in some ways, and i am leading in other ways. she keeps me going. it is her who i imagine at the end of the day when i think of home, and it is her who i miss the most. i cannot keep on like this, seeing her through a screen. she is the strongest person i know, and i have learnt so much, like that i owe it to her to tell her

i am starting to record. i bought an app for my phone which will allow me to use it a bit like a camera. i have spent all day just recording different activities. i’m not sure what this will become. it doesn’t need to be anything besides a thing i have for now, it’ll grow eventually. i am completely devastated in so many ways. i know that this is explicit. i know it’s true that i wish i wasn’t here, but not that i hadn’t come. i am unbelievably happy that i’ve left, and that this has given me the opportunity to see my life for what it is. i have gone from two opposite ends of the spectrum; city to country. suburbs to land. in some ways, i have learnt that i can do this thing anywhere. i can be beautiful anywhere. i can be ugly no matter the time. i can be warm or cold and i can survive it, even if i have nothing. i can survive having nothing, no matter where i am. people do it all the time. i can be people. i can do that, too

i do not know what i am keener for. to get through this or to be back home under the sheets. i talk a lot of shit, but i do feel excited for the mud i am about to push myself through. in a week from now, i’m back at school. i’ve gotten myself into this mess but i can get out of it, and no matter what, i will. it’s my decision what i do. i’m tired but i have been before. it’s going to be fine. i can be, too

sunday solitude

october 27th, 2024

a good day, maybe, maybe really rather challenging; i do not know where to sit now with my solitude piloting this plane of mine. this life of mine, soon to be. now. i try to take hold of it and make plans to bring myself out, but nothing responds! yes, i do feel unwanted. i am not uncomfortable by it. i do not feel rejected. not really. but i feel forced into this seat with no view of anything but vast sea and occasional foggy cloud. i am all i have. i have to keep going. what a horrible idea; is rest very real and possible? what an idea that it could be untrue. well, i know i do not want it, of course, but to lay down and choose would be nice. i am stuck. that’s all. everyone else seems to be having a wonderful time in their outed-ness. i cannot seem to get there, no matter what i do. i know it may be something in the future for me, but i resent my contentedness. i should be writhing with disinterest now, but no, i am a happy girl with finding things i love and going after them for a while. i do not live life very satiated, and i wish it did not pain me so much when people told me about theirs, their satiation, their beginning to fullness, because it almost makes me change my mind about this

i wish i truly had some idea of what would make me turn myself in, to release and to accountability and to my parents and to freedom, but i turn away from it all to fit into the prison of love and self; i cannot see where i come from at all now. i am much energy slipping through bars and i am not bleeding. i do not know where i go from a place, though imprisoned in, i finger the keys to each day and night, and i say, “maybe tomorrow,” but then tomorrow is here and it is so beautiful to see the sun through the window and to hear noise from outside, but to know i am truly a being when i am in my chamber; that i can be left to this and have all of this, and it means nothing. i believe some people would be immediately unhappy. but this is a calling of some kind. this is a test to my strength, and i am addicted to proving that i can survive. each day is filled with so much grief, and i am convinced tomorrow i will not get through another day like this, but then it’s over before i know it. the noise does not know what that is like. the people i love in their outed-ness do not know what that is like; to shed from speech and crave everything but colour. because i cannot tell when this will end, and when i will be sweet enough to walk again, out of here and out of this

in loneliness i have found a limited but bountiful love that makes me incapable of sin; i am locked up here so that i learn to breathe with just my chest. i thought i needed grace because that is what you told me, but i only ever needed prayer; your blessing only shoved me further into the ground. i have learnt better than you to hold my own word, to hold hers and his and all the earth’s, and someday i will be everywhere because of my deviation from the cracks of the world

tired of so much [in]difference

october 26th, 2024

nice surprises. still drunk! exhausted and growing thin now. we ordered three bottles of champagne between the three of us, so i know i have had at least a bottle of champagne to myself. she offered me a long, thin aubrey hepburn cigarette and i took a photo, smoking it out the front of the cathedral. it was a good thing to smoke. they are nice people. they are going to teach me how to make wine when i come home. the food was so expensive and small. i have never eaten anything like that before, not that i can remember. i bought three various items. i stole a coat hanger by accident. they are nice people. i wanted to go around the world with them. my head was spinning and in the car, i spoke french so well. nobody would have known i was quiet most of the time. i spoke more than the little girl in the backseat. i showed [redacted] my french music. [redacted]’s parents might be getting divorced, and i do not want to call her about it unless she calls me. i am tired of expecting nothing. i am tired of this

did meditation and yoga

october 25th, 2024

it was a good morning today. i slept fine and left my room without my phone. watched dinner in america which was not so bad at all. had a slice of brioche for breakfast, showered and washed my face. listened to joni mitchell all morning. drank a bottle of water and finished the movie. i wrote four pages in my journal, as usual. it was good, slow journaling today. took me good time to culminate thoughts. i pissed and meditated for five minutes. second time doing the unguided meditation, and i think i need longer. so far, i’ve been spending the first minute or so doing breath-work, then i do a quick sound and body scan, and then i spend the rest of the time trying to think in a very clear and stream-lined way about intentions. i think i want to try doing it for longer tomorrow. it’s been helpful, i think. then i did something really exciting. i spent time doing yoga for twenty minutes. i really do hate following videos for morning stretches or yoga or exercise, but this lady wasn’t so bad at all. and i also felt like i could do anything she asked me to, no matter how shaky i was. anyway, i left feeling good. i unloaded the dishwasher and i ate my pasta outside, but it had onion in it so i couldn’t give the rest to the dog. i gave her the meat, though. drank my juice. then for the last half hour, i made a voice recording about moon phases and how i’m really feeling about getting back into gaelic wiccan practices. i’ve also just been writing

i can’t believe it’s going to be november soon. i remember when it was the day before the first of october, and i couldn’t believe i still had another two months left. then i remember the tenth of october, when i called my parents. maybe it was the day before. time is moving. time is going. i wish i was going with it

thirty days left before i leave this place

october 24th, 2024

weighed myself this morning. was surprised that i have unintentionally lost weight. i am thin but i figured with all the processed food and heavy dairy i have been eating daily, i’d certainly have gained something. i am pleased. confused, though. it seems sort of wrong. called [redacted] this morning whilst on the couch, watching bridget jones — the second film. i just felt like calling her. she came from school and showed my her halloween outfits. there is a party tomorrow night, and if i’m lucky i will sleep through it and hear about it another time. i’m sure i’ve written that before! i don’t like this feeling, but i know it. that’s better than a new sensation. i am reading about that in crime and punishment, after the murder he describes how he feels. it was enough to make me feel sick, that chapter, simply imagining that sharpness; what do you do? you couldn’t do anything to fix it, or know when it would go away. i don’t feel good today. i think it might be the moon, you know. really. everything has happened at such oddly specific times this cycle. i am in accidental alignment. i read some of my old work online and felt pretty proud of it. i know it is truly something good when i read it back months later and still get the chills from my own writing; is that arrogant to admit?

i should take a shower, but i’m worried about what time the cleaner will arrive to the house, and i don’t want her to walk in on me by accident. i should start getting set up downstairs. she is supposed to clean the rooms this time. i need to eat something, too. i meditated this morning without any guide, and it felt good afterward. i am always worried to do uninstructed meditation sessions because i am worried that i will get discouraged from not being able to concentrate, but this was a good first time for not having done one in a while. it has always been my dream that someday i’ll be able to meditate on a topic, and discover something very deep and important. i feel as though i’m all spent-out, but it’s not time for me to rest. that will come later, maybe next week. yes, next week. i will start resting and looking after myself. i just have to finish this week on a more reflective note, try and get myself through the feelings and focus on better horizons. it is such a relief to think i will be home soon, and all of this will begin to matter then

i am bound to survive

october 23rd, 2024

however, can it be possible to live this way? i am burnt out by my wants. if i repent now, it is purely by act of more desire, not desperation, and i seem to confuse the two. i would say i have heavy impulse now to pray and have faith, but i have had that my whole life. the only reason i feel it more brutally now is for i am in reach of myself. i go to bed very tiresome and wake up even more so. my dreams have been just horrible. when will that stop? i write every day that i will survive; it is an act of kindness in which i do not dabble in. it’s blunt. it is the kind of thing your dad tells you whilst you cry from loving too much. you will survive. and it feels just the same here, just the opposite of what i need, for i know that, but i am resolute in determining my unconscious mind, and this survivalist sentiment pulls me further away from the gaping whole in reality’s bridge. but i have to be hard. i must tell myself every day and be kind in the long-run, in the process of tiredness. i am unfolding and have nowhere to lay my head. this morning i was sentient in a wonderful way. i was gross and showered it off, filmed myself in the steam. i dressed up and ate outside again. i journaled for almost an hour. and i lay down with the dog to pat her, for she showed me her belly for the first time. she kept looking up at me to check if i was still there. am i? am i? am i? i get worried about thinking that too often, but sometimes it’s a painful tinging relief to know that i can ask it without coming into hysteria. i worry that i lie to myself, though. i worry that i too often think, it will be over soon, when it won’t. but never has relativity been more important to me than here; i listen for the sound of the clock everywhere. i am waiting for it to be time to leave, and i worry that i will not live at all

how will i get my life together?

october 22nd, 2024

i want to do summer internships and despite what i need write now, i do want to leave home. i am crushed that a perfect opportunity like this one i found today is only of access to people with rich parents. i am also aggravated that an online poetry seminar i am interested in taking is for some reason declining my payment. it would be the perfect three hours for me to practice my writing with a cup of herbal tea in the morning, with other passionate poets and with the help of a professional who i respect a lot. so! i need to sort that out. i don’t understand why the payment won’t work, but it’s pissing me off. if not, i am so desperate i would consider asking my parents to allow me to use their card and transfer them the money in return; i normally would never go through that kind of hassle. i also don’t understand what is happening on saturday with [redacted], or where i should be meeting her when i arrive in reims. i have enjoyed two days in the sun eating my lunch, feeding the scraps to the dog. that makes us both happy

i ended up submitting some less-than-grand poetry to a publication which cost me a fair bit of money. i ought to do something that’s good for the soul now, like read or do the latin course-work, or my maths homework. i still need to ask if i can use the printer downstairs, or if they even have one. it’s hard to catch one of the parent’s in a minute alone. i could not function that way. i’ve been staring at a screen all day; i know that, and so i’ve got to go downstairs and fill up my water-bottle, meditate and do some good work. that would make me fuller. i’ve still got around an hour until dinner-time, so that’s more than enough time for me to do some smaller more whole things. this all day has just been about piecing together parts of my life in order to construct one in the future that will be worth my time. do you know what i mean, if you ignore what a sad sentiment that is? because although this does not feel sad in contrast to the lives of other people, it has occurred to me that i am not living mine. but i cannot explain it to you; it feels like it’s not possible to live until i have sorted this out. yesterday i challenged myself to stop what i was doing and stare out the window for ten seconds at a single patch of grass; i was itching to leave it. i have work to do

productive, avoidant monday

october 21st, 2024

it’s been a very long day. a good one, though. i managed to do lots of things. i woke up and found the house empty, and there was a note left by [redacted] telling me to make the most of the calm. they did not come home until very recently, and it’s just passed seven at night now. i started the day by writing in email in response to [redacted], who sent me one, very small and early in the morning that said she missed me, because she had seen a photo of me. i wrote a very long, wordy email back to her. then i called my parents and drank a glass of milk in chocolate powder; i did not warm it up and the milk had not come from the fridge. i did not eat any breakfast. i cleaned my room very courtly and then took a shower and washed my face, changed and everything. i came downstairs then and ate lunch outside with the dog. the sun was brilliant and shining; i wore a camisole all day. and i gave the dog my bacon leftovers from the pasta while i drank my juice. it was so nice outside that i even brought out my journal to begin writing, but it had gotten to windy, so i returned inside and finished. i wrote four pages today, which was a good effort; i had nothing to reflect on or hope for that felt worth coming out. i simply rambled in silence for i knew it was good for me. i went back upstairs and did more of the cambridge latin course-work, but i have not yet finished the chapter i’m on. i will tonight, hopefully, after dinner. i did that for about an hour, then i went downstairs and ate a yoghurt. i just finished the movie i started shortly after, au revoir, la-haut which was a french war film. i enjoyed it. i wrote some french in my journal, and for the last hour i’ve been doing maths homework at the kitchen table, waiting for everyone to come home. now i’ve retreated in my room to do whatever i feel like until dinner, which i sincerely hope will be in front of the tv. i cannot tell you exactly why, but it’s so completely horrible to sit at that table with the family. it feels like anything could happen. i almost want to fake a migraine every night now so that [redacted] will tell everyone to be quieter. now that she knows it’s common for me, i think it’s possible that i could stage something like that and have some more time to myself. what a horrible thought. either way, the day is basically over, and i have done a lot, but i do not feel regulated now. i feel a bit uncomfortable. i do not like the nagging way that [redacted] yells, “mamaaaan! it drives me up the wall. my back aches and aches and i can’t get my hip to stop itself from clicking each time i fold up and off the bed. i am ready to come home

potentially valuable mistakes

october 20th, 2024

i’ve spread myself out too wide, and in a rhythm completely unchained. nothing makes me happier than to have myself to myself again, but why have i betrayed my conscience so easily? all it takes is a simple rejection of reality, or persistent anti-reason. i told myself everything i did not need to hear, and i made it so that it was the only thing i knew. it’s only for a short period of time. i should do everything i can. i should just climb into the boat and rock it a little, see if it’ll budge this time. how long will it take for me to be okay with my edge of fragility? it’s a delicate thing, this belief of mine that i hold onto: look out for opportunity, grab on and don’t let go. find something. other times, i open a wound. like last night, i opened a wound that should have stayed very healed

each time i am with a man, i feel his anti-presence as such a weight that i must make up for it, and it almost becomes a joke. it does become a joke. and i know that this is not normal; it is why i have sensed for a long time that i should not be around men. i do not like to speculate on why, because i seem to know the reason deep down already, and that is already in it’s burial ground; i will not poke that bear. i will not dare. but i seemed to think this time it would be okay. maybe i could try and see if anything has changed, and maybe i will not cancel out my possibility of liking men. but, i am horrible. i do not listen to myself here, when so much else is loud. like the music last night. even though it was impossible to hear him, i still tried to read his lips; i was disgusted by what i was doing. when i took him outside to teach him how to kiss a woman, i could not believe what i was doing. i had to leave myself for a moment. he shook and shook and i nearly threw up with pride at what i’d done, but when we went back inside away from the darkness and he called my by my first name (the name my parents gave me when i was born) and i could really see his face, and properly see it, i thought that he did not have the right to my name. just like i will never address him by his, he should not address me by mine. it has no power of me, and yet he does it for the sake! he is not like she; he is not wise or witty or clever like i might’ve thought

in all honesty, it’s my foolish error. i have not been violated. i was in fact the perpetrator of these events. but i have been clear. i have made my boundaries thick-on. i will now go radio-silent. that is all i can do. what i really want to say about this mess of mine is that i will spend a while recovering from the mistake of misleading myself from previous knowledge; i do not like men. i am not attracted to them. i do not want to kiss them. part of this recovery will be me reclaiming my body, despite giving him access to it. despite it being my choice, i now feel completely creeped out by ever allowing him to be close to me in that way. and i will not let it happen again. i was out of alignment with my true wishes and self, and i understand that it makes me human, but i am not used to this significant regulation. i almost feel as if i’ve been set back. this experience has been painful, but valuable. i will try to move forward how i know best, and i cannot wait for this grossness to lift

commencing a brief, better hell

october 19th, 2024

it is the first day of break, and may there be no more days like this one. i think i will die if i do not go home soon. i pity this horrible place. i am developing an imaginary migraine to help look after myself. i am laying in my dark bedroom listening to brown noise with a blanket over my head

this is all so horrible. it’s just like some kind of terrible dream that i can’t wake up from; i am being taken along without any input. i have to go the party tonight! i am laying ready on my bed now, after five hours of despair and an interruption from dinner, and i believe truly that if i do not drink tonight then bad things are going to happen. i called [redacted] and asked if he’d come, because even though he’s the only person i may throw up at the sight of, he is also the only person who would do something like that for me. i am going because i have the sense that it’s something i really should do as an experience, but also because i would like for [redacted] to think that im doing okay, and im going out to parties and kissing boys and doing very normal things. and i’d like to do this, just not now. not for this duration of time. not at 11pm at night, until god knows what hour. i am meant to be taking care of myself! i am doing many of the things i told myself today that i would not do. after today, it ends. no boys, no drinking, no bad eating, no potential smoking. it ends tonight. i will come home early and go to bed tearfully and not reply to any heartfelt messages from [redacted]. i simply hurl at the idea that we will spend tonight together; i hurl at my insolence, my anger and my inability to reciprocate male affection or attention. there will be no sweet-talk. i will not tolerate it. i will drink and dance and go home early. that is it

someone’s lover again

october 18th, 2024

i slept well last night for the first time in a while. i simply shut my eyes and it came, and i was aware that it would but i did not freak out. i woke with swollen eyes and i realised i had dreamt about my dad and brother. i cannot remember what they were doing, but i woke up and was so grateful to have been with them. i am on the way to my last day of school for the term here before we go on the two week break. i am going to see [redacted] and tell him to kiss me. i would like affection; there is none of it here, aside from my nightly bonne nuit kiss on the nose from [redacted]. and i think that touch starved feeling is why i wouldn’t mind having sex with him, even though we don’t know each other that well. but maybe not. i am also very happy to have sex with lots of different people if they only asked. i don’t know if he is the kind of boy who would have sex at all, but i will tell him one day when we are alone. i do not know if we are allowed to be alone with each other, and how will i make anything special happen in that school in five weeks, possibly less if he cannot see me during the holidays? it does feel very good to invest myself in this, and i am not thinking as much about home this morning as i do other mornings. i am not overwhelmed, either, i am relieved. i have that feeling of when someone heaves you up from the floor and says, “you are so light!” so perhaps a bit of pride and loveliness. it feels so nice as always to be given-to. i have only just enough energy to receive it here. i feel lucky. i feel like this could be very good for me, but i will be regretful either way. what will i do?

there is a halloween party tonight at the kids’ school, and i have told the family that i will come, because i would like to do something. and [redacted] will be happy either way, but i have a feeling it will make her excited to see that i have come with her. i will wear a witch costume, and maybe if i am lucky, there will be drinks there for the adults. i am very sick. i clear my throat every chance i get. it’s a nice sick for now; i can still function but my voice is a little changed. i hope i can make people happy today, and that the lunch food is good; i hope for the best last day possible. i would like to relax, at least; im still waiting to feel like i know what i want

quand le jour est court et triste

october 17th, 2024

the world is so pregnant here. the earth is clean and perfect. the air is full. i am sick for wanting more. i am being tested

i wrote this this morning, and a lot has changed. i am loved again. a boy gave me a beautiful hand written letter in english and told me that i have burnt his heart. i wrote a letter back to him in french. we are going out with each other now. i do not know what this means, but maybe i have a boyfriend. i am tired now, and that is why i cannot tell you everything as it really was, but it was very beautiful and simple. i called my mum who is at the beach with her childhood best friend, and i sobbed very loudly on the phone reading each of them the letter. i think it is because i am afraid. i am concerned and confused. i do not know what i want. maybe i want this. i do want this. my stomach is pained and i really want to curl up in bed, empty, and sleep in a big shirt. but i would not mind if he was there too

it’s a real cold place now, thinking about next year

october 16th, 2024

i am so tired. i submit myself over to it. i wrath in literature and prose. i imagine i am powerful and i laugh when i listen to my audiobook about god. i bite back at the french who laugh at [redacted]’s accent. i will spend my time next year focused. i will come home so heavy with boredom and love. i will drink more and smoke less in spirit. i will learn to drive with my dad. i will roam at the beach for weeks, picking shells, plucking feathers from the sand. i am grown now; i know it will take longer than three seconds to kill me. i will write you so many letters. i will hunt down that cd for your old car that i’ve been thinking of driving in with you one day. i will write on my floor with the window open and the plants from the bathroom will have moved to the ceil. i will not forget to water them this summer. i will work and work, and send inquiries. i will set myself up. what does that mean? has anyone ever felt this bad before? what does that matter anyway. i will annotate poems, and read a little. i will study. i will see my family at the dinner table every night and make them all laugh. at christmas—oh god, at christmas—we will all be together and happy about it. mum and i will crash out after on the couch and watch love, actually with ads because it’s more special to watch it on tv than a streaming platform, and it’s more excusable. my mum. my mum. my mum! i hope she does not think of me and count the days down like i do. i hope she does not cry. dad, i wish you would talk to me. i wish you would not work like this; i am tired of missing you. get it over with quickly. the world is all black and my brother is awake at home. i will be a good daughter next year. i will be a good sister and a good lover. i will wake up early. i will want this

strawberry gum

october 15th, 2024

im on the bus home. it’s 5:30 and im chewing strawberry gum. its the sweetest thing i’ve ever tasted. i suck and suck, im barely chewing. some poor kid got yelled at by the bus driver just now for throwing something at the driver—rightfully so, yelled at—but poor because as he left the bus, his mother came to pick him up from the stop; and he got told off again, this time with the driver telling his mother in front of everyone on the bus. it was hideous. i’m so happy to not be that boy. another day of joni mitchell. not a horrible day, i might add. i posted on my blog, and i submitted some poetry. i felt okay. i ate pasta at the cafeteria and custard for dessert, but there was no grapefruit today. me and [redacted] went to carrefour and i bought my handmade local lollipops. i sucked one before my last two classes. i also got my dark mint chocolate that we always have at home in australia, and this strawberry gum i’m chewing. [redacted] knows five languages. this is absolutely the most of anybody i have ever met. she is still very shy. if i knew five languages, i think that i would not be shy. i don’t know why. perhaps she is just shy in english and french. maybe in the other three she is loud and alive and mean. i don’t think so, though

even though last night i slept fine, i still yawned all day and wished id gone to bed earlier. it simply isn’t possible sometimes. we eat dinner so late here that i spend all of the afternoon hungry and trying to distract myself, and the only time i feel satiated and full enough to let out is after dinner, so i try and get decent writing done then. that normally goes to about ten at night. then i sleep. still, eight hours does nothing for me: i am burning out here. i talked to my friend from home today before lunch and her guinea pig is grown up and she has gained weight. she looks very different and i realise now that some people might also look different by the time i come home

well-slept, totally fine; push-on

october 14th, 2024

haven’t had sport yet, so i haven’t officially made it through the day, but i’ve been at school for five hours, and done four hours of class and lunch where i held conversations in french, so i’d still classify it as an achievement. i have a very upset stomach and i have to be careful not to think about anything too grave that could send me into a complete literary schizophrenia; i am itching to get out. the family confuses me. why do they want me around when they are so clearly at a loss of priority amongst themselves, anyway? how do i possibly not add to their mess? i am exhausted. the world just keeps going. home is a horrible paradox that i want no part in now, not when i am removed of it so completely; i cannot keep one foot in the door for the rest of the time that i am here, or i will just go insane. plus, i have a very singular feeling that it is not what i really want to do at all, and in fact, i am compelled to only by comfort, and sight. i think that i would like to loosely know that all is well still without me, but i don’t; it hurts me. i lie about everything. i am not sure how i feel. writing feels like dragging out the most horrifying truth and finding it old and shrivelled. it’s not here anymore, i am half-abysmal and completely blue, and do not want to be hailed a war-hero for sitting down and trying not to cry. i do not want to see you applaud and pretend to know, or want; i will come back unscathed by my own cowardness, the only bruises on my elbows

sunday is god’s day

october 13th, 2024

i’m swarmed with emotion. each day ends the same. sunday is truly god’s day. i finish rainer maria rilke’s poems in the car-ride and [redacted] falls asleep on my shoulder after fighting off tiredness for a strong ten minutes. i listen to joni mitchell and text [redacted] good luck with first day of term four tomorrow ❤️ i love you along with an attached photo of [redacted]’s sleeping head on my blue sweater, identical to the photo i sent her, must have been a month ago now… i swat [redacted]’s hand away when he tries to wake her because of boredom, because i am tired of him now

we spent the day at charleville, and then sedan. first was bowling, and i lost by a lot, but there’s no surprise there. i drank a coke zero and then we walked around streets to place ducale, where we ate lunch. i had salmon pasta, and couldn’t finish it, and i drank a virgin mojito. i felt very desolate in the restaurant, and i was suddenly overcome by tiredness. i watched the elon musk funded spacex starship launch live on the way to chateau fort, and couldn’t help but smile at the eruption of cheering crowd when the booster landed back down into the chopsticks seamlessly. i do not care if we go to mars, or not. i do not really care where we go. but it was special, texting my brother to say, “turn on the news!” and him, replying, in what was the middle of the night for him, “i’m watching now :)”. the castle is nothing short of breathtaking. it is unbelievable architecture. i am truly excited for this next week, as it is the last week of term here; i will have two weeks of selfishness, rot and read and write and eat and bathe, go out sometimes, talk very little, call home often, write more, and that will be it. then three weeks of school and i am home again. this last week feels like my final trial, although every hour also seems to be. regardless, i’m coming into tomorrow very hopeful and inspired by today and what i’ve seen

manner-less little boy, you make living a chore

october 12th, 2024

oh god, i am so happy to have not been born an insensitive boy. to be so far away from femininity; this is heaven. that must be hell. perhaps that is why they are so disinterested in life? for they know they have already been ripped off by being born into their bodies. my skirt and my red lips. my breasts and my cold, shaven legs. i am dragging myself through tasks and listening to a shouting that makes my heart beat in stark, crimson jumps; i imagine it in there, tensing each time i hear that awful, itchy-whiny, nasily, euh! at a video game, and the father’s encouragement. i feel unromantic here. i feel indescribably annoyed and angry, and i cannot possibly turn it into something kind. i am so tense. all i think to do is breathe

trying to calm the itch

october 11th, 2024

i make obnoxious guesses about the lives of others. i wish i were more beautiful and i wish i were less eager to be with myself now that i am all i have. i want to see nobody around me who knows me until i want to know them. [redacted] sent me a beautiful email last night in response to the one i sent her yesterday, and i feel horrible for doubting her response-time at all. so much joy, i have read it three times over. there’s something wonderful about an email. texting is dead. i woke up to it and to [redacted] calling me. i did my makeup in front of the mirror and told her about how it’s been going here, which is really just fine. she told me about her lice from last week, and how she cries each night. i am trying to stay calm, is what we tell each other. i’m doing it, you know? breakfast was cereal with grapefruit juice. i listened to rainer maria rilker’s poems on the bus into town. it is dark and painful outside

my clothes itch me all day, i’m wearing the tingly stockings, and i can feel all of my hair on top of my head and on top of my eyelashes. i don’t know why i wore jangly earrings today. i feel just revolting. i can’t wait to wash my hair tomorrow. i think it’s [redacted]’s birthday tomorrow, too, but i can’t be sure. maybe i misheard. i’m very unsatisfied and need to pee constantly, and don’t drink enough water at all. and my stomach hurts all the time from me sleeping on it to stop it from hurting overnight. how do i have this in me? i really don’t. how have i been here for six weeks already? how, god, will i make it another six weeks? somebody tell me. how will i survive four more school mondays and legs that tingle all the time and this constant tiredness and sickness? how is it impossible to leave? why have i done this? how could i have done this? i know i will finish. i know i’ll come soon. all of my poems lately have felt like that at the end, and then i never do. except peak erotica is anticipation, not failure to give, isn’t it? i am tired of this. i am tired of all this. won’t somebody pick me up and bring me home? i am rotten too soon; somebody weight me down so heavy i can’t get back up, but i don’t want to go crazy, i just want to be as good as you. seven more days

t’en veux, ou pas?

october 10th, 2024

gruelling morning lessons. a truly deadly combination of earth and life sciences followed by history, geography, and geopolitics. i just finished my two hour english specialist class. i felt very depressed this morning, and i have got to sleep for longer at night. i refrain from doing what is good for me and that i want to do in the afternoons before dinner because i am more keen to distract myself and not run into trouble, so i end up doing it in the night; taking my makeup off, if i even manage it, right before bed, braiding my hair and journalling, laying my clothes out for tomorrow on the desk-chair. distraction consists of lots of eating and watching, and thinking in very limited amounts. sometimes showering, but not always. i need to start putting the important things first, creating a routine, and the things i actually want to do before dinner, because then i can simply fall asleep after without being plagued with anxiousness; it is half the reason why i put off falling asleep, because i’m busy imagining that sometime soon maybe i’ll get up and want to do it. i don’t like my life here; i cannot imagine it differently, i feel at a capacity i have never quite thought possible for myself, so the thought of doing anything more than i am doing currently is jarring enough, but i know i need to change something. it is not worth thinking about whether my restlessness and inattentiveness after consistency is due to my natural dopamine deficiency, which is what my mum would ask and it certainly is, but i cannot accept it because i simply cannot live like this forever. to have somebody tell me that i will need to pick myself up from the rut of living every day, even when it bores me and i cannot even dare poke back at it for lack of words, well that might be the final cut. for the sake of hope, i need to believe that this is not like a disease, but a brief sickness that i will get over one day

camel’s back is sore

october 9th, 2024

it’s hump day! why do we call it that? well, you know. but it’s an ugly word for wednesday, which is normally kind to me; i should give it a rest. i have never spent a wednesday in bed. why not?

i found my work hadn’t saved from yesterday and i’d lost a good two hours worth of writing to a nearly complete article. i was proud of that work. it won’t happen again. i thought about hurting myself today, for sure it came as a bit of a surprise, just a fleeting moment in the student lounge when my jeans were soaked from the rain, my sock were in scrunched up balls at the end of my shoes, my hair was frizzy and gross, and i’d decided to wear my pyjama jumper to school underneath my leather jacket, which was also completely soaked. since i have stopped and started feeling much better, when i think about cutting, normally / all of the time i find the idea short of pointless or unnecessary or sometimes even disgusting, and i see immediately past the appeal. but today it was shiny and bright, and i thought it might be the day, but it wasn’t. i showered after school and shaved my legs and reminded myself that now was the time, but i thought against it as i washed my body and nothing stung. that was that

i also called my parents after school. they’re still in new zealand, doing very exciting things that i should be doing with them. they’d just woken up when i called, and i’d just finished eating a late dinner, and was about to crawl into bed. i ended up monologging, and when i finished, mum told me that i should be in a one-woman show. i have to go to bed now

no singling, your study is a bright spot

october 8th, 2024

where’s the sun? has anybody seen the sun? i am swallowing my own tongue. i have plans. every town is forever away. the trees are so tall and angular and they all stare at me with pleasure. what is there to smile about? i would not smile if i were a tree. maybe if i were a cat or a bird that sung and nested with it’s young. one day i will. music is tasteless. the ceiling is blue and rattling. my feet and the ins of my thighs are the warmest shades of me; you’ll find no more melancholy in the world than you’ll find there. it is not worth the trouble of uncovering a mystery to create one, although it offers virtual victory. i wonder, are they happy with theirs? sometimes i do not know what i have written in my own journals and notebooks. sometimes when people ask me what my poems mean, i don’t know the answer

repenting

october 7th, 2024

do not get it wrong; this is not me repenting. this is me being mean. i cry not from guilt but from anger and frustration, and when you come to get me, it is like the icing on the cake; who wants me at their place? that was it. no sleep last night, and i knew it was no luck. i trembled and walked after her, who talked for me like she had the right. she did. i sat and waited. i saw you and smiled, but i was crying. you were disheartened but you looked at me strangely. car ride home was silent. i grabbed myself when i could. i spent the day home alone. it was funny, really. most of the day i spent cleaning my room. properly cleaning. i dragged rubbish out in bags, and then i did something very expected and was still surprised by it. i began to pack my suitcases. i emptied my drawers of clothes and squeezed things in methodically. mostly, i felt interested to see if it would all fit, but it was nice to know i can pack my bags anytime. that was really why i did it. to know that i am in control of that kind of thing. it gave me the illusion too that i might be leaving sooner than i think. i scrubbed things off my bed-sheet; melted dark chocolate. and that was it. no joy or hate in the world, just me and the same old empty indulgence. dinner was good. i showered after and scrubbed myself

ignoring life for love

october 6th, 2024

today was exciting. i am writing late. i feel very awful and achey now. i woke up feeling beautiful. i ate a croissant and did ballet stretches. i am trying to learn a few things. it is good for me. i like to move my body in this way. i have not done it for a while. i journaled after

we visited verdun today, which is a war site, one of the places where the germans and the french fought one another. we visited four different sites, most memorials, one museum of history. we ate at a diner before. i had a bad chili dish. i felt bad. the car rides were long and difficult. i do not like being between two car seats occupied by a ten and six year old. they are both so loud, and annoying. they pester each other relentlessly. when i came home, i was so tired, and i went straight to my room to watch a movie and call [redacted{. she answered. we talked for a bit about life, and how hard things are. i realised that the reason why i feel so out of control when i’m feeling disconnected from my body is also largely to do with what happened to me as a kid. it feels very wrong to be gone from my body when it is something i’ve tried so hard to reclaim, and what makes up so much of me. i talked a lot. she listened and rarely said anything. she cried because she hadn’t talked to anyone like she’d talked to me. i felt confused. i still feel very confused about all of that. i try not to think about it, but it gives me lots of guilt and sadness. there’s nothing i can do to help it

we ate dinner, which was a good time. i felt happy and light, and i even talked quite a bit at the table. for what i usually manage to say after a full day, anyway. and when i came back upstairs, i saw that [redacted] had messaged me back, and that she wanted to call me. that’s what i just finished doing. we talked on the phone for such a long time. she is everything that’s good in the world. she is what i come to and go from and arrive at and see at the end of darkness. i am possibly more in love with her every single time i talk with her, even when its horrible, because it never is. as i’ve said before, the horrible is the best part. but no horror tonight, just pure love. just pure us. dear god, it’s been good. tomorrow, don’t give up on me; i can still repent later for ignoring life for love

called both my parents, it’s nice

october 5th, 2024

i can’t talk about myself. i cry and cry. it’s time to pack myself up neatly and get the fuck away from everyone before i break into a sweat; i already have. how, god!—has it been this long? of nothing, still. what was i thinking? who was i fooling? what was i busy proving? why do i smile when they praise me? because they never do, and i tell them that. i want them to feel good, i swear i do! i’m wasting like i said that i would the moment i was no longer standing on one foot, juggling

dad, i love you—how did you ever do this without you? i suppose you did have you, but i have you now. you had nobody. you were the loneliest boy in the world. and mum—how did you manage to get out? all these people here are little, they have little dreams, little sites to imagine; they are broadening and flowering but they are little. and why aren’t you like that, too? you had worse, you had nothing, like dad had nobody. do you still both feel like that? even when you must also feel like you’ve got everything you never had? will it always be like this? never feeling full, even when you know that you are, is there always something missing that you used to not have?

walking whilst sitting down

october 4th, 2024

i’m back, waiting for the day to end now. for this week to end. it’s friday. i have one class left. i pray to god i find something fun to distract myself with. my thickest fingernail broke today, right off my thumb; i ripped it off just now. it’s barely a nub, cut just past the finger. it’s ridiculous. i haven’t had a nail this short in a long time. i feel mutilated. it was the kind of fingernail that was so impressive, too, that although i couldn’t bare to look at it because holding it detached from my finger would’ve been just too wrong, i did consider tucking it away in a tissue. it’s in the bin now. oh well. i also considered texting my host mum that i had become sick and thrown up in the bathrooms, and to ask if she could come and get me, but i would never do that. everything is under permanent consideration. i forgot to mention that yesterday was very good, and i felt really basically happy for most parts of the day except for the last hour of class. i have finished reading four books in the last three days ( boule de suif by guy de maupassant, amores: poems by d.h. lawrence, selected poems of robert frost, and love in the night by f. scott fitzgerald) and i am cured, also currently reading three other books, all of which are in french. i’m very excited to finish school here. last night i couldn’t fall asleep, as in that i was very worried about waking up, so i tried to procrastinate for as long as possible. i ended up talking to myself, looking up at the ceiling, until i finally did sleep. it’s very beautiful here, but i am very alone, and i miss my life and all the little people who i love so much simply because we have captured an impression of knowing one another, even though we certainly don’t. like me and the guy at the counter in the op-shop, or the ladies in the aisles, and the children who play tennis in my old primary school, who i see when i walk home from the bus stop. here i am a waiting imposter. i surely know nobody at home in a grocery store any better than i know the strangers here in the supermarché, yet i feel that i might understand them more somehow

every day is one day closer to christmas

october 3rd, 2024

daylight savings setting in here. maybe it’s daylight spending. i can never be sure which one is which. it’s the one where the sun rises later than normal, and it sets earlier than normal. so savings, yes? we’re preserving daylight for later. i just know im wrong

anyhow, its so cold and dark. the bus has nice lighting when the lights go out. it’s all blue. and all the houses aren’t white; the lighting is warm oranges and yellows. it’s amazing. i don’t imagine i will be here long enough to see snow, but i imagine it would be very beautiful. i ate fruit for breakfast this morning: a banana and a tiny mandarin. and a cup of juice. i will tell you what im wearing because it’s a good outfit, and i want you to know that every day i’ve worn something different and special. i have brought enough clothes to do that, and haven’t even worn all of them yet, if that gives you an idea of how overpacked i am. i’m wearing my nicest white lacy bra, with no wire, my black long-sleeve thermal, the white jumper that [redacted] bought for me when we went to reims, my black pleated work skirt—which is no longer a work skirt when i think about it—my white tights and leg warmers, my docs, nice black leather gloves that i’ve never worn before, and my black beanie with a bauble on it. a pom-pom on it. and im wearing my headphones listening to grimes. it’s really an accident that i’m always writing on the bus, about the day before it has begun, but i hope you can understand that by the time the day is over, and i get home, all i manage to do is sloppily undress myself and clamber into the shower, eat dinner and read or try a film. then go to sleep. most of the time, anyway. sometimes i manage to journal. today is going to be a long day, but not as long as tomorrow. every day i wake up, it is one day closer to christmas (that i will spend with my family, in my nice bed, wishing i was here—so i’ve really gotta do this, no matter how bad i want to get gone)

a hopeful day

october 2nd, 2024

i’ve started editing my blog (for real, this time!). i was sitting in the study / student lounge with two hours to spend, so i spent it organising my studies for articles i plan to write. i feel good because i know that all i have to do now is write. one way or another, it’ll be written. that’s a feeling i can’t describe. it’s a good feeling. maybe it’s a lack of godlessness? it’s a presence. of self, i don’t know, but of power, yes. definitely power. i wield the sword in this equation

today there was lots of crying, but not from me. i went to the carrefour this morning, and i even had time to write before school. i wandered around the town because i was locked out. i walked through the graveyard and sat down outside, and i filed my nails. i saw an old man walk in, then i left. i asked myself, “who are you going to see?” and i heard an answer, “nobody you don’t know.” so that was it. i payed much attention to french class today. we are studying gargantua and a particular paragraph contrasting hunger with religion and food; the character has more of an appetite for food than for spirituality. i also knew the answer in class yesterday, to a question about what the third branch of christianity is, outside of protestant and catholic. in my dreams, i raised my hand and said, “evangelism,” but i didn’t, and nobody else had the answer. i could have been worshipped. missed opportunity to prove my intelligence. and the improved french after was good too, with the new student

i came home, took a shower and lay around in my flannel pyjama top and short shorts, and my slippers. it’s been good. time is being very kind today. i don’t feel it so much

something for me

october 1st, 2024

it’s not about me. but so where is it? who is it hiding from, and why? i have travelled to the other side of the world to chase after it, and i’m still not fast enough. still, my chest is heavy mid-morning and i am drawn to hugeness. i am drawn to isolation amongst love; is it proving to be too much intimacy for an anxious embrace? i am drawn to angst, not nervousness. suddenly in the country of a place where i have no name, finally, i am clouded by nervousness, and dreams that cannot be chipped away at from all the way out here, no matter how lucky i am or beside myself i am. everywhere, it’s always going to be about leaving, going on, quickening, hastily making my way to the moon’s other face, an ode to the disappearing act it pulls. maybe it is hiding on the moon after all. maybe that is my true calling

speaking of, i called you last night. i never can work out if all of this is really for you, the whining and the writing and the way i reel in your empty words, or the other you that could be (me, afterwords) (but do i think this is before? and when is the middle), but either way, it is possibly just easier to imagine saying these things to a you rather than to myself, or to nothing, and telling you about my dreams and sicknesses and how much i want to live. i am really very inclined for it, you know? i am ready to run after you, whenever you’re ready: just be there for me in the case of silence or greed

everywhere is boring without love

september 30th, 2024

this morning i thought of messaging [redacted] about sitting on the bus with me after school, and walking me home, and it’s highly likely that i am still going to message him after writing this. if he’s still interested in me, that is. i know i only want to see him so that he will kiss me again, but i think it’s not such a bad thing. there are worse things to be pursuing in these circumstances. i would really like to kiss for such a long time that i stop thinking about us kissing, and i can shut my eyes and think of something good, like my bedroom in december. everyday i think of talking to [redacted], but it’s not my turn yet. it’s good for me to stay away, maybe just for another week. we can’t do it yet. i won’t fuck her over the phone. i won’t end our worship like that. i’ll come when she wants. i’ll be waiting here. she knows that i can’t go anywhere. that’s maybe worse. i wish i was with her and i wish we were in love, but i’m past it. i’m knee-deep in otherness, and it’s sticky and dark and affectionate, and all that stuff i thought was bad before is now the good bit; i miss excusing our arguing as disagreement and breathing into her face after eating garlic on her floor and feeling dirty after being mean with her, and i miss all the foreboding that never arrived. now i feel like a shrew, and a man-whore without her. i miss her, and i wish she would call so she’d put me out of my misery and into something more serious and beautiful

i haven’t had sport yet today. i still have another hour and a half until i’m back in that gym, sweating my ass off, trying to get [redacted] to look at me so that i can make up my mind. but it’s made; i like him a lot. it’s bizarre i think because it’s normal; it is how they say it happens. i don’t know what to do about that. i probably won’t do anything. i would like his phone number, or his home address so i can send him letters from australia. i’m going to think about him forever. probably not, but it’s the kind of thing where i’d like him to message me in twenty years to ask if i’m still living in australia, because he’d love to visit and catch up with me. how do i make him want me in two months?

one month gone

september 29th, 2024

we watched the second beetlejuice movie at the cinema today, and i missed my mum a lot. i went with my host mum and sister, and my host mum’s best friend and her daughter. i sat alone and walked alone after, and i stayed to my side of the car. i am struggling with not feeling impressive, although a little less than i thought i would. it only hurts when i think about it, which is a shame, because i end up thinking about it a lot. tomorrow school starts again, and that might kill me, although always it doesn’t. always i think, “i can’t get out of bed,” and then i do, and then i think, “i can’t wash my face and get ready,” and then i do that, then “i can’t survive school today,” and then i come home, and suddenly the day i didn’t think i could handle is over, and then the week. and then, on and on. does it ever stop feeling like this? like a simulated version of reality? i am trying to get my hands on the map of my life so that i can destroy it and build a new one, but no matter what, i just keep on feeling like i’m on a path that has already been walked by me. my choices all corner me, and they all have ridiculous faces that scare me in the middle of the night

[redacted] cried tonight at the dinner table, only a couple of tears. i was surprised that she was crying but not surprised that she was crying. she does everything in this house. she receives no praise, no recognition, and her children are completely spoilt. [redacted] in particular. he set her over the edge today. she was already annoyed, i could tell, because [redacted] is going away again (i couldn’t hear if it was a work or leisure thing, but either way it would have bothered her), and she didn’t know about it. she asked if it was a joke. he just said, “no,” and looked back at his food. then [redacted] threw his food at her, and that got her crying. she didn’t eat anything else after that. she didn’t cry much but i could tell she wanted to. i find little boys completely insufferable. i called my parents this morning. i’m more sad than i thought i’d be

turtle

september 28th, 2024

i am never allowed to go to a zoo again

“i miss you”

september 27th, 2024

the words have no capitals, no seriousness or smiliness or anything, really. it’s just a bunch of words that hang in the air there for a bit, and then peel off like wall-paper; i’m curious enough to scratch with my nails but it’s not worth the look on her face

i listen to the same music on repeat and the week is finally over, thank god. there’s nothing to cry about except the good old end of the world, which is still coming, and i’m back here in the same stale manly position; watching the trees move outside, expecting to feel embraced by the world when i step outside, but it’s just the same old cold feeling

almost went crazy today

september 26th, 2024

four hours of straight specialist classes this morning. history was good; i maybe even learnt something valuable. but in specialist biology, i was basically on the verge of crying and leaving the classroom for two hours. the french kids are starting to have their tests, so biology was two hours of me staring at the test papers, so spiralling on my own notebook pages with nothing else to do, i dug myself deeper into the mud. lunch was good today. the food, i mean. it was stew with fries. carbo—something. but again, i felt sad in the afternoon. two hours more of english. i sat there and answered some questions, but mostly i think i just wrote some things in french. then we had a french replacement lesson for the one that was cancelled on tuesday. it was only an hour long. i sat and read more of simone de beauvoir’s autobiography (i need to ask the librarian to extend my borrow time somehow, and i need to start remembering my verbs) and joined in for a little bit in the last fifteen minutes. i sat downstairs for the last hour, tried to get more editing done for my blog but gave up, and just kept writing instead. then played wordle until i had to leave for the bus

it’s really a wonder that i’m feeling okay after almost an entire month of leading an opposite life, but it’s not a wonder, and i also don’t feel okay most of the time. so it’s all relative, and it’s all going well. i’m still looking for a way to make the time hurry up, and a way to make the most of everything without sitting on my own all the time

tribute to you and the dark

september 25th, 2024

have you ever slept, woken all foggy and bright, gone to the mirror and seen the mark the mattress has left on your cheek and think, “it was better when it was dark”? i’m filled with unforsaken longing to sleep, to dream, to wake up and forget, to remember pain, to do something with it, to let the bread grow stale and parasitic in my hand; to feed it to my lover and make her throw it up. i am hungry to be fucked. i am trying to find a home that leaves me alone to breathe, but i worry such things don’t exist outside my visions. i worry i will always feel this strangled, no matter who i meet; who i become; where i go; what i feel for. it’s always been this hard. sometimes it is worse than other days, but it is always this hard. i’d do so much better if you were here with me. i don’t believe that you think of me ever. i don’t believe it could be true you wake up some mornings and wish you’d go to bed with me. you only ever text me when i’m in the cinema, or because i imagine you feel my desperation so much that you can’t bear the loud silence any longer. you never ask me things. you never stay with me. you never say, “you’re so good at loving me”, so i’m trying to be good from a distance instead, except you never call me now. only that one time. you never want to hold my hand, you just tell me how pretty it is, and how much you like to look at it. you never want to be next to me, so maybe you just want to imagine it. well maybe i will start letting them have me, if you can’t stomach it. it feels nice to be wanted. i am turned on by the idea that i turn them on. i will never give up myself if it means losing you. you won’t either. why do we play this game? why do i want you to be angrier at me? because i know you’ll forgive me soon, in a week or two. maybe tomorrow. but that’s the fun of it; the anticipation. the when? when? when? i suffer from that you know nothing about. and to have you back after all of that, well, that’s the long-game. that’s my win; your confusion, your apology, your sudden arrival like an orgasm. except you win when i cave, and try to get you into bed with me again, and i always cave

wait for my mind to catch a break

september 24th, 2024

it is not normal to think so oppositely of everything you believe quite so fast. back and forth, back and forth. always up in air. yesterday, on the bus home i felt so good about my french. then last night at dinner i felt just horrible. i felt like everybody could feel me crawling in my skin. and this morning, everybody wants to speak english with me. but in english, i say one very thing in french, and [redacted] looks at me and says, “your french is so good now.” so now i’m on a high that i know is undeserving. i do not have faith in my ability to communicate about 90% of the time, and i have never felt more insecure or discouraged by the opening of my own mouth. i nearly have a nervous breakdown every time my host mum asks me a question. it’s a completely bizzare way to live, in fear of misunderstanding. i feel it at home in australia, and i think that’s why i can bare this extremety. otherwise, it would not make sense for why i have not completely lost it. but the equation seems to balance itself perfectly. the sensitive and introverted kind that go on exchange are used to feeling alienated and mentally far away from people, so they are prepared in this way; while the highly intuitive keep-pushing maybe-autistic extraverts survive in their own way from this misunderstanding because they don’t really understand it either, or themselves. so they manage to just get through it. i imagine that the person who would react the poorest to the kind of intense rejection and frequent misunderstandings would be somebody who does not know why they are laughing, and cannot characterize the feelings they have. what would i do without a radar that tells me who to stay away from? who to be involved in? who not to smile at? this helps me avoid unnecessary misunderstanding

this morning i banged my arm into a girl who was walking past as i put my bag down underneath my desk. she said “ow”, and i was curious if she felt hurt while sitting down for the rest of the lesson. i also need to fix my “sorry!” reflex, and replace it with “pardon”, but i don’t know how to do this. maybe i will just practice in front of the mirror, and try to keep it in my mind at all times. i need to learn some new things in french. i am writing this in my one hour break, by the way. i have five hours today after my next class, which is maths. yesterday in maths i sat at the back of the class and looked at universities in the edinburgh area. maybe i’ll do something similar again. i wish i didn’t feel so in love with people the moment i was away from them

sixteen

september 23rd, 2024

i turned sixteen today. i wore a bouncy white skirt with two bows that sat on my hips, a light brown tank top, my fox socks, and a white jacket over the top. [redacted] gave me chocolates in the morning before class and i was too stunned to say anything. last night, i braided my hair. it woke up looking very pretty today. amazing reaping the reward. i wore eyeliner to school for the first time since i’ve been here, and i will continue to. i had all bad lessons, but i did things to cheer myself up. in history, i tried to learn. i took notes and was interested. i replied to birthday messages in the break and i didn’t cry. i had biology and didn’t jump out the window. i didn’t look at the clock as to be kind to myself, and the time surprisingly went away much quicker than all the other times i’ve been in that class. lunch was cheesy pasta. i can’t remember what happened or what things i said. [redacted] came back to school today after being away for her mother’s death. in maths, i sat at the back and looked at university options in scotland. then in pe, i bucked up and got some courage. then [redacted] and i played a match. i didn’t tell him it was my birthday, but i have a feeling he wouldn’t have gone easy on me anyway. i’m attracted to him, i can tell now: mostly his niceness, but also his soft boy-ness, his hair and eyes and his height, and the way he looks out for me. he’s funny and passionate and he’s good at everything. and he’s older than me. he’s also untouchable. there’s no way i could make this boy love me in a couple of months

i told you i wouldn’t mope

i will not mope, i promise you that

september 22nd, 2024

it’s officially my day of birth, adelaide time. here there is still seven more hours to go. i’ve felt a bit shit today, really. i lay in bed mostly all morning, looking at my phone. although i went downstairs and had a glass of juice for breakfast, and i wrote in both my journals at the table. i even called my parents, which was nice. i showed them my clothes. i will call them again tomorrow for my birthday. it’s going to make me feel just terrible after, because i will have two more classes to go to until i can go back home and cry. it’s going to be a very long, hard day, but i’m going to try and have fun. i won’t mope, i swear to god. after lunch, we all left the house and went for a long walk in the middle of nowhere. it was nearly two hours we were out for. we crossed through the middle of a paddock with electric fences around. i am so worried that their family dog is going to die while i am here. i think i am more worried about it than them. she is a big dog. she lives outside and her black fur is nearly all grey everywhere on top of her head and her snout. i can’t help but be incredibly emotionally attached to her. i feel like the family knows i am feeling shit. i can’t even be convincing in this language. i walked ahead for most of the walk, and i got hot and sweaty quickly. i have not been drinking enough water. but at some point, we sat down and i ate my clementine and two marshmallows; one pink and one white. i listened to music for the entire walk, too. one taylor swift album and one florence and the machine album. i wish i had more energy, and i didn’t miss home so much. there is nothing i can do to help myself either, not more than i am doing. contrary to my own belief, i have never dwelled in my sadness less than now. i have this charging belief that it’s all going well, and i’m doing the best i can. it’s why i get out of bed in the morning, and i try to talk to people at the cantine, and i try and try and try. i have not given up yet, and i don’t plan to. but it’s impossible to deny how difficult it feels to want this. i’m not denying it anymore

after i drink some water, i’m going to think about things. what a terrible sentence. but it’s true. i think tonight is the night to start meditating again. before my fourth week. it will be over before i know it. tomorrow i’ll be lying here in the same position, counting my lucky stars. hopefully i will also be crying. hopefully i will have had a not bad day

unloading

september 21st, 2024

i want to go home. i feel truly liberated here. i’m desperate to cry. i want to do cool things like this all the time. i want to be so far away from myself that i reach the front door. i want to see my dad. what if i don’t remember all the noises here? and the feelings? it is so easy to see this ending soon, and coming home; feeling so embraced and so loved again. and also feeling like more of an outsider there than i do here. my nothingness makes me something here that i could never have imagined before. i am bethany here, and i wear interesting clothes that are just feminine enough to be considered french. i take the bus and i don’t say anything, and when i do, i make a mess of it. nobody knows a thing about me, except that i call my mum a lot, and that i understand them most of the time when they talk; so they should watch what they say around me. it’s interesting. what if i don’t remember the noises? every long card ride, i keep on thinking; this is it. this is the end. where am i, again? who am i again? why is nobody sleeping in my bed at home? at home? at home? for how long is it home, or is it forever? it’s forever, isn’t it? well. i need to cry, and i need to write something good, and i need to speak more french, and i’m going to regret this. i’m going to miss this. i miss my mum, and i miss my dog, and i want to go home. i feel like i’m floating above the ground here. i need to meditate. i need to cancel my apple tv subscription. i need to settle down about my hatred for all sport. i need to catch my breath and take a walk, and meditate again. i need to fix something. and stop worrying! oh, god. i need to stop calling home. it’s only making this harder. at least i am not in [redacted]’s position. i have nearly been here for a month. it’s my sixteenth birthday in two days. i am not spending it with my family. i am spending it playing badminton and doing maths and hopefully crying while opening my cards after school. i need to be grateful. i need to be clever. i am not a bad person for taking myself in, and not having room for much else. it’s not going to be this way forever. i want to be here

uneventful subject : stress, fed-up

september 20th, 2024

i keep on thinking it’ll be okay. but today i have a hiccup in every breath and my heart isn’t beating right. i just want to cry. i just want to survive, get through it; move on. be better. call my mother. but it’s not right. it doesn’t fit inside me. i’ve tried everything. every angle. i’m doing so well. is this all there is out there? i keep on thinking, “it doesn’t get any better than this” and then, “there has to be something better than this”. there’s so much going on that i think i could implode at any moment, and i really mean that. i have nobody to talk to now. i am on the verge of total panic. i could swallow myself. i have to go slower. what can i do? it’s not like that. it’s just like i’m stuck in the universe and there’s no way to reach something bigger than it or to see outside of it (without turning to drugs, which i won’t), and i think sometimes it is a much sadder thing than it is; the truth. today i wrote in my book, “i am lucky to have this brain. i am lucky. and what if i waste it on something it is confined to?” so how do i break out of my confines, my prison. where is the answer hiding from me? is it hiding or waiting? should i run after it like i say that i will or would i only being chasing after more fear and uncertainty? is it destined for me, like i feel it is, or am i like everyone else? do i also believe in what doesn’t exist to console myself, because at the heart of it, i am more afraid of what my existence doesn’t mean than what it might? am i going to settle before i reach the high-lands? this very last thought is what makes me cry the most

september 19th, 2024

homesickness

september 18th, 2024

nothing new here. sat outside under my wednesday morning tree this morning and sent videos to [redacted] about men here and why i’m confused about liking them; i feel homesick i think. i know i do. i don’t really like going to school here anymore; it takes up all my time. it’s a good distraction, but to think without it, i would shop every day and play with the dog in the backyard and eat at a different bakery each monday morning. after this week ends, four more to go. then two weeks of holidays. then three more weeks. i can do that, i think. maybe not monday, though. i can’t do another seven mondays at school here. that’s a full week taken up by mondays. it was hard to get out of bed this morning: i straightened my hair and it looks bad and i feel like everyone is looking at it. i just remembered i’m on my period, too. fuck that too

i have some time to waste until class. i had a dream last night that i spent a month and a half in france, and then came home for a week, then would need to go back to france for the last month and a half. the dream was set in the week i was at home, and i went to school. it was a dream, so most of it was completely ridiculous, but i remember at some point i went into class to see [redacted] and she didn’t have the time to talk with me; she just dismissed me. when i woke up, it got me really missing her. i could not even spend time with her in my sleep

so much of the time, i spend completely dreading things. then moving on. i spend all of it excited about coming back home, though; at the end of all of this. what kind of things i’ll remember and look back on to think, wow, that was not so bad at all. i have spent some times here in complete dissociation, but it doesn’t worry me too much. there are a few days here and there that i look back on and can’t remember much, aside from how i felt in a very specific moment. oh, god, i know i am having a good time. what is it? i mean, i am listless now. is this an acceptable point to accept myself as “listless”? because what am i doing wrong? if you tell me that i am dwelling too much, i have spent the last three weeks wandering around in disastrous denial, still trying to coax my feelings. i know it is just a rough period, and it will get better, but i miss my mum so much that i have a headache

beautiful outside again today

september 17th, 2024

in the mirror i make jokes about my slippery skin, about how i feel like it might fall off me. on the walk back to your home into your bed, after we saw the moon and it danced for us, we laughed it off; i knew you felt bad. i know you’ve probably forgotten. this body is good as it should be. i have no problems with it now, none so clear that i am worried, like about where to go to when i have no home, because there’s always me under all that skin that is stretching and pulling and has been in this whole life. in this whole life, i have felt fairly small in myself and big in the streets and unable to fit into enough places where i can truly rest. comfortably rest. waking up to myself is a sweet treat now: i’m so happy to see my angles and curves and fuzzy outlines that blur into nothing but the world. and i am skinny now. i fit into all these small places. but i still laugh and laugh and laugh in the mirror. not because it’s really that funny. but because it’s a confusing thing, how i can still feel like this after all the stretching and pulling all my life. it’s easier to pretend like i don’t notice it happening; the separation. between what? i think what i know about my body and how it appears to be to others

i’m writing on the bus again because it’s beautiful. so beautiful to feel it all move away underneath you, like a dress slipping off your hips and you can feel it moving like your own feet on the floor. it’s not sensual anymore, it feels habitual. my days here are measured in bus rides, watching for the sun, hoping it won’t be too foggy to see, and my weeks are measured in filling up my pill container. as i’m writing this, the sun has just come up, everyone’s trying to look at it. i hope to see it again after we get out of this next town. all the houses hide it. it doesn’t make our skin hot when it’s this far away, and this early in the morning. it still has so much height to gain

physical education

september 16th, 2024

today i ate lunch with the girl who came up to me while i was at the library, and we spoke some french and got to know each other. she was really, extroadinarily nice, so i don’t understand what’s wrong with me that i was excited to be alone afterward. it’s not unusual, but i really didn’t think i was in need of such a moment of introvertism. i got my laptop today though, so i am going to try and work on getting used to the keyboard. i hated all my classes today, and i know i act like a child when i talk about sport, which is part of the reason why i never do, but also because i can’t ever be good at it, and it is one of those things that other people (everyone else in the world but me) have no problem being great at. c’est pas grave, and i know that so i should stop complaining; but it makes me feel entirely on my own. needing to downplay myself in front of others because i don’t want them to think i’m not self-aware enough to know i’m bad at sport is dull, and it hurts not only my ego but my opinion of myself. i like moving my body, but not in a two hour class at school designed for my efforts to be rated and graded. thinking about how next monday is my birthday, and i have nothing at school to look forward to, makes me feel pretty down actually. i’m proud of myself for doing what i’ve done today in an effort to just get through it, but shouldn’t i be allowed to drop this class if it means instead, i can walk around town and buy my host family some flowers before the bus ride home? i really need some courage before i skip this class for the first time next week. god, i hope it’s cancelled or something. on the bus home, i talked to [redacted] who just landed in germany. we just texted, but it’s so good; i miss her. i bought a pizza from the bakery on the way home, and ate it in my room

the horrible other

september 15th, 2024

there is so much more trying to spend the time here than i thought there would be, because i’m so busy already. there’s no time for anything. but still i lie around and feel bad about it. it’s all very strange, not quite real, like i’m just playing the game to satisfy myself, but there are no rules. i think that’s another thing. i don’t really know what to do. i’m here now, and so what? i’m good with it, and myself, but not with the boundaries. i follow around my own shadow sometimes, and it’s unnecessary. my shower was nice. i’m clean now, and lying in bed waiting for this period to start. it won’t come until tomorrow, i’m sure of it. it’s nice to wait for a real reason, though. and this period might crack down hard on me, i have that suspicion of almost a hazy blindness, where you don’t want to open your eyes because it’s too underwhelming, but closing them makes you seem helpless. at least i’ll be able to suck my thumb in the gymnasium tomorrow and complain about mal au ventre… and hopefully the time will fill itself. hopefully there will be more things to enjoy. there’s still a tomorrow and a yesterday, and that means the horrible other is not going to dawn on me yet. when she does, you’ll know

i miss it because it was easy

september 14th, 2024

still there’s no reason greater than that, for me going home. easy is an inexplicit word choice. i guess i mean that it was natural. that’s just how it goes, i guess, and people feel that forever. where they were born and grew up gives them the same kind of feeling their childhood gave them. i’ve been lucky enough to have a happy one. australia is easy. it’s default. it’s moping around in the heat and hoping there’s the best kind of ice cream still left in the freezer from last summer. it’s just a feeling. i’ve known forever that i love it here, that i might belong here, into the mirror’s imposter : the intimate reflection, the darkening abyss posing as a naked lover, the whatever-europe-is. i know this is a feeling, too. it is a harder, more complicated, dense feeling. imagine it like a fist in the ears, doing nothing. just there. maybe threatening a headache, but never. never. and all of it is so good. aside from the noise. the big aches and wanting. but it’s what i wanted at home anyway. to give my reflection a break, to eat the shard. i’m yet to lose sight of the abyss, but swallowing is easy. i’ve wanted this forever

look now!

september 13th, 2024

there are just some things that only happen in europe. my classes today were good. i am so tired by lunch-time, and the last lesson i have is two hours long. it is almost torturous. but i entertain myself, and i always come home at the end of the day, to write and eat dinner and smile at the family dog through the glass back-door by the kitchen table. she wishes she was inside with us. this dog has more longing than me. it’s like a competition. who can whimper first loud enough that we will be let inside? except i’m already here, locked up and sweating through outfits, and i have no voice, no words to whine with. she can whine and whine all she wants, but will never allow herself to ruin their house, even if she was let inside. therefore, she has probably the worst fate. the days are flying by. the document i write in before moving these to the archive, i start with all the months and days of the year, of course emptied at first. i remember waking up on the first of september, on the sunday, and thinking how long it would be until i had filled september. look now!

some things that happened today: the eleven-year-old girl sat on the bus home with me today and she told me some words in spanish, she told me to go through the colours in french and she’d reply with the word in spanish. i said, “rouge”, and she said “rojo”, then i said “violette”, and she said “violeta”, then i said “blanche”, and she said “blanco”, then i said “jaune”, and she said, scrunching up her nose and laughing all nervous now, “je connais pas celui-là…” when she got off the bus she tapped my window from the outside as she walked past, and waved goodbye at me. when i came home, [redacted] was loitering in my room and delivered me my package from my parents (which was waiting underneath my pillow). there it was! my wonderful beautiful travelxcard, which means i am now a certified rich person. then me and [redacted] played for probably a lifetime, and i helped her with her homework—not really, i just sat there—and then we organized the costumes we’re wearing for halloween, because i’m going to be here during halloween. i didn’t even know the french did halloween, but i’m happy to participate if it’s true. i sat downstairs and started reading nadja by andré breton

jeudi, i hope the morning drags on and on

september 12th, 2024

my heart is filled with so much longing for these strangers. i wish i were a mother in her warm car dropping my french kids off to the bus-stop, waving at the bus driver like they know each other. i wish i were the the fat old woman in the open red window each morning, folding her washing over the tree branch that must hit against her roof every storm, sparing a glance to us kids. i wish i were really here, and this wasn’t just like fostering a dream. it’s only the morning. i’ve got the day stretching out in front of me, and i always want to write on the bus because it’s magical here. everyone’s starting up, and so is the rest of the world; the sun is different. it’s orange, naked and blistering, full and completely beautiful, you can look into it’s eyes when it rises, and everybody puts down their hands to pray to it when it hits their faces

“maman died today, or…”

september 11th, 2024

there is a girl in the group i’ve made friends with who’s mum died last night, or maybe early this morning. according to [redacted], who has known her, i’m sure, for a very long time, her mum had been sick for a while with something that i couldn’t quite catch the name of. anyway. to hear about it stirred me enough that i called my own mum. it was a particularly gloomy morning already, too, and i was sitting in the student lounge area waiting for class to start, and flipping through pages of the stranger. my mum is sick too, but just with a cold, and she reminded me i have nothing to worry about; she is not going to die from this. i can’t remember what happened today. i stay in my room after school lately, and i know i should come out for more than just the hour surrounding and following dinner, but it’s the only time in the world that i have when it’s there, which is… always, i guess. still. i’m not depressed! all things are good, particularly now, and i am not missing home at all, only in little brief flashes

it’s cold here, i have nobody

september 10th, 2024

it’s already getting cold here. but not the kind of cold it is at home. it’s a brash and invasive cold, this one, and it stays on your skin. just like the heat did last week. i almost don’t believe how quick the change occurred. the bus this morning was so nice, and the mornings here have been especially peaceful since i arrived. no kids in the morning, and i hit the buzzer on my alarm at 6:10, swallow my meds noisily after i turn on the floor-lamp by the desk, stumble to the bathroom after shuffling into my hoodie and socks, and i clean my face well. scrub it and polish it with nice, new moisturizer and try not to freight about my face wash running out. and i don’t rinse the toothpaste out. then i change into my clothes in my room, and today they’re particularly cozy; my blue-turquoise wool sweater, with a nice floppy collar and big wide arms, and my comfy jeans, and the nike flats i’ve had since i was twelve. i rub oil into my hair and today, put it into a bun at the back of my head, and then i do my makeup. i put all my things into my leather bag and shuffle downstairs, clutching my book (”the stranger”, i decided to start reading it again last night at 1am, and am really enjoying it), my shoes, and my headphones. then i make my breakfast. the kids’ cereal and the strange, thick multifruit juice they always have in the fridge. i go through instagram and pretend to take things in

but the bus is the best part of the morning. the sun begins to properly rise up, then, and it casts not a golden light but a real tangy, angry orange colour all through the bus, and the little dewy tears melt off the window. i read my book on the bus this morning, too. and i listened to songs i might’ve listened to two years ago at a pool party. it’s worth nothing to recount my life, but the more i try and tell you what i’m thinking, the more i feel like i’m suffering, and doing it without realizing. so i’ll settle now for telling you about the morning

about christmas; i’ll be home by then

september 9th, 2024

i spent the day home sick today, waiting for something. i realized that when i was starting my new blue journal. the one i keep my drawings in and keep-sakes in and all my most undeserving ideations. i thought to myself, what am i going to do after this? no, don’t think about it. i have to finish this first. then i thought again and realized, i have nothing to do. i could do anything, and time is in front of me. all of today. so i gathered my items and went downstairs, sat myself down in front of the television and first i called my mum, while i was eating breakfast. i wanted her to know i missed her, but i didn’t end up telling her that. she was out with friends at the pub, and she sounds sick too, but she didn’t tell me that. we both just kind of looked at each other and pouted. then i called [redacted] and i sat back down in bed to charge my phone. i finished painting my nails while she told me about her family, and her dad hurting her, and her little sibling’s insanity, and how things are actually going well. she tells me she wrote “fuck you” in lip-stain on her dad’s study door, but he made her clean it off. i realize this is a story i’ll never have to tell. i think it’s a good story, though, and if it wasn’t so sad why she’d done it, it would’ve been even better. i told her about here, and how things are, and i think i might’ve told her i’m learning things. which is true. i am learning about things. my communication void, and how every day it threatens to open up and swallow me. i talked to [redacted] too later on. but it wasn’t that important. for the rest of the day, i just sat on the couch and watched uptown girls, love, actually and maybe half an episode of a tv show on netflix that i can’t remember the name of. i ate spoon-fulls of honey and the world went quiet for about ten seconds before i asked myself what i was doing there. i wrote for the rest of the afternoon in all my other journals. i’m starting to feel uneasy

forgot to write

september 8th, 2024

today’s been good. i hope my host mum will let me stay home tomorrow

thoughts on exchange

september 7th, 2024

i should give my parents more affection. i should’ve cried when i left them at the airport. i shouldn’t have been annoyed at my mum for worrying. i should’ve crawled into bed with my dad when mum left for the weekend; he loves me just as much. should i flirt back with the boys at school, even though i am not sure about them? will i ever want-want a boy like that? i should call my best friend more. i should tell her to cry more in my arms. i should stop writing; it only ever makes me more prone to longing and seething. but i can feel myself losing self-touch when i don’t pick up a pen. i can’t wait to move away from my hometown. i feel guilty for thinking that. i know i’ll end up in scotland. it’s knowledge, and i cannot help it. i need to return where i was found, and you were lost. i can’t wait to do something big and terrifying with my life. i know i’ll let myself down by thinking like that. nothing is ever as exciting as i dream it to be. except this, and this is small. i still know i’ll be more than i thought was possible. i know i’ll never stop wanting more, but i only want to slow down; to have a child that’s mine, a dog that sleeps at the end of the bed on my toes and a cat that sleeps by my head on my pillow. it would be just us. but i can’t. i can never; i have to keep fighting for myself. all i want is one thing, and another, and then that one great thing in the world; to be a writer. to make something great. to make life worth living. to dive in and forget to leave, to prune and prune and be stuck forever. i never want to be stuck. only in my throat. i should be and be and be i list like a manifest. i am not demonstration. i am piled in the bed, breathing. sometimes looking. normally shutting. what can i do to be worthy of a title outside of myself?

dream

september 6th, 2024

these moments alone with myself mean a lot to me. in the classroom, ten minutes before everybody pours in, finishing my presentation for the other people in my group. i almost forget where i am. i’m here. not dreaming. in france and not dreaming. in a real classroom, with my eyes wide open. i keep saying to the people i call, “it feels like a dream, so i treat it like that, but every time i open my eyes in the morning i’m still here,” and it makes it sound like a nightmare. but it’s not like that. i think i might just be unsettled still. how should i fill in the time after school? i’ve been coloring in and feeling sick. i’ve been trying to journal every day, but it’s hard to be excited recounting my days. i know that’s what i’ll want to read about in fifty years, though. what will the girl in ten years need when she’s trying to compile her journal entries and send them to a publisher? it’s hard trying to please all the future versions of me

seasonal

september 5th, 2024

i’m going to sleep so well tonight. i’m getting sick; my throat itches a little more every morning and i sneeze every chance i get. i don’t know how to say, “i think my sickness is seasonal, because of the change in climate,” in french. i wish you could see what im seeing. my bedroom window looks out on fields on fields on the world in our world, and the boy i kissed today is somewhere also down the street. the boy who kissed me who grabbed my chin and texted me later to ask if i liked it. he’s somewhere down the road. my best friend is where i hope to leave her, tucked up in bed at 4am in the morning. i’m going to sleep so well tonight

fantastic news about being happy

september 4th, 2024

it’s funny, because i always said i wanted to write. when things get bad, i turn to it. when they are good, i resist it. the writing becomes over-personal, and too descriptive. the order of a writer’s nature is in some way disrupted by their happiness. it becomes less like art, and more like a sculpture. how real should it be before they sense the fear? i wonder, when i am scribbling my silly poems into school books on my bedroom floor. and i forget that fear is what they all want. they want to say, how long can it last like this, before it’s tacky and unrealistic? i want there to never be a time when my fantastical ideas become “tacky”. i am still figuring out the differences between irrational and abstract things in my own writing. i don’t know which i tend more towards, but i’d like to think abstraction. surely every great writer did/does? aside from bulgakov, he had mastered both in a blender

i don’t believe in wasting time, but am i wasting mine?

september 3rd, 2024

i read something terrifying today that said if you spent four hours daily on your phone, that it’s fourteen years of your life. it makes me want to die, honestly, to think how much time i’ve wasted. then i think, is any of it wasted? up to this point, no. the time i spend is all spent anyway. some day i might look back and wish i had spent the time differently, drawing and writing and doing real things with my hands, but i am doing enough already. i am trying just like anybody is

september 2nd, 2024

i’m a living gallery; my body is my art

september 1st, 2024

the title is a line from a short film i just finished watching called “affairs of the art”. tomorrow school starts, and tomorrow i decide what exchange will be for me; a social experiment, a grand challenge to take upon myself and revel in the excitement of newness, or completely terrifying, a time to cower at anyone who tries to speak to me and cry each day on the way to school. writing this alone makes me remember what a thing it is to have a psyche and developed awareness. i can decide now. it’s possible that i can decide to wake up early and prepare, to rock up to the bus-stop on time but with headphones in and an outfit violation, and i can smile at the person i want to befriend. i can make my way to school slowly after, and apologize if i’m late, and sit at the back. this is not a challenge, to do all the things i want to do. i’m good at that. i’ve learnt how to slot it all in. people are the challenge. they always have been. so what if i manage to fit myself inside this 9 hour window of education and make it out alive if i don’t have a single friend to call my friend? everybody says i will make friends easily, no problem, before i know it, but i don’t know—i really hope it’s the truth. more than anything, i want a friend

my digital diaries from november & december of 2024

getting on with life in a way

december 10th, 2024

i have made it this far and not once googled ‘guide to wrapping round christmas presents’, which shows growth from perfectionism or an unfortunate descent into lack of care. i am feeling particularly normal today—i woke up and watched the french news channel. i wrote in my journal in front of the television after my brother came home from bali. we all said hello to him in the hallway, and he disappeared into his room to crash out. i saw him when the door was cracked open; he still had his converses on. then i decided i’d swim in the pool. i put on the speedo bathers i wore when i was still doing competitive swimming in year 7 and 8; i look thin now and much better in them, but they felt tight around my chest and hips. it is interesting, because i do not think i have grown or shrunk in those areas. anyway, it felt nice to wear. i felt noble for being able to put them on and feel pleased. i wished someone had seen me, so i could say to them — look! look! they still fit — but then again, i am grateful nobody did see me. the swim was nice; i lapped the pool and swam in all sorts of ways. some of my thoughts make me so sick that they are repetitive, i often think of lines to books in my heads or theories i am developing and i do not want to write them down. i think they are bad, because i have thought of them so often as a default; my mind draws back into those places and it tires me. whenever it came up, i dunked myself under water

then i showered and washed my hair well. i thought of straightening it like i do every week but never end up doing because it’s never actually as exciting as i imagine it will be. mum sent me out on a mission after i was ready to buy us both coffees. i emptied my trash and then i walked up the road with a bag of my clothes that dragged on the ground of not carried drooping over my left shoulder. i delivered it to the vinnies next door to the cafe with the good oat milk. i ordered mum a medium flat white with oat milk, and myself a medium chai latte with oat milk. this is what i’ve been drinking normally since coming home—there is bad oat milk everywhere except for this place. i brought it home and said hi to the cleaners. they come to our house every week and are kind, and they have seen me grow up over the last decade. i do not think they really remember me, though. they have always looked the same to me, never any older or younger. like my parents, too. i cannot ever remember mum with blonde hair. anyway. i’ve been reading my book and wrapping christmas presents, i sent [redacted] some videos on snapchat too, as well as organizing what i need to buy. i think i’ve worked it all out now. i will be broke by january. i also made theo food and we watched the beginning of the fourth fast & furious film. i do not know why he is watching them. do you see what i mean when i tell you that i feel normal today? i am doing such regular things, not getting it together per say but certainly getting on with life in a way

december 9th, 2024

the cogs in the mind, watching you tick

december 8th, 2024

i am coming to terms with the fact i am not a truly mean and actively conniving person. it is easy to feel that way when i lie often to others about my strategies to gain their affections. but i am okay more and more to know honestly it does not undo me when i convince friends, please, please, to stop me if i ask something they are uncomfortable with. even though i know i never would, for i am too considerate and watchful, and there is no reason to say this at all. it’s prideful, which is what makes me feel sick after. am i doing it out of real consideration at all? but yes, i think. today i think so. and i know with [redacted] i ask her things because it is her mind i have always secretly wished to know devoutly; it is with real satisfaction and nothing but curiosity that i watch the cogs in her brain work through the words i pose as threat, and as creative nourishment for both of us

freshness, busiest day

december 7th, 2024

we ran this morning. i did not run well, but dad stayed with me the whole time. i walked for a while. we ran to the ending, anyway. maybe next time i will be better. but afterward we swam in the ocean, and the world felt kind to me again. i won’t waste our time trying to explain to you this feeling of easiness, because i hope you realize it rarely exists; it is a rush of coldness which turns you back to some primal fixation with where you are. those moments are rare, and they tell a story about you without your participation. it is good to feel unbroken for a small moment. we drank coffees with bad oat milk at the café above the dunes. then came home, i dressed and replied to people on my phone. i should not use the internet, i think. i wrote in my journal and put makeup on. we [my parents and i] went out to breakfast in the town and then went op-shopping. i bought nothing but had a good time anyway. at home, i read most of my book before i went back to the beach, thinking i’d swim, but i just read more. it was not sunny, and the wind was sharp. my feet did get burned, though. i made a voice recording on my phone to talk about everything. a mum and her two boys were watching me as they moved past; i realized i didn’t care that they knew i had nobody on the phone. the sun came out and i walked home, ate an avocado toast and mum and i piled into the car with no dogs. on the way, we listened to a new york times podcast on the substance. mum is out now, at a group gathering with her friends. she’s not going to be home until late, so i’ve been writing. and writing. and writing. my book, mostly. am i allowed to call it that?

hopeful to be great at something

december 6th, 2024

arrived at aldinga—going out for dinner once dad arrives. writing is hard and also the easiest thing in the world. art is how i imagine pregnancy. sex is the half-formed idea, the love affair you have before you give yourself over to one idea about how love means to be, to find you are with child is to accept you are hopeless for trying and this is the paradoxical fun of it, before bearing the child and giving life to the art you nurture, you must secretly loathe all the things about being changed by desire—you will always be a mother after your delivery, you will forget yourself in caring and crying and constant giving without anything in return except theoretical joy—it’s all future-focused. nobody loves the nights awake. everybody lies about it. the indulging mothers say, “it is hard at first. you’ll learn the ropes. there’s nothing like being a mother,” and this tides you over because it’s true, but it never really applies. because there’s always disgust, there’s always uneasiness, there’s always lying to yourself; it is only amplified now by what you’ve chosen or rather not chosen to become. you want the child, you want to see what you’ve created experience the world, and maybe for others to delight too. but that is never the point. they tell you it can be, but it’s only ever a moment. i don’t know. i’ve been thinking about art lately and i am sentimental about what i don’t have; i’m furious about it because i’m envious of glory and my own youth, and i am also happy to be alone and do what i can to experience myself on my own. purpose is terrifying because it does not exist anymore; it’s your own responsibility to assign your role within yourself. i do not want to become soulless and aching but i am also afraid of so much, i worry if i will do anything in my life that is truly great and fulfilling a need. i deep-cleaned my bathroom this morning

deciding to be honest today

december 5th, 2024

i know it is quite the statement, but i feel time slipping away from me and i cannot keep doing nothing about it. i have to be honest with you that i am not sure about anything. i do not know why it’s only a recent plague that’s befallen me; thinking that sensuality of existence does not matter. i am on the second day of my period and i slept well last night and now my face looks totally different. my ass has a tiny discolored mark on it. my heels are always blistered and my mum makes constant note of it. my eyes look small and slanted. my breasts are too big for my body. when i do not know what to say, i always come back to telling you about my figure. i tell you what hurts and i tell you to press the surface, i rip off the tag and ask you which way to put my shirt on. there’s nothing interesting about why i am a liar. the worst part is that i cannot tell you what i’ve lied about; i know it would bore you to tears of confusion. you will say, but why would i care? i do not even know you! i do not think i am lying for you. and the truth is that some things i simply can’t remember anymore, because the lie is more important. the truth is that to understand how to make people enjoy you, you must be a comfortable liar to a degree; not because you deceive but because you prepare for the worst. i love that i have people who are willing to give to me. it used to be a thing i cried about, but now i am mostly happy. we do exactly the same as each other; bring out what is needed. it is like when you speak with another person, and somebody walks up behind them who you want to impress so you say something completely loudly gauche, you make yourself big and beautiful and shiny, and you hope they are listening to your conversation. but you must control it for it to work and be good; you cannot be big anymore. you must be humble. that is all it is. trying to find shininess. i know that certain people need to see certain things, that are true but are at the height of glory just for them: sometimes my cleverness, maybe my introversion, or my willingness, my creativity, my adulthood and responsibility — it is a game of knowing what to show to whom. others prefer that you give them a weak point. show your belly, is what these people are thinking. this is where sensitivity shines; it is allowed to kill all of your strengths for just a moment, to tone down while the other person becomes used to you. to be sensitive to the world, no matter how idiotic. i am not sure i mean it when i tell you i believe in certain powers or great things, because i do not always believe reason prevails, or has to. sometimes i say things to reassure myself, but really it sounds as though i am convincing you of something false. if you are worried about what to believe of the things i say, know i am even more worried

let the sky darken with many pinks a-fold

december 4th, 2024

what about balance is worth it? being with others. aloneness. conversation. the phone ringing. buying someone’s old books. reading street signs out loud. anger. changing lampshades. drinking with family. smoking alone, wondering if it is working. crying in front of someone because you are happy. having worry for tomorrow, eager agitation. anticipation. cold hands that warm. certain birds you listen to when the window is open. these are all things that are ultimately good, i guess. and that happen so rarely but so often at the same time they are no longer special or officially sacred. they are, though. i know that they are more than i don’t, but i still am no happier than for a fleeting second. i cannot stop breathing with my mouth open; i have caught a cold since coming home. and i worry for the film i am taking my mum to see. i have told her it is a horror movie — i am worried i have mislead both of us! so much to do today still. we have already decorated for christmas and i have already gone to school to see [redacted]. i wonder, do i love waking up? do i love these long days or does it tire me too much? i know i tell you nothing anymore, but i have nothing to say; life is moving very fast ever since i came home and there is no time to explain why it’s all meaningful, and because there is no explanation. it is always easier to lie to yourself, anyway. it feels exciting sometimes, mostly during the day, but at night i become unbelievably convinced that my life is a waste. i do not know why. i have been doing superficial things lately. but again, no, not really. i have been seeing people who all pretend they want me to talk about myself. it feels exciting at first but then tiring. i distract them by posing them a few quick and thrilling questions, but after a moment they remember they should ask about me and all is forgotten again. i like this but don’t know what to do with myself. i cannot bring myself to study or be an intellect

remember i am loved and ready

december 3rd, 2024

it’s nearing the end of the year! not really, but it feels like it’s all going away and i need to hoard and get ready for a rebirth. i have been bad at writing lately. you probably have noticed. i think i am not inclined to it right now. maybe tomorrow i will be overcome with urges. it’s not so bad. i do write in journals, but it’s never on purpose or because i truly seem to want to; it happens with automation. is this such a bad thing? it is the only thing i can stomach, so it must not be so bad. sometimes i worry that i don’t say anything meaningful when i write, and that it’s only just words. but i hope someone will understand the lesser things as more than nothing, because i do care about all of them. for such a long time i worried so much about coming and going, but now i’m back and i live with the same set of circumstances, the same clouds, the same family members. it is not so bad at all, but it is unimaginable intolerance. i get angry more than i want to because the world has not done anything to me. i ask myself questions that are not real, and say, will the world be kind or cruel to me today? when really it is more absent than loving or hateful. that makes it easy to be blue from aloneness. there is always noise outside, and my window is always open, but i rarely hear things if i am not trying

how much is it useless?

december 2nd, 2024

the sun burned my legs today. i felt it burning but i did not put on sunscreen. i only did my chest and face because i am afraid of old skin on those areas. i was curious to see if i’d go red. of course, i did. i am such a stupid, senseless girl sometimes. last night we ate cherries on the kitchen counter because. and this morning i shoved my meds into your mouth because they are yours too. and then we took the tram. i am more beautiful than i was two years ago when we did this. and you are too. it was good. we were cool, and i felt a little dirty and restless but didn’t tell you. you did know, though. you said i handle big things well most of the time, but other times i really don’t. i knew what you meant in the moment but now i’m just curious and want to bite your hand off. i tried to do this last night, but i just fell asleep instead. it’s all such a dream. such a nice day and bad dreams and i was so relieved that you were in my bed. i don’t even notice when i tell you things i thought i didn’t ever want to say

there is time left in silent conversation

december 1st, 2024

it’s the first of the last month and i am on the bus home, to a black dress and strappy heels. there are cherries under my arm and i’ve been in the sun today. i saw her in the city! as we walked. i shouted and called and got real worried. it’s always such a delightful day, but never that good. we ate and the grass nipped. i sat on my silk from when we went away and i used my money to buy something special. i don’t have money anymore, but i do have silk. the ants ate my dip and we talked about love and art and what we want to do after school: make love and do art. us, not the ants. there was some silence and i never know if it’s happy silence or not. it’s just silence. a chill that you force onto your body, but was there for however long; you could do it any time and the fact it feels nice is far more of a but than anything additional. you left and it was awkward to grab you and hold you there. i said thank you. the bus came. here i am. there’s time left

death reversed taro card reading

november 30th, 2024

son of a preacher man is playing. the month is ending. i am home, and why is everything not all right? why have i not been reached? or taught? i have written a lot today. i showered and got ready, and mum and i walked the dogs down to a café. i had a juice. i felt upset after she said something to me—i don’t want to say what, i am too embarrassed—and i wanted to go home immediately after that. we got dog food on the way home at the butcher’s. i was in an ugly mood, so i didn’t say much. i didn’t know what to do to bring myself out of the state, so i sat down on my floor with a candle and wrote in my journal. i smoked on the bed. it’s new moon. i pulled a card from the taro deck; death in reverse. the card in reverse is normally more of a psychological warning than a physical one. a mental obstacle; myself in front of another self, saying “don’t go there, we don’t like it there”. in my experience, anyway. it’s avoidance of transformation. if life in reverse is gradual decay, the finite; death in reverse is growth, the eternity which beckons. this can be a good thing, depending on your leanings. i do not want to be foreseeably unbalanced because of fear, so my responsibility today has been to stay open to noise. i did a smudging ritual with sage and then did a couple of small things; [redacted]’s birthday presents card-writing and gift wrapping, cleaning up my areas, doing my makeup and hair. then i went to the dentist. my dentist new my dad from the gym. she was nice, and i asked her what she thought about while she cleaned teeth. she told me she often was very focused on the satisfaction of cleaning, but that she sometimes thought about what she was eating for lunch. then i came home for a half hour while we waited for my brother to come home. i got dressed and called my grandma to tell her i was safe and alive after exchange. then we all went to the markets together. we ate lunch. i had a bagel. then we bought fruit and vegetable, and wandered around the japanese store. mum and i went into target and bought christmas junk. we just got home a half hour ago; i finished writing in my journal. i have a headache from how tired i am, and how overstimulated. i do not feel very interested in the usual things. i do not know a solution yet

november 29th, 2024

god only knows how much i love you

november 28th, 2024

an[other] entirely sleepless and anxious night; i don’t know what is keeping me so much from sleeping. two nights, i have laid my head down to think, it all feels all right now. it might be okay now. i will open my eyes one more time to make sure i am really here, and then i will crumble into myself and rest completely, not feeling a thing. and then suddenly i am struck down by lust for fear, but it is not only as simple as the things i want to do and haven’t done and feel compelled to write down very suddenly, overcome with knowledge about self and optimism and life; it’s followed by jet lag induced insomnia. today i have experienced an almost hallucination-like purple swirl of a sensation behind both eyelids, more prominently when open. i play the game ‘whac-a-mole’ but i am trying to beat the moles—my very minor and almost funny hallucinations—by blinking, not whacking. this morning i relished in my brief morning euphoria - the always very enticing dopamine boost that sleep deprivation is courteous enough to leave with you. it lasted for longer, because i am home and loved and feel very good without my training wheels on concepts of gratitude. for example, i drank hot drinks in the bed with mum, showered and washed myself off completely, took off dead skin from my chest and neck. i am considering a time away from the pill. i believe my two side effects most obvious is the excessive dead skin and enlarged breasts, both of which i can live with if by consequence of clear skin and regulated hormones. but perhaps i should try it sometime, even if only for a month. i ate a wrap with hummus on it, which i always used to eat when i was at home. i drank a glass of water and took my medications. i unloaded the dishwasher after i changed into my summer robe. then i felt very inspired to write down the list of things i need to get done during summer. applying to alliance française appears impossible online, so mum and i need to find a time to go in together and meet with someone who can organize the entire thing for us. it’s too complicated on the computer. it will be something we forget about until january — but maybe not now that it is on my list! so i sat and drank my water whilst writing, and then finished my journal entry which i started very early in the morning, when i was tired and upset about not sleeping all night. i meditated, but had to pause halfway through due to barking at the door. mum came home from pilates, she brought me a juice (pineapple and orange) and we took both dogs out after i changed. i wore my brown pleated skirt, which needs to be ironed as mum pointed out, my white shirt-bra poking out beneath mum’s skinny blue camisole, her old grey cardigan with no buttons except for at the sleeves, plus my docs and ruffle socks. we walked the dogs and i felt sluggish at times, but i love to walk now. i leave my phone at home with full desire and little interest in returning to check on it. i love that mum and i always see people, and i always know how to behave depending on which person it is. today was [redacted], the nice greek woman up the road who likes her grandchildren and is fond of rory, but who rory is rather skittish of. i notice how my appreciation for those with english as their second language has rapidly heightened. i think i will remember [redacted]’s parents in the kitchen nodding, telling me, “we understand. but don’t worry. we think after about ten years, it begins to feel much easier.” and perhaps i never had thought of [redacted]’s parents as anything but fluent, or highly proficient. now i seem to notice it everywhere. at the nail salon, on the street, in school group-chats. i do not have pity, i simply have a much more profound and incredibly sentiment of respect for them. after we came home, i lay down and tried to nap. i couldn’t, so instead i edited my youtube video — it took me some time, and i should have done it another day. i am too sleep-deprived. but i was so pissed off by the fact of overtiredness that i had to pursue something that was not a white rabbit. i lay in the dark after anyway, and only recently got up to ice my face and go in the pool to wake myself up. i would really like to feel half-awake before [redacted] comes over in an hour or so. it is a pity that i will be so deflated. hopefully she will let me lay on her and listen to her

i wish my dad were at home and i wish we loved each other less so it would be easier to cope. i am in awe of him in an indescribable, incapable way, and to tell you that removes the element of disbelief - you do not know anything but belief, it is all word of mouth, so what do you believe? i am only admitting that i wish we were closer in a more constant way. i am constantly at physical disposition to my mum, waiting to crawl into bed with her or smile and please her and to let her know i am still young and need her. this is what i want from my mum; i want her to see inside of me and want more; to not throw up and to let it all be there, and i want her to tell me when she does it. i want her to tell me about me, how she loves me and sees me and what she dreams about honestly still. i want her to dream bigger than me, so big that she cannot contain it anymore. i know it may be an awful thing to wish on someone, but i am frightened. i know i have more to learn from her, but what can i do when she is not willing to bring it forward to me with total vulnerability and lightness? she is not dull or amused, so i find it more-so difficult to imagine that she lacks enough judgement to pass off my begging and claims for love as normal, freakish, insolent, or even cruel toward her. i imagine she simply does not know what to do with me sometimes. she is cursed too, to never know what to do with her arms. but from my dad, i would like cleanness and goodness. i try to be honest around him because i do not want to skew his opinions of me; i tell him bad things when filtered and always the good things. but he cannot always listen. i cannot fathom how busy he is, and how he manages. i respect the occasional real distance between us for it allows time apart to regroup, and when we come back for our infrequent groundbreaking encounters, it is always the most vibrant and cool memory. perhaps i feel his imbalances too strongly

rinse your hands off, play with your food

november 27th, 2024

it is my first real day home, and i have been nervous to write. it’s been very good. nobody has disturbed me. i lived as a real girl again. i ate in my spots and cleaned up after myself. this morning i went over a couple of blocks to [redacted]’s house to wish her a happy birthday. i had nothing to bring her but i thought we could see each other. it was nice and i could tell she wanted to listen to me. if i am being very honest, though, maybe too much honest, i find her story-telling unexciting and she does not know where to begin or end; she consists of much plot but no intrigue. why must i care about the love affair between these two girls at school who i am so rather unintoxicated with in general, and find them both as much as a bore as the other? [redacted] will not give you a reason to care; i think this is a problem. she does not know that all the best language is poetry; a jumble of phrasing and unreasonable self-imposed assumption and strings of synonyms of the very same word, all at the pleasure of creating sound and feeling. [redacted] has sound, but no feeling. perhaps this is really the problem with a lot of people, except they are much more uninspiring people than [redacted]. i walked to the vietnamese coffee shop across the road because it was raining. i ordered a hot chocolate and mum drove me home ten minutes later. i created my cv for the flower bar in two hours, and i feel very happy with it. i ate lunch outside; five strawberries, a little apple, and two pieces of raisin toast. mum and i went to officeworks shortly after, and i bought things for school even though we still have two months to shop for that. i unpacked two of my three bags at home, and then we walked the dogs together. then went to dinner at the nepalise restaurant very near [redacted]’s house. i had a glass of tempranillo, and mum had the grenache. we talked about university and conspiracies and exchange and some other things that were important at the time. i’m home now, and drunk. i have writing to do that will hopefully entertain me until my eyes begin to weigh from something other than a light tipsy buzz, hopefully tiredness

cancelled flight in the melting pot

november 26th, 2024

my flight was cancelled last night; the final flight home from melbourne to adelaide. i was waiting around in the gate, having just made it through the horrible virgin blue baggage drop, and security. i called my mum to tell her my flight had been delayed, but then saw a notification saying the flight was now cancelled due to a weather concern. i lost it, and cried and cried. i called mum again and told her she needed to call [redacted] and ask if they could pick me up and take me home for the night. i was freaking out. i got my big suitcase from baggage claim and sat downstairs on the tiles while i waited to be rescued. i gave [redacted] a big hug when i saw him, and he brought my things to the car. we drove home. he said funny jokes. i showered and he made me pasta. i slept in [redacted]’s clothes on their comfy couch like i watched [redacted] do in february. i slept for eleven hours. i love their family. i love their lifestyle. i enjoyed being their last night and this morning, but i am excited now to go home. very excited. i want good things to happen. i am on the plane home now. today [redacted] and i sat on the sofa and drank coffee whilst i told her about my trip. i was very excited to do so. i ate a bagel and fruit for breakfast, then got ready in the bathroom. [redacted] showed me a place to get my nails done. i got dark red shellac on them, and they’re perfect, even though the ladies pulled off a lot of my skin around my cuticles. one of them is at a risk of being infected. that’s besides the point. i am safe now and i’ve finished my journal and i am going home

travelling alone conscious list of real fears

november 25th, 2024

our flight’s landing is delayed and i’m getting a little nervous now. a couple minutes ago we shot up into the air very unexpectedly, and i am not sure why. the pilot said something to us before, but the intercom was all crackly. i have been drinking green tea because i am worried of anything upsetting my stomach. my stomach is upset, though. once we get through airport security in abu dhabi it should all be okay, get on our second flight. the long one. i will sleep on that one. i won’t read; i will just go straight to sleep. my feet hurt, but my shoes are off. i have so much to do, so many fates to expel. my mind is playing and eating itself

point of definitive return, home-bound

november 24th, 2024

well, wow, i have imagined this moment for so long — the plane has just taken off; i listened to my take-off song and am watching the wedding singer. i said goodbye to my host family last night and caught the train in the evening where i met [redacted]. we met our coordinator, a very old man, after we got off our train, and he ushered us through the airport and to a small bus for special hotel transport. he helped me with my smaller suitcase. we stayed at a shitty hotel where i had to use my phone to sign us in, because our organisation didn’t get us pre-planned accommodation. [redacted] and i decided to order kfc to the room, because we both hadn’t eaten dinner, although i’d eaten a small cheddar and ham sandwich and a hot chocolate at the train station. i wore pyjamas downstairs to the lobby whilst we waited for our uber driver to arrive. i ordered a chicken burger and fries, and drank a “7up mojito”, which i’ve never had before. it was all delicious. we ate on the top bunk (which i slept on, with [redacted] on the bottom next to another twin bed with all our luggag) and we half-heartedly watched a german movie with french subtitles: it was old and about a young german woman who was falling in love with a french man during the war. she wrote him letters in french. then we turned out the lights and tried to fall asleep. we slept badly, because the hotel was not good and people were coming in and out; doors slamming and chairs clattering and walls banging

this morning we went downstairs and ate our breakfast; a pain au chocolat and cappuccino and a glass of apple juice. i got changed, took my meds, and re-packed all my bags. we finally left and headed to the airport in a similar van, this time with more people. i did mindfulness on the way and tried to prepare for the airport. we got checked in and put our baggage through, after [redacted] had a small complication with her’s being overweight, and then we went through customs. i found out that my passport wasn’t stamped on the way here, but luckily i kept my old passports for evidence of arrival, and the policewoman let me through after a couple of minutes. we got through security and waited at the gate. [redacted] bought us both juices whilst i waited at the gate with all of our things. i called my parents and finally we boarded. now, finally, i’m on the plane

saturday ; i am overnight in the city of love

november 23rd, 2024

i am sitting on my bed for the last time! day is like magical infinity and a chest of tight nervous energy; distraction and emotion and not knowing where or what to do, being happy and golden whilst also wasting away. like playing minecraft before road-trips with my brother when i was eight. half my lifetime ago! what will happen now? i am growing older and more wise and beautiful and even rotten, as things tend toward being — and this is not the end of living, and oh! i just i can’t believe it. i woke up early this morning even though i went to bed late, because i could not fall back asleep when i remembered i am going home. i have many fears: my suitcase will be overweight, it will need to be checked back through customs after i change airlines, that i will forget my other suitcase in the overhead luggage, that i will lose something important like my passport or phone, that the flights will be delayed, that i won’t fall asleep on the long flight, that travelling will be harder than on the way here because it will just be me and [redacted]. but i know that i can handle it. i think it’s hard to know that it will work out while i’m here, because i must dwell; i have no other opportunities to reprise! i do not want to be on my phone, i have already written, and all my things are packed away, so truly i have nothing to do except think. i am wondering what food i will eat when i fly. i am worried the plane will crash; i know i have to not be worried about that, but i cannot help myself. i must plan that it all goes well, and that i look after myself between airborne breaks, that i go from airport bathroom to next gate, to wash my face and smell good and drink water and braid my hair and sleep with a face-mask, to sleep and wake and take panadol. things i didn’t do last time in anticipation of dread, i will do this time out of bursting rapture. when i woke up this morning, i thought about something that used to bother me a lot. it is a memory from last year in july and it is one of my worst memories of being cruel to someone i love and being rewarded by them for it; i did something i have never confessed to in written or spoken word, and doubt i ever will. as i thought of it this morning, i realized i had forgiven myself for this too. i realized this because it suddenly was not worth the tossing and turning, and life was so much bigger than old cruelty

i am telling you this because i want you to remember how it is to come home. it sounds like that song “mykonos” by fleet foxes. it feels like a suspicion that the air is watching me and is going frozen still when i stare back with a cocked head; it sounds like the tapping that comes from the roof each time i remember it’s there, and i breathe. it is like the kids asking me if they can shut my door because they don’t want my ears to hurt whilst they play outside; it sounds like them stomping back and forth through the thin hallway outside my bedroom. my bedroom, it feels like. it looks like the house across the street with a circle window that turns into a golden full moon when i look out at night, and is a reminder of the dead flies trapped in their decaying corpses between my window panel and the screen they climbed through to save each other when it was warm enough. it feels like it’s always going to be this way, and that inevitability is going to eat me up for it’s dinner

we go to silly length to avoid experiencing life

november 22nd, 2024

it is the last friday of my life here, and the last day of school—the last day for many friendships cultivated here, and it is snowing. mother is striking down on nature, and isn’t it delightful? i am hesitant writing now, at risk of losing my time gazing out the window, but i must. i must tell you i’ve forgiven myself of the guilt which eats away at me for believing too big in the worst of words and ways has decided to stay in the house, for it is too afraid of the snowfall. for too long i have thought my vanity a sinful good; i see it now for what it was taught to be in order to save me from myself. the unceasing desire to be beautiful prevents me from doing horrible things to myself. today i will go to school and kiss the critters on their cheeks, remember what exists everywhere; love and eternity

only sleepless is day so hardly dreamlike

november 21st, 2024

the bus driver played christmas music this morning. i slept not at all last night and my alarm failed to wake me up, so i got ready in twenty minutes and meditated on the bus. i sat with my knees tight to my chest the whole ride to school. yesterday was an achievement, as has every day in a way whilst i’ve been here. i hope i do not forget it all. i am very good at being alive now in a way i never used to be: i accept and learn and leave and come home and teach and burst and cry and listen. i payed attention in history and took very studious notes about the document we were analysing. i scribbled notes about home and hopes in my last science class ever. i will miss these two blonde teachers in different ways. at lunch, i spoke and spoke. i seem to only be able to speak french when i am sleepless or drugged. perhaps i just do not care as much; my anal retentiveness is not so so on those days, like today. i love to be happy. i love to be sad. i’m growing to cherish happiness though in a way i have only ever valued sadness for: protection and comfort. i have three hours left of class today: english and french. i plan to write. i always plan to. i feel i will write, though, today until my little finger goes yellow and blue from bruise and ink. i’m always so excited about the bus; today i am especially enthused. how i cannot wait to kick my heels by the hot radiator and wish away my whims for a moment of silence! i was so overcome on the bus this morning that i almost began to cry. i am always catching myself in that quiet corner with my fist in my mouth, and it’s been lovely, but it’ll be over tomorrow. it will be over tomorrow

has life really kicked me in the balls?

november 20th, 2024

i took a walk today in the fields behind the house and the sky was all clear and blue. the sun was out. the moon was wavering and they were on opposite sides of each other. i sat down in the grass for a moment and it was blistering cold. i thought i might cry but i didn’t. i always find something new to worry about, or it finds and worries me. and i always think if that one moment had been avoided, like last night, i would be much happier right now. i felt light as a bird this morning. i showered and soaked and got so clean, and then i worked through frustration and scribbled out my pains onto two blue book pages in the sun-soaked kitchen. i looked for the dog in the back-door window but remembered she is dead. i felt depressed when i lay back down upstairs in my brown blanket with holes. so perhaps i should just never lay down. i am so worried about being alone forever, and distancing myself from good people because it’s too hard to be around good things. it is like the walk in the field. everything is evil and of some evil is born good; of all good there is evil. we do not all accept those terms for what they are. some people find easier names for them as nature and corruption. it is always up in the air for me; am i a pleasant person or am i plain and unthinkably cold? often i do things to aggravate people to get a reaction out of them. i am sorry for admitting that. i feel bad afterward, because i see they do not know why i did it and i do not know either

i remember self-awareness spawning at my eleven-year-old heels by how every bad moment was the worst moment of my life, and how i would remind myself that i’d thought that the last time, but then i was helpless to it. even that reminder made the moment worse than the other. i could not save myself by remembering i had lived through all bad moments, because eventually every moment was a bad one. i dug myself deeper and deeper, and i am still down there somewhere, digging horizontally now, hoping i’ll reach cliff-side or something. i know this is not the worst moment of my life, and i know there are many more to come. i know perhaps life on earth is one very long bad moment stretching out into infinity. but i am disquiet to it. i am impartial to the lost noise, even when i know it surely exists. i accept what this is. i try to move on. i try to make change happen in footsteps to-and-from the bathroom to the kitchen to the bedroom to the bus-stop, but all i feel is a little worn and hungry for god

tuesday’s liar ; promise of a snow-day

november 19th, 2024

it’s going to snow here! it’s predicted for thursday and friday, but still up in air. today’s tuesday, if you didn’t read the title. yesterday i stood waiting for the bus for half an hour, fighting the cold, slightly miserable and elated after sport, my shoes completely soaked-in and i thought i’d come home with trench foot. it was a nice yellow tree that i stood under, and there was a long worm i saw in the soil. back to the point; i’m trying to get prepared for the snow, despite the fact i have no form of clothing-protection against that kind of weather. two thermal layers, a jumper and a jacket will have to do, leggings and jeans, socks and leg warmers and boots. i’m excited, anyway. i’ve never seen snow before, not since i was five and held an icicle in my bare palm after forgetting i’d taken my glove off, and i cried so bad we couldn’t make a snowman. i ate his nose in the car. it really is the coldest i’ve been

you’ll remember this from last time, but i am terrified of the plane crashing. i am doing everything in my power to make sure it doesn’t happen, but i am afraid of jinxing it. i had a horrible dream last night about turning into a monster because of a sticker under someone’s bed that i couldn’t name, and i tricked someone. it’s more likely i will arrive home safely, but i just won’t believe it until i’m home. maybe i won’t, anyway. believe it, i mean. i am scared of waking up on the plane to find i am falling like one of my dreams lately. it’s too hard to accept that i’ve been pining for this long, and that i regret nothing. i will be the same in loathing ultimatum; my best friend is going to order the same food and she’ll get older first and i’ll always be the second to grow up and say my bit. i get myself choked up. have i wasted the year writing to you? hoping you’ll be there? it’s nearly the end of the year. she’s gone now, so it’s just us. do i even tell you anything worth hearing here? i feel sorry about that, but won’t say it. it’s worth nothing to be hungry like this for you, but i starve and wrinkle under the dryad’s apple tree i once had my sights set on

i will miss everywhere, the tiny morning fires

november 18th, 2024

this is my final monday, and my last day ceasing to avoid god. next week, i will not be so restless. next week, i will be getting ready to lay my head down on my own pillow in my own room, after kissing my family goodnight. the world moves by very fast on this bus. faster in the mornings with my bubbly music and jittery aliveness, deeply and far slower in the evenings with our tired lugging bodies and my centuries-old classic audiobooks playing in my ear. in the morning, i make the most by watching the villages burst awake like tiny fires everywhere. all orange and glowing red. all of them like bonfire for the first time. i hear nothing from nobody at this time of morning, just a couple of posts sent to me from mindless scrolling on the other side of earth, and their afternoon grows into a lighter, fuller night; i pretend i am better for it but really i am always such a bitter girl. how is it that you do not love me with all of time wrapped up in a nice bow? it can’t be, though, so i am not to do anything about it. i am to listen faster and deeper to my music and wish the earth would turn and burn and spin around in it’s entirety; heels blistering at my ball-gown holding me up like a thread, like a little lion cub puckering its lip on pride rock

we are supposed to see a film at school today, before sport. i cannot remember if it is beetle juice, beetle juice again; but i sort of hope so. i might like to see a movie i’ve already seen today. it’s for english class, so the movie is in its original non-dubbed version

my last sunday in the middle of nowhere

november 17th, 2024

i realized just now that next sunday, i will be on the plane home. this is my last sunday in this house, in this room. in a week from now, i will no longer be in this house. probably, i won’t ever be again. hm. everyone is still shaken up from the dog dying. i am more shaken up from the stress, and have been eating and eating. i’ve called vala twice in a row, yesterday and today. we will call again before i leave, probably. and i have decided that i am going to wash my hair on wednesday next week, so i don’t need to wash it on saturday when i’m leaving. i have no idea how i’m going to get all of my clothes into my suitcases, but i have got to do it somehow; there’s no way i can take another suitcase with me to the airport. it seems like the last four days have made all the difference to the time, and it seems i have none left now. six days is probably nothing. what can happen in six days? in six days, i will need to arrange buying a phone charger and taking a day off. i will need to go to my last day of sports in that horrible little gym tomorrow. things like that can happen in six days. a lot of things. anything, actually. you get the point; i feel strange. i posted my youtube video today from weeks ago, when i was still on holidays here. i figured i will record my last week here, too, because it will make it all go much faster if i do that. maybe. i also finally finished my article, and posted that too. i have to move onto new projects now. yesterday and today i have had no medication, so it’s a wonderful thing i’ve gotten anything done. not as much as i wanted to, but something at least

well, the dog did die yesterday

november 16th, 2024

the dog died yesterday after i finished my practices. i came downstairs to wait for dinner and i heard [redacted] crying so i took off my headphones. i heard her say “est mort” and i assumed the worst; i thought my host dad was dead. then it took her another ten seconds to repeat for the little boy in the living room also. she said the dog’s name and i realized. oh, it was so bad. they cried and cried. [redacted] came home and dealt with the dog in the garage. i stayed upstairs until they called me for dinner and the dad looked fine. then he began to cut the pizza. i looked back up and he was weeping. he was like that all through dinner. nobody was hungry, so there was pizza left over. we had no dog to give it to. i felt very out of place. i went back up to my room after dinner and called my mum to tell her what was going on, and it was very good. i love her more and more. i will be home in a week to see her!

today is officially the beginning of seven days until i’m no longer in this house. because i leave next saturday for the airport / hotel. the train is at this time next week, anyway. monday will the beginning of seven days until i’m home. how crazy! five days left of school. thank god, is all i can think. i watched two movies today. the second one was very disturbing and i had been wanting to watch it for a while. it’s called nocturnal animals and it stars amy adams and jake gyllenhaal. i am obsessed with amy adams, and have been for a while now. i was glad to finally watch the movie, but it was way more fucked up than i thought it might be. and very bizarre come to think of it. i woke up this morning to another text from my mum. it was a video of a restaurant we go to in the dunes. she said, “thirty degree day on the deck with drinks looking out at the dunes. blues band playing. you’ll be here soon,” with a love heart. something like that, anyway. i will be there soon, and that’s a good thought

it’s full moon, and i’ve been put to use

november 15th, 2024

such a long day. remarkable and hellish. not remarkable for its hellishness, but for it’s plainness. remarkable for simply being the second to the last in line. today i observed a group of girls laughing at the school’s weird girl crossing the road, because she was running with her arms straight. they all mimicked her and remarked how funny it was. they were all rather ugly too, i thought, and that they shouldn’t be laughing at all. i wonder if i would laugh at her if i was ugly, but i don’t think so. those girls would never laugh at me for running that way. hm. this morning i realised that the bus rumbles on the dirt road as if it were a plane about to take off. i closed my eyes and tried to imagine i was already a week forward, but then realised again i was doing a noticing mindfulness practice in order to be present. how to exist in the world with an imagination in-tact is somewhere in my recent search history. last night i watched a film clip of charlotte gainsbourg, and she said something about how it’s very hard to attain randomness, because we all to some degree subconsciously lean toward organization. she said something like that, anyway. the little brother of a girl who goes to school with me and lives in my town here is picking his noise. he is anxiously looking at me to check i am not looking at him. of course i am. today i planned to go to the park whilst everyone had spanish so i could spend some time alone in nature, but my plans were interrupted by sudden news that we were all supposed to go to the old gymnasium to watch a dance performance. i don’t know how to explain to you what exactly i saw, but it was not a dance. a very okay performance given by two clearly talented thirty-or-older year-old women but done all the same in a smelly gymnasium for a handful of confused french kids, about “the importance of differences between people”. rather mediocre and nonsensical, and reminded me almost uncannily of the fringe shows which we have at home. we all survived

and wow, i have never seen anyone pick their nose that much in my life. is he okay? does he have any more nose left up there?

well, i have news for you! my clothes came. my dress is really beautiful. i cannot see the moon tonight which is a shame, but it’s okay; i know it’s there. it’s rather too cold and dark to spend time outside blowing kisses tonight anyway. so tired. drank a wonderful hot chocolate in the ten minute break between history-geography and english, and i talked to [redacted] about religious theories. i will miss her, i think. she will miss me more. i do not want to leave her here to rot. but! i am home in a little more than a week, and i’m going home, and i’ll be home, and real soon i will be at home. i cannot wait to do my ritual and fall asleep tonight; i am such a giddy girl

the world is kind again! when i am to it

november 14th, 2024

yesterday was such a high. i’m letting today be what it will be, and enjoying my dad texting me right now on instagram (for the first time ever) and on whatsapp about the dogs and aldinga. i’ve noticed a few things today, like a girl at the canteen who after she finishes eating, cleans her cutlery on the napkin before it goes to the lunch ladies, and a dark freckle on a big, loud, mean boy’s middle finger. and hey, guess what! my package has been delivered to the house. i recieved a message this morning and thought the worst, because i figured the same thing would happen this time, especially because i am not home this time. but i dropped the thought and set my expectations to zero. and then, just this late morning i recieved that beautiful, sweet message: votre colis a été livré. oh, sweet relief. i thought it might not happen while i was over here, but i am filled with such relief that it’s really true; and i cannot believe the luck of it all. how it has turned around for me, and i will go home to be greeted by my new clothes at the front door, carry them inside and try them on. i have three hours of class left, if my “life class” at the end of the day isn’t cancelled, which in the past it has been. rough, dense morning lessons, but two hours of english to go, and i’m sure it will all be okay now

successfully beautiful and aware of love

november 13th, 2024

i woke up as i always do on wednesdays and made the most of my extra hour with a grapefruit face mask, a podcast episode to listen to whilst performing my daily makeup ritual, changed into something warm and i remembered to put perfume on today; yesterday i wore my hair in braids. i took them out this morning very slowly and rubbed oil into the ends of my hair. now my hair looks beautiful and big and curly and alive, and perfectly messy and straight at the ends. i wish it looked like this every day. i didn’t put mascara on my bottom lashes today, which is the first time in my life, i think. i was feeling sensitive and worrisome, so i decided against it. my morning really was lovely, though. i walked to carrefour and listened to jazz all morning. i picked a dandelion to make a wish on. i bought lavender body soap, which i am going to bring home with me as a nice souvenir, plus some kinder bars for [redacted] to give to her later on and the red lindor chocolate for me. i took a nice photo of myself in the window of the front of the building i’ve been going to school in. after my last class today, [redacted] and i are going to buy flowers for my host mum

i had the most magical most impressive most amazing day. i bought my host mum a single white rose from some lovely young florists who understood me in french and then me and [redacted] went to a bakery and she bought me a the most cream-filled eclair. we walked up and down and talked, took photos and sat in the student building area. there were a group of old ladies sitting outside a candy stall / pop-op shop, trying to remember the name of olaf on their plastic cup. i walked by in absolute envious joy. i was bouncy today. when school ended, i gave [redacted] the little chocolates i bought her earlier in the day and then ran up to [redacted] before we both got on the bus. i accidentally showed everyone my underwear as i was running up to her, my jeans fell; but i didn’t care that much. when i got off the bus, the most special thing happened, the moon appeared out of the sunset. she followed me all the way home. i looked at her and blew her a kiss. at home, i have [redacted] her flower and then i went to bed early. it was such a nice day. the world is full of love again, because look at how it sees me trying with all the force i have. is this “externalising” except to good use?

unexciting day, land of grossness

november 12th, 2024

woke up to about twenty mosquito bites all over my body this morning, including one on my face, so that was a very nice surprise. the ones on my feet itch now, which is why i’m writing about it at all. it was an okay day today. i did everything that i wanted to get done, basically, and didn’t have such a hard time. i just spent the last two hours planning maths that needs to be done instead of doing it, which is pretty amazing. i feel pretty uncomfortable for some reason. i don’t know really. it’s like my body temperature is dysregulated; i feel clammy and hot but my fingers feel cold. i am just excited to go to sleep and leave the house tomorrow for good. wash my face and do my makeup and meditate on the floor, listen to a podcast whilst walking to carrefour. same jam. same cold. maybe i just haven’t had any water today. thinking about anything right now just feels a little tiring, because i am trying to physically be here but i mentally can’t prevent the image of home. i can’t believe how close i am. i can’t believe how little i have gained. i can’t believe how much i have gained. i am tired. i would like to sleep and wake up at home tomorrow. there’s so much in my way. and also nothing. i realized today that i have basically no ties left in this place, aside from some people i want to thank and a payment to make for the canteen. still haven’t looked at the envelope because i have no idea how i’m going to pay anything, let alone the insane amount of money i’m sure will be requested inside. i just can’t deal with another thing

there’s nothing you could say to me

november 11th, 2024

called mum last night. dad was on the phone too. i cried on the phone. it was loud in the house with the kids screaming, and mum said, “i don’t know how you’re coping with that,” and i said thank you. then [redacted] called me, and we talked for an hour. i realized all that’s missing is talking about love, and i guess you could say nothing’s changed, but a phone-call has changed everything. people still love me and listen for me when all they can do is imagine. all i have been doing is imagining. i won’t ever be able to explain this, but maybe that’s okay. maybe i know more than i think i do. life here is still coming my way, but i have people listening for me. that makes all the distance. i was meant to write difference, but i think i’ll keep distance there. i can burn through this and come out the other side a little comet. i’m taking deep breaths. i’m not managing, but i’m doing it regardless. i love myself more than you know

they’re setting up for christmas in the house here. [redacted] has been sent to his room three times today, and we’ve only just eaten lunch. we spent the morning walking around, collecting little wooden sticks that [redacted] hid around the village with symbols on them. the kids have to spend time de-coding them, but i wasn’t paying much attention to the rules. it was cold and raining a little, but i was happy to be outside. we killed an hour. i wonder what i will spend tomorrow doing. [redacted]’s at home tomorrow, too, i think, so probably nothing. i feel fine. it’s going to be fine. i’m listening to good music and i only have half of a headache and ringing ears from the noise downstairs

empty women, i want to speak with you

november 10th, 2024

today i sat downstairs and [redacted]’s friends came over. we all sat around the big long dining table and ate lunch. the first plate was avocado and tomatoes in dressing, followed by meat, potatoes, green beans, and a nice sauce for the meat. the women talked. i did not really listen to them, because i felt tired in-and-out all day. they talked about things they had been doing. someone went to america. someone didn’t want wine. i heard that kind of thing. i said nothing. i said thank you each time someone cut me a slice of cheese or passed me a plate for more servings. i watched the women a lot. i was trying to hear one thing. i just gave up in the end. i am not going to pity myself; i am too fatigued, really, which is my fault. i stayed up late last night watching tv on my phone. i don’t know why

i feel some relief that it is the tenth of this month. seeing double digits in the date is a wonderful thing. my eyes are very heavy. it is so loud in this house. every day it gets louder, and i am more keen to be at home than ever; every day is worse than yesterday. it’s okay to say that. every day i want to be out of here, back where the kids do not whine and shout like this and the parents do not feel so dull, and where the women are not so empty in front of each other. it’s only a short time now. i have all the same fears, though. how do i fit inside this time, and make sure i do it all right? this feels like infinity. i cannot work anything out when i am so muddled. i cannot do the noise anymore. i cannot do the shouting or the whining or the babies that are growing up through voids. always i can cry. i realize that now. i have not been allowing myself to, but if i do, i certainly can. i just have to open my chest a little

monumental day of my darkness

november 9th, 2024

it appears i am experiencing burnout. it appears i am learning the meaning of this word for the first time. i think perhaps i have felt it before to some degree, but in the past i have somehow subconsciously rid it of me: i have asked my mum for days of school and i have rested and recovered. i have drunk water in my nice bedroom with a select few warm lights on and i have taken warm baths and journaled about the moon phases. that is simply not an option here. here, i have to go. burnout surprises me because before this week, i had two weeks of complete nothing. but i am also sure i know why this did not fix me. so quickly, i went from that to this again. there is no gradual ease. it was like a shock-wave. i feel completely fried. it’s a strange, unnatural feeling. i can’t even describe it to you. it’s like depression but with the ability to function still; you have all the mental symptoms but you continue to push on, and as much as it might effect you, it simply doesn’t until you’re alone with it and remember that it exists. maybe this is my absence that i spoke of a while ago? it’s slow. i am not sure what to do with it. i cried today, very slowly and not well, whilst laying on my back and trying to do a meditation. i took three panadol and gulped water and then watched a series until dinner. it was okay. i am okay. but i am settling now, with the thought at least that this will not be over until it’s over

losing the battle of being faithful

november 8th, 2024

i feel a mess. last night i did not sleep. this seemed inevitable in the afternoon yesterday, when i came home and lay in the dark and watched the light from the slit in the door on the wall stretch out with little aching pushes forth and back. i asked myself the very serious question of, “am i tired, burned out, or depressed?” but i think everyone is laughing at me. they all know already. when i answered, i knew i would not sleep. i groaned and whined and stretched in the sheets and heard nothing but me yelling at myself. i hate when i do that. i felt so angry this morning, when i saw my forehead had a massive dent from the mattress. i slept in my makeup. the door didn’t shut when i pulled it in the car, so i had to reopen and slam it again. i ate no breakfast because last night i ate an entire packet of sour straps. i’m not read for another day. i have not recovered from wednesday, or thursday. i cannot do friday, too. i am searching for answers but getting too sore. why does it have to be like this? day after day, feeling dirty and unsure of life. feeling like i am waiting for you to call me so we can do nothing together; the idea makes me cry with relief and pain

i still have the impression i’m going to break any second. i don’t feel well at all, and i have to get my shit together before i see my local coordinator this afternoon. i need to be prepared to lie and not look frustrated and fed-up and fatigued; i need to be fine. is there a world where someone notices there’s something wrong with me? my mum is not awake. i cannot call her and tell her i am going to die. that’s not an option. i have felt worse, maybe. just two weeks. what’s that? nothing. i have been here for ten weeks, you know? that’s no joke. i am happy and sad again, i am a blackness and gold. i cannot rest my cheek on every cold tabletop i find but that would be nice. i am cold and tired. i am cold and tired. i am tired and cold. did this used to be romantic? it still kind of is. i still kind of feel beautiful because of this. i have never had such little energy for everyone. i cannot hold a conversation with a person. what does that mean?

worst place in the world is upstairs

november 7th, 2024

i feel as though i’m sucking the life from the world so that i will have a better chance of feeling colourful when i get home again. i am terrified of feeling certain about anything. last night i was thinking, but everyone feels this way forever once they move abroad; there is always something missing because the people and places and memories you love are scattered everywhere. it’s not that simple that you can just get them all together again. the place you grew up only recognises a person you used to be, and the place you live now is on the cusp always of seeing you as a stranger. it’s torturous. i want to leave home; but i do not want to feel alone like the way i do now i’m gone. i want to stay; but i cannot stay. and i am terrified of coming home and realising i actually do belong there after all of this madness. i am terrified of coming home and becoming truly certain i can never stay there. i am terrified of being sure about what and where i will be. i know that i don’t have to be, but can’t you understand that to some degree i must be sure? to ease my own mind, and to belong at least to the world if no single place in it

the days here are going so slowly, the more i think of home. of course they are. but it is impossible not to think constantly of home; i manage my distractions well enough. any more and i will peak into delusion. i watched a christmas movie last night downstairs, and have been listening to jazz and christmas music on the bus every day. it feels right to be cold as it nears; i cannot believe in a few weeks i will be blistering in the sun again. everything is reversed. i can’t make sense of it, or my emotions. i’m trying to clear my head, and i think to some degree i am, for it’s impressive that i still manage to know how i am feeling at all when i am so mixed up in this, but i feel like a ball of heat and energy. i cannot contain myself. i am jittery trying to escape myself and this place. i am addicted to list-making and planning. i am afraid that if the days go by any slower, i am not ever getting out of here. i can’t believe it’s ending and i can’t believe it’s beginning; where is my life in all of this?

i am the ghost you walk right through

november 6th, 2024

today i had a brief feeling that i’ve had many times since coming here, but it was in a very unexpected way. the closer i am to the end of my time here, the more i feel like i am just waiting for life to end again; mine in particular. i have no wish to be small-minded, but ever since i came here all i have wanted has been to go home, and i feel no guilt for this, as i know i have done the best for me with all else. the thought of home is but an anchor. except now i feel increasingly worried about loss, not just grief. what about the physical sensations of leaving behind something? i always am feeling it. it’s paralysing executive dysfunction; have i forgotten my phone, or my keys, or my money, or my bag, or my sunglasses? i should check the seats again; the floor again; the table again. this is how i live my life. but i have never felt such an intense loss as the one i feel now, and am preparing to feel. today i spoke with [redacted] about the bus-rides. it is the in-between of our lives here, between home and school. it is where reality does not exist. i cannot imagine the airport, for this is everyone in the world’s in-between; leaving or returning, it doesn’t matter. it is the only place where you should not be. does that make sense? trump has won the election in america today. everyone at home is posting on their stories. i have been ranting all morning, but i am tired and angry now. efforts of understanding the american political system are all futile, and i’m finding everyone more annoying than usual. if i wasn’t on the pill, i would say i was just about to start my period. i am not prepared for anything, but i am getting on with it all anyway

the world is going up in flames again

november 5th, 2024

same time every four years; the good-old american election. today is the polls. this is the time when parents grumble loudly at the breakfast table and mums tie their hair back, rubbing furiously at their eyes, red and bulging from the news screen. [redacted] tells me she watches less and less after covid, when she realised she’d been stressing the children, particularly when the war between russian and ukraine began, and now with what it is becoming. i told her i think it is important anyway. i consider saying, “people are idiots. politicians act on impulse,” but i remember the article i read before coming about the things you should not talk to french people about: number one was politics. i mount the bus with the news going on my phone, playing through my headphones, feeling others look over my shoulder to watch in passing. i do think how horrible it is to hear about other peoples lives this way, but i don’t think it supports my views or beliefs to shy away from parts of the world because it makes me uncomfortable or frightened

although i have nothing else really to say, i do want to tell you how much i miss home. i miss it like nothing else i’ve ever known, and i thought this feeling would subside the closer i got to leaving, but it hasn’t. i am living here, better than i was any earlier in the first term, but it’s not because it’s any easier. in fact, embracing how much i truly miss home is one of the reasons why the situation has improved; i think to myself that at least i have a home to look forward to seeing, and i cannot imagine that so many people go through this pain every day, but have it a million times worse. i watch movies about the war and see those letters from soldiers in the museum, and i cannot believe anyone’s real hand had written them. i am getting closer to something. i feel as if it’s in the air for everyone, not just me. like i’m in the final stages of making something happen for me. i am working on finding joy wherever i am, and on connecting with moments where i have felt truly happy and good, because i find it so easy to forget all of those times. i cannot tell you that this is why my situation is much better, but it’s probably a contributing factor. the only thing missing is everything else

hell bites, & i am back into the streets

november 4th, 2024

back on the bus, as usual, as i will be for another three weeks. my morning was nice: i did gratitude mindfulness and i’ve dressed for the weather. it’s biting cold. my nose and fingers sting each time i go outside. i’m pretty much pissed off by today already, but i know it’s never as heavy as the weight i put onto it. it goes quicker than i expect it to. i’m on the bus again before i know it. my classes today are really unbelievably slow and shitty, but that sort of thing happens. i’ve only got two days of this day left, and in ten hours, only one. i hate mondays here. i never want to complain, but it seems the moment i’m allowed to open my mouth, it’s all i do

my update is that i have survived four hours of class this morning. i have one hour of maths, and then two hours of sport to go. i’ve eaten pasta. then i am back on the bus. why do i give it this power? there has to be someone out there who hates this class more than me today. school is the exact same. we talked about politics at the lunch table today. i feel very upset about sport. do you know, this all would be okay if i had an energy drink and weed to smoke. it’s only counter-acting anxiety. i am excited to go home. to watch the sun setting on the bus and to walk home in the dark. i have to go, because i have water to drink, a bathroom to get to, and lipstick to put on. i’ll be back to tell you about the worst of it all

i’ve done it. i’ve made it. and it was not so terrible. i am on the way home now and i am listening to jazz music. i did an excellent mindfulness exercise just then. very impeccable timing on balance’s part. it’s so dark; it’s unbelievable. and it’s so cold. i might have never been so cold before. it’s hard to believe it will continue to get colder. i mean, oh god. my face feels very weak. my body has that feeling of wanting to give in. i am wearing my scarf wrapped all the way up below my nose. i am very excited to get home and take my warm shower, change clothes, drink a warm milo and eat something, journal. i cannot wait to eat dinner and go to sleep. i cannot wait to go to sleep. it all feels very easy for some reason right now. i feel good about myself. everyone’s elbows rub on the window and make the same little mark on the foggy window to see out. it’s very beautiful and dark

unmedicated and fairly joyful despite odds

november 3rd, 2024

roughed it today without medication. that was a choice and a half. i figured i’d try it out for the last day before school. i kind of love being unmedicated. only because it’s by choice, though, don’t get me wrong. finding the perfect day to let yourself go is special. i offer this rare chance to be totally unchained to normal day’s rhythm, and i go about my tasks—no matter how unserious or stupid—guiltless, because i know this isn’t how i live anymore. i can always get back on my feet tomorrow, right? there’s security in giving up for a day, committing to three movies and an early night. we went to [redacted]’s mum’s house today. it was freezing and the sun came out for the first time all week, just like i hoped it would for school tomorrow. the sky is clear now. we watched hugo on the arte channel, but i only saw the end. i remember hating the movie as a child, because it frightened me. i thought it was very beautiful this time. the end was, anyway. something else i love doing when i haven’t taken medication is showering. when i finally manage to get little tasks done, all the dopamine is much more real. eating feels good. sleeping is exciting. you do little things just for a kick, like stealing [redacted]’s little pink scooter and doing a lap of the street for no reason, walking differently. noises also don’t seem to bother me as much, weirdly. i distract myself easier; less regret. i ate three waffles while i was there, and forgot how to ask for a warm drink, so i just looked at everyone drinking theirs. i felt nice on the ride home. i just finished the others and am going to bed now, because school starts tomorrow and sleep deprivation might try me out again

listening to my pulse and poetry

november 2nd, 2024

i listen to this one song a lot. there are three that i can have on repeat, and have since last year, but this one in particular is different than the others. it is 17 by youth lagoon. the two others are simulation swarm by big thief and i only want to be with you by dusty springfield. often i listen to it when i’m moving around, like on car rides with my headphones in and the sun is getting low, or when i’m at the window seat of a plane. the song reminds me of my dreams in a way that the others remind me of my life. both are just as important, but i have not found another song that i can play this way and get chills every time that part comes on, where she claps and her voice gets deep and she says, “my mother said to me; don’t stop imagining, the day that you do is the day that you die” i think it’s uncharacteristically beautiful

don’t you think it’s very hard to remind yourself how young you are all the time? i so constantly want to address myself and write to myself because i want her to answer when it’s over; when you stop doing that, answering for the time, do you feel happy? i am so excited by memory, and the idea that one day i’ll have things to do. like, maybe i’ll drive around again with a child in the passenger’s seat and have wine to buy and a house to clean. maybe you’ll be there. but i know all my journals will be. all my words will be there, somewhere at least in drawers. that’s the most important thing. that one day i’ll have all of this, and more. every day you work hard to have a bit more than you started with. it’s hard to feel like you are losing, and you cannot do anything except wait for the moment you can grow your empire; a purpose, a place to live, a body to feed, money to make, joy to believe in, love to give into, humanity to face, little heads to kiss, floors of dust to cry on, clothes to be seen in. is it too much to ask that by then, i am there?

working and worrying through it

november 1st, 2024

maths is difficult. i want to have what it takes to be intrigued by it, but i find numbers boring, not fascinating. the patterns are scarcely there for me, and it’s difficult to get myself to do the work while i am alone. i was doing very well keeping up in school, or at least was trying to, and felt like i knew some things, but now all i can think about is how behind i am, and how much work i need to do in order to start IB next year confidently. i want to give myself the best chance of going in with all the same knowledge as everyone else. i don’t feel like i have less, but i have very different knowledge now because of this. in any case, i’ve had an okay start to the new slate today. i woke up to messages from [redacted] asking about when she can get me from the airport, and how much she misses me. that made me feel warm. i did my meditation on the floor and then i ate a pain au chocolat and played the sims 4. i felt pretty happy for a moment, but i over-stayed my welcome; i needed to get up. i showered, rinsing myself to begin with the new moon tea i set my intentions over last night; my salt crystal dissolved in it. then i did yoga, which challenged me today. it was proper flow yoga. i tried to journal, but felt like reflection would only make it harder for me to keep positive. i lay down on the bed and scrolled through memories on my phone from snapchat, listening to lana del rey, and sent a couple to my brother and friends. then i got to curiosity about the logistics of my schedule for next year. will it really be possible for me to balance doing what i should and will make time to do (school work, waking up early, learning languages), as well as my school commitments (IB, leadership, philosophy club and the dispatch), my outside-of-school commitments (alliance française, teen writers club, family and friends), and my personal pursuits and self-interests (writing, being, loving)?

it all seems like so much, particularly compared to last year. this year alone is a thousand times more difficult than anything i put myself through last year, but next year seems a thousand times more-so than this year. they have all been challenging in unique ways, but i really do wonder what it might look like to my parents. this feels like such rapid, uncontrollable self-growth. i would order the years like this, with little subheadings — 2023: mental limits sparking emotional growth and maturity, mantra: get up, get up, get up. 2024: personal exploration, mantra: pushing, pushing, pushing. and it seems like 2025: academic over-load, maximizing individual pursuits, mantra: stay up, stay up, stay up. i ate lunch downstairs with the family, and then came upstairs to finish my routine outline. i have no plan to force myself to stick to this at all; the only reason i created it was to see how in a perfect world, i would be able to fit everything in. the prognosis is that it’s nearly unforeseeable, but entirely possible at the same time. i just finished journaling, and then i did maths for an hour, but i’m not really sure you could say that. i didn’t really “do” it. i organized all the documents for homework over the summer; i had to download them and add them to folders. then i just kind of looked very confused at my screen and wrote down a couple of things that i thought might make sense. i left more confused. i’m excited for the poetry workshop tomorrow. i haven’t really thought about it since i signed up, but i’m happy it worked out. it could be great for me