Book Ends;

Alright, so this post is about endings and beginnings, arrivals and departures.

Endings & Departures; summer, my nineteenth year of life (by which I mean I will be turning nineteen soon—this whole thing is like the eighteenth century and the seventeen hundreds being the same thing), leisure time, The Extended Short Story, and a four-year friendship.

Beginnings & Arrivals; autumn!, my twentieth year of life, my mother-to-be cousin, second year of uni, and possibilities.

Summers are significant to me the way I suppose New Year ought to be. It’s this weird interim from normal life where the rules you’ve been abiding by the rest of the year invert themselves and you never really know quite what to expect. Maybe it’s because one year and the next are separated by not even a second, and summer spans at least six weeks. Maybe it’s because I don’t live in the southern hemisphere, so the end of a school year always coincides with the summer holidays. Or maybe it’s because the formative years of my adolescence were infused with The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants books and I totally wanted to be Tibby. Whatever the reason, that’s the way it is. I always look forward to summer with the anticipation of change. It is a pivotal time, quite literally.

Now, the completion of my novel, the end of a friendship, and the expanse of possibilities on the horizon are all integral to one another. And I kind of want to chronicle why. Because I have a funny feeling that, in ten years time, I will look back and I will think that the summer of 2007 and the summer of 2011 were bookends to a very significant period of my life.

Timeline;

March 2007 – Rosie meets friend. They click.

July 13^th 2007 – Rosie stamps on the object of her infatuation’s hand because she hates him. He drags her back in the grass and tickles her. She hates that. He asks to go for a walk. Rosie says no. Tears spring to her eyes. She doesn’t understand why, but she has the distinct feeling something significant has just occurred. Nothing is going to be quite the same again. She needs to feel in control, so she takes her friends to the top of the car park from which you can see everything. She takes a lot of pictures.

October 2007 – Rosie’s erratic behaviour has alienated most of her friends and she cannot find the words to explain or apologize. This is when she needs to check-out the most. She picks up a book and rediscovers her love for reading. She remembers her childhood dream of wanting to write. Her fingers itch. The cogs of her imagination begin to turn.

April 23^rd 2008 – Rosie scraps the thing she was writing before and embarks on something new. She has become increasingly taciturn and introverted. Her mood swings are violent. Enough is enough. She begins writing with the sole intention of exorcising the inner angst monster. It’s in diary form, through someone else’s proxy, because she was never brave enough to keep her own diary.

October 2009 – Rosie takes off to Australia for a gap year. She returns eight months early after realizing that what she was trying to get away from was not everyone else, but herself. Which is impossible. Friend expresses his happiness at her return.

January 2010 – Rosie unwittingly embroils herself in The Most Stupid Fall Out in the History of Mankind, resulting in the hiatus and death of several friendships, for which she is later extremely grateful and realizes had to happen.

February 2010 – Rosie becomes an unconscious adherent of Descartes’ first Meditation. Strip back to the fundamental basics. Trust nothing. Rebuild.

June 2010 – Rosie laments the unstable nature of her friendship.

July 2010 – Rosie experiences a series of epiphanies. She breaks the surface of the water. She stands on the beach. She looks back. She’s exhausted, but she’s made it.

August 2010 – Friend suddenly gets back in touch. It is always like this. He always starts it. He always stops it. And each time it is like starting from scratch and being strangers all over again. She tells herself not to get attached, have no expectations, and to go with the flow.

August 22^nd 2010 – Rosie finishes first draft of novel and runs into the inspiration, having not seen him for two years, and in a place he has never been before. Rosie tells him their old school has been demolished. They talk about toilet paper.

September 2010 – Rosie is unsatisfied with the first draft which has the inspiration’s blessing. She thinks there’s more to come.

October 3^rd 2010 – Rosie’s eighteenth birthday sucks. Okay, she gets a lot of money from her parents, but it’s pity money, and she doesn’t spend any of it. She also gets a set of knives from her dad. To cheer herself up, she and the friend decide to go see Ludovico Einaudi in Edinburgh. He is one of their sacrosanct and exclusive commonalities. Rosie feels victorious.

October 2010 – Glasgow Uni art students have a reading & writing week off classes. Rosie has thirteen mini breakdowns about her Descartes essay. Her parents are genuinely scared for her health. Unbeknownst to them, however, she stays off most of the following week because she is simply paralysed by emotional exhaustion. Her paranoia and insecurity surrounding the friend are giving her nightmares about falling. Her guilt over a previous transgression, for which she tried to apologize many times but couldn’t because she never understood why she did it, is poisoning her rationality. She makes herself go out on Tuesday but physically cannot get off the bus. She makes it to Waterstone’s and gently the horrifying truth she’s been fighting for a week dawns on her: she needs her friend to save her. Her worst fear is losing control, and she has lost it. By some miracle, her friend asks her to meet him for coffee. She doesn’t like coffee, but she goes anyway. Later on he remarks she was ‘reserved’. Hearing this from someone she cares about makes her listen.

November 10^th 2010 – Rosie and the friend go to Edinburgh to see Ludovico. They both bring their winter hats and the friend says Rosie is back to her usual self. Ludovico is amazing. Rosie should be happy, but she is only allowed to feel content. Her friend cannot tell the time. On the train ride home they stay awake by playing Trivial Pursuit.

Christmas 2010 – Rosie spills her guts in a letter, but unlike all the other times she has tried with other people, this does not feel contrived. It feels right. The friend responds with an equally intimate letter. Rosie issues a reluctant but necessary ultimatum; the friend must be in her life, or be out of it. In spite of all her self-destructive bullshit, he says “Well it would be pretty stupid to let go of four years of friendship.” Rosie cannot believe someone is actually sticking around. And yet it is not enough. She wants him to lie on the floor with her, but he’s too luminous for that.

January 2011 – Rosie has failed Philosophy.

May 2011 – Rosie goes to the friend’s house with his birthday present and another letter. She feels guilty inflicting it, but she has to. She has spent four months trying to escape the inevitable, and she can’t do it anymore. She gives him the letter and she runs. The letter expounds the cartography of her psyche; how she has steadily lost control to him ever since he waltzed back into her life, how she sometimes wishes she had never known him, how she sometimes genuinely hates him, and how she is terrified of regressing to that numb place again. He comes to her house to sort it out. She says “I don’t trust you because I don’t trust myself”, meaning, she has too little confidence in herself. He says “But you know me, you know I wouldn’t do anything to hurt you” and she says “But I don’t really know you, do I?” And the irony of him once calling her reserved laps at her conscious now. He is just as reserved. He says “I don’t know what to do.” She says “Just tell me that you’ll be there, if I need you.” He nods, says “You know I will.” She says “Then say it out loud.” He does, and now he runs.

Summer 2011 – Rosie takes this time to distance herself from the mania of the past few months and gain perspective again. She writes tirelessly. She makes a promise to herself that when she has finished writing, she will contact her friend again. And so the final paragraphs are postponed and postponed. Her favourite phrase becomes “I don’t want to talk about it”. She has never seen a hedgehog here, but she sees one now, again and again, and she can’t help thinking it’s a sign that she is reverting into that defensive, numb place once more.

August 2011 – Rosie notices a conspicuous influx in the number of spiders.

September 2^nd 2011 – Rosie runs into the inspiration almost a year to the day since she last saw him. It’s much less awkward now, and she cannot help marvelling at the timing. They talk about the last time they met. They laugh about the toilet paper.

September 11^th 2011 – Rosie has come to the conclusion that she had it wrong; in order to finish her novel, she must first resolve things with her friend, not the other way around. They have not spoken for three months, apart from when he said well done for passing Philosophy. The entire summer has passed, and the tectonic plates of their friendship have inevitably changed. It is raining heavily and the sky is dark. This type of weather always makes Rosie feel safe. It’s as though something benevolent is hugging her, and reassuring her that everything will be okay. It is a good sign. Just as she is about to make contact, the friend does. Except it’s not him, it is someone from his work. Pushing down the ominous feeling in her stomach, she strives to reconcile. She hates texting. She cannot tell his tone, his manner. She cannot read his expression, which is always so telling, even when he is not saying anything. He calls her “my love” and she finds this endlessly patronizing. He is going, she can feel it.

September 13^th 2011 – She gives it one more shot. She says they should meet for a “catch up” even though she detests the term. He “completely agrees. When does she think?” They set aside the following Friday, time undetermined.

September 17^th 2011 – At one minute and forty-three seconds past two in the morning, Rosie writes ‘The End’ to a continuous loop of See You Soon. She smiles. She’s happy. She’s done.

September 20^th 2011 – On her way to the bus stop in the morning Rosie sees a magpie. One for sorrow. She makes a mental note to keep track of her bad luck in the following week.

September 22^nd 2011 – The cosmos is telling Rosie tomorrow will be a good day. One of her favourite childhood movies, Jurassic Park, is being rereleased in the cinema, her mother tells her that Ludovico Einaudi’s album is about to top the charts (this isn’t strictly good since Rosie cannot listen to his music anymore without feeling sad, but it is a connection) and her friend Stephie, whose Friday is also shaping up to be significant, tells Rosie that us Libras are to be bestowed with luck on the 23^rd. The cosmos is telling her, but she is not wont to believe it.

September 22^nd 2011 – Later that day Rosie finishes uni and texts her friend on the bus journey home to fix a time for tomorrow. She is not at all surprised when he says he couldn’t get the time off work. Ironically it is his apology which rankles her the most. Flippant, off-hand, piteous. She detests pity. And she feels it, the undeniable truth that this is it, this is the point at which she loses him. She barely holds the tears in. She wants to scream. She’s mad and she’s hurt and she doesn’t understand what she did. She thinks of all the other times she sat silently crying on buses or in cafes or in bed, toiling on only because of what she’d already invested, unwilling to let those almost five years become obsolete. She cannot stand that loss. She cannot stand that humiliation. She trusted him, against all her better judgement. And now she realizes that this past year she’s been blinded; she believed the pain and constant dissatisfaction was testing her, would pay off in the end, but now his actions stick out in her mind much clearer than his words. He doesn’t care anymore. He was using her, as he always had done. He’d waltzed into her life for gratification, for entertainment, for a fleeting moment of intimacy, never asking her permission to bluster through, and never stopping to tell her he was leaving again. Right now she hates him, she hates what he’s become. It hurts her to be angry at him, but she is. She hates the impossible standards he sets, and how he brings out the very worst in her. He once said he never wanted to change her, and look what he’s allowed her to be reduced to! She has given everything she can, she can give no more. She will not sacrifice herself. She will not disappear into him.

September 22^nd 2011 – At home her mother can tell there’s something wrong. Finally she gives in and the surge of emotion almost defeats her. But she must cook. Her mother offers to stir the vegetables while Rosie has some wine, but “No! I have to cook! I have to do something!” So she chops the peppers up, the fucking bell peppers, the only person who ever called them that, and she’s screaming and crying the whole time but she just needs to know that the right thing to do is to say goodbye, because he isn’t going to. She needs to move on. She needs her life not to be about him anymore. The concept of his absolute absence terrifies her, and has done for a long time, but she’s been denying its necessity because her life ceased to have meaning as soon as she thought of him not in it. It’s irrational, she knows, but that’s how it is. It’s because he knows everything. And it felt right to tell him. And she was safe with him. And now she has to start all over. And she can’t be bothered. She’s too tired. She’s thinking of how love is a chemical high in the body that lasts for approximately four to five years. She’s thinking that’s how long it took the last time. She knows she has to pick herself now. She cannot keep picking him. Thank God Walking with Dinosaurs arrived in the post this morning or she might have sank to cyan. She watches the entire thing and goes to bed.

September 23^rd 2011 – Rosie has just one lecture today, and when she comes out she checks her email. She is expecting a confirmation of the printing job she’s requested, and when she opens her inbox there is one from the printing place saying her manuscript will be ready to pick up after 2pm today—not next Friday as she’d anticipated. She has three hours to kill. She jumps on a bus to Waterstone’s, buys a hot chocolate with two marshmallows, and sits upstairs at her favourite table where he once came to pick her up and remarked the staff were rude which, frankly, should have tipped her off about him. She jogs upstairs and selects the two books she was perusing when she came in. One is about zombies, their blind slavery to cannibalism, and how to survive them. The other is centred around the idea that love is a disease, for which scientists have developed a cure and the government has made mandatory. The significance of the themes doesn’t sink in until later. Rosie feels no anxiety as she types out the valedictory message and hits send. It is a belated reply to the nebulous text she received yesterday as a solution to the problem of meeting up; “Okay, I’ll text you soon :)” Rosie types back; “Hey, listen, I know you said you’d text me soon but I don’t know what soon is and I don't really feel like waiting around to find out. If you don’t want to be friends anymore that’s fine! But just tell me that okay?” Predictably, he doesn’t tell her. But as soon as she’s sent it, an enormous weight lifts from her shoulders. She doesn’t have to wait anymore.

September 23^rd 2011 – A little after two Rosie heads back to the West End to the tiny print shop that’s like a cosy nest of wood shavings. She wants to hug the woman behind the desk who presents her finished, printed, bound manuscript to her. It is the most beautiful thing she has ever seen in her life. And she did it herself. It’s hard not to compare the whole thing to pregnancy and giving birth and seeing her baby for the first time, being allowed to hold it! And it is the same weight as a baby; her rambling skills have ensured that. All the way home she smiles. She feels freer than she has in years, since the last time she was at the ocean at Durness, at the top of everything. She has become herself again, evidenced by the three new books in the Waterstone’s bag she will find the time to read somehow. Even the wasp on the bus doesn’t bother her. She listens to Komeda’s It’s Alright Baby, U2’s Even Better Than The Real Thing and Eddie Vedder’s Hard Sun delivers her right to her front door. So today didn’t turn out the way she’d planned, by sentencing herself to masochism. In fact, it turned out a fuck load better. And she got home by herself.   

Allllllll the post-its :).

Folder of character drawings/outtakes/procrastination,

the post-it pile,

the Leaning Tower of Pukka Pads,

and The Manuscript (L).

:)

Boathouse, Phegans Bay, Australia, October 2009.

A is for Armistice, B is for Banana;

My head and I are having one at the moment (not a banana, the other thing), which is rather pleasant. I haven’t felt this...amorphously good in a long time. I say amorphous because it’s not a set-in-stone feeling, or a particularly grounded one, or one that will be around for a while to come. Words like ‘content’ and ‘positive’ and ‘ambivalent’ don’t quite fit the bill. It’s more this kind of heady scarlet cloud of sedateness, so maybe I’m a little high on it, I don’t know. But I am going to suck the marrow out of it, that's for darn sure.

A is also for; avocados, which I have reintroduced to my diet because they are full of GOOD FATS GUYS, and they look like nature’s little cups of lime sorbet; for Archie, Stephie’s alpha male collie-cross-something hybrid dog, who has developed an immunity to chocolate and the closing of doors; for August resits at 9.30 in the morning grumble grumble; for my deep, undying love of Amazon; for ¡Ay caramba! because if Bart Simpson was real I’d be in deep shit *swoons*; for Aunty Dave, his anger issues and his mystical tea powers; for new baby Abby (who should have been named Summer since she was born on the summer solstice, goddamnit); and last but not least for ARGHGHAUKDYJKHDUDYYYEUSGYDDJG, i.e. ineffable frustration of the artistic kind.

It’s also, duh, the first letter of the alphabet (and it’s at the beginning of the word alphabet, harharhar!), which kind of nicely parallels this After The Storm business when you begin again. (I would have said A New Beginning, but again that’s not an adequate description.)

So what’s been going on?

Well, Rosie went to the doctor (whose name began with an A, funnily enough) and was all YO, I FEEL LIKE ALICE FALLING DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE, HELP US OUT WILL YA. Although she put it a little more eloquently than that. The doctor was beautiful, there is no other word. He was philosophical on the one hand and theological on the other and he chatted to Rosie about Prozac Nation and how he ought to read it and Rosie got very excited and gushy and did everything but Superman it home and Superman it back with her own copy to give him. The doctor gave Rosie a questionnaire to fill out about how she feels (she and Meejin later laughed at the ‘I feel cheerful’ statement and how it was completely uncheerful), asked her to compose an A4 sheet of DARK STUFF for him to ponder over, handed her the contact details of a reputable therapist and advised her to enroll in Zumba classes…

*segues out of third person lunacy*

Ahem.

I have been unprecedentedly social over the past fortnight. Allow me to elaborate.      

Davidoff came to visit and to bestow gifts of metaphysical tea and assume the persona of Aunty Dave. This was lovely, even if he did deliver earth-shattering news that prompted me to scream for about ten minutes and then to periodically shudder like Sideshow Bob stepping onto all those rakes. It was still lovely despite the fact he spieled the synopses for European torture-porn films and laughed derisively at me when I began dancing to Splish Splash by Bobby Darin. We now have this little unofficial tradition (and unofficial traditions are the best kind) that when he’s walking home from work at ungodly hours and knows I am on the cusp of sleep he will phone me and I will not pick up and he will leave me a voicemail and I will reply to it via text and then he will leave another voicemail and you get the picture. It makes for some rather entertaining conversations, if you can call them that. (Seriously, if someone opened up my inbox they’d think I was off my rocket.) During said visit, we talked about What We’re Going To Do When We Grow Up, and I voiced my empathetic terror for those who don’t know what they want to do because I have always known and this reduced Davidoff to an even paler shade of white, because he does not know what he wants to do when he grows up, which happened in February, since he’s already twenty. So during this most recent transaction he yelled down the phone, and I quote; “I can’t deal with working with people. I’d rather work with the dead. I’m thinking of becoming an undertaker. Is that ambition enough for you?!” This was followed by his high-pitched freak-out on crushing a snail. The downside to this otherwise glowing friendship is the fact Davidoff does not care for The Simpsons, and in my world that is quite a faux pas.

I experienced déjà vu when I accompanied Meejin on her BlackBerry quest, although I was of absolutely no help at all, not only because I am technologically incompatible, but also because the tariff I signed up for was an introductory one and no longer exists and all the other Bold options were not student friendly. However, Meejin resorted to the Curve and Cheryl hooked her up and Sean was a grumpy bastard and in a hop, skip and a jump Meejin became the proud owner of the aforementioned Yay For Homogenization & Social Conformity/Nay For Independence-pushing contraption, thereby contributing to the World Domination Conspiracy. But don’t worry, Mulder and Scully are onto it.

We continued on to Stephie’s new house, which is like a loft apartment with the convenience of being on the ground and near a Greggs, with the intention of finally getting around to our long-awaited Movie Night. But inevitably, as with all planned Movie Nights, we watched a total of zero movies, instead opting for a four-hour bitterathon with hot chocolate made in a sexy little Italian machine and a helluvalotta junk food. There was even a mini-vending machine for cans WHICH YOU DIDN’T HAVE TO INSERT COINS TO GET, dates with convicts and chaetophiles, and this; “I’m kinda hating my dog right now for being a forty-two-year-old paedo called Archie.” Golden.

The next day I went to register with a new swanky dentists’ and then utilized the early start by resolving to WORK when I got home. Of course, first I had to eat, and by the time I sat down to actually make good on my promise, it was already three o’clock. I don’t know how. Now, no sooner has my ass made contact with the swivel seat when my phone beeps and this appears on the screen from Meejin;

MEEJIN: How was the dentist???????

ROSIE: A telt ye already D: it was f9, but a need aboot four million fillings X_X

MEEJIN: Fuck mannn Btw me and aimeee are at hardgate its sunny do u want to come out a wee walk???xXx

ROSIE: Awwwh :O <3!!! I really really would but I am woefully behind on writing and I will have to kick my own butt if I procrastinate any more :(!! I’ll be there in spirit (Y)

MEEJIN: Awwwww man just for like half an hour Its nice and sunny :(

ROSIE: Quit tempting me :(! I really really can’t, or I’ll be writing this till am toothless (N)

MEEJIN: No I respect your writing but it is sunny and u will do it later :(

ROSIE: You smell mccanny :(

MEEJIN: Okay? Its gonna be pishin all weeek

ROSIE: It better be or al batter you like a fish m8

MEEJIN: It is my mother told me very gleefully

ROSIE: Cool whip

Half an hour turned into three hours and a walk turned into a trip to the shop for crisps and chocolate and then vegetating on my bed. Swell times.

Today I met Suzy for a very, very late lunch (Linner? Dunch?), made even later by the fact we spent half an hour trying to decide where to go. Eventually, we decided on a ritzy place on the top floor of Princes Square and we caught up on eight months’ worth of Life and finished by testing out the BlackBerry barcode scanner (it works!). I love that even though we don’t see each other often, whenever we meet up it’s like we were never apart. If I ever get married, she’ll be at the wedding, because I’d want her there and she’d want to come. (This sentiment should not be undermined by the fact that when we saw a hen party walk past, we both agreed we couldn’t see ourselves getting married. That was probably more a result of the bright pink hard hats, my aversion to white dresses and the fact men are gigantic piles of poo.) A year of higher physics and PSD with eight guys really fortifies the old female bonds, I tell ya. *shudders*

The world is small because it transpires The Other Chick from philosophy works at Meejin’s new place of employment. She remembers the polar bears, bless her.

Also-also, anyone else besides me and Suzy a little discombobulated by the specificity of one particular question on the DVLA provisional license application form? It was something along the lines of ‘Can you read 54mm wide lettering on a registration plate stationed 60.5 feet away?’ I’m sorry, I don’t actually carry a giant tape measure on my daily excursions. Jesus.

In other news, I finally finished writing the long-hand sections of the Extended Short Story and all that was to be done was stitch the whole thing together and then I could write (with a tear in my eye) THE END. But, no. An experimental wondering I thought I’d repressed recurred to me the other morning whilst lying in bed fighting the urge to be vertical and join the land of people, and I am now in a kind of paralyzing void of indecision. I desperately wish I could splice myself into two and have a conversation with my intellect. In my imagination my intellect is sharp-nosed and pragmatic and her hair is always ruler straight and so shiny I could see my face in it, and she wears black and crosses her legs and she can probably walk in high heels and she probably even digs them, and she has a notepad and a pen and prim posture and spectacles and she doesn’t find my rambling amusing in the least. Sigh. Unfortunately, however, I am going to have to go it alone. Double sigh. Do cross your appendages for me.

Additionally, because apparently I just cannot shut the fuck up tonight;

• I ordered more books from Amazon which I really don’t have the time to read. In my defense, I only intended on buying one (A Midsummer Night’s Dream), but Amazon was having a Two Books For £8 deal, so I added Into the Wild to my basket and have subsequently fallen in love with it, and the other book was free because I’m one of the Vine People. Although I did just point out that time rather than money was the issue… Someone stop me. If my rotting corpse is found beneath a mountain of books, I have no one to blame but myself. I have been warned.
• Mazzy Star blow my mind in a very tranquil way… When I listen to them I feel all nice and wrapped up in the 90s.
• I FINALLY got my solid aluminium turquoise elephant! YAYYY!
• It is both lovely and torturous having gorgeous dreams about certain people in which I have no makeup on and am wearing pyjamas and am lying in a sleeping bag next to them and we’re with hundreds of others watching a movie but they don’t raise their eyes to anyone else and I can feel that they are scared but that they care, and I kind of love the blurriness. Of course then I wake up and realize it didn’t happen, but it stays with me all day like a tangible, physical blanket or something. Yum.
• It’s also pretty cool having dreams about fighting in the Battle for Hogwarts alongside Hermione Granger and taking out some bad guys with a flick of my wand and a yell of Stupefy! I was pretty crafty and kept summoning enemy wands and then snapping them muahahahaha. Silly Voldiethingy.

Righto, I think I have sufficiently filled my Rambling About Shit-All quota for the century, and then some, so I’ll be off to agonize over this pivotal literary question; to fuck or not to fuck?

Seriously, someone needs to purchase a giant butterfly net and come catch me.

Word of the Day: exsanguinate  



April 23, 2008;

The beauty of blogging means I can write this ahead of time and schedule it to post at a specific time so I'm not still feverishly typing through the pivotal moment instead of celebrating it. Bad timing runs in my family. Of course, at said specific moment, I shall not be celebrating, I shall be studying. Or watching Jonathan Creek. It's fifty-fifty really.

So, while I was battling against The System a couple weeks ago for access into my old computer, I found the original Word document of The Manuscript, with the start date still contained in the properties. This was rather exciting, as I thought I'd lost that date forever, and if you know me well you know I'm all about the dates, and even more than that, I'm all about The Manuscript. So this was a double manna. And the guess I mentioned before about the 28th? Wrong. The actual date I embarked on The Great Novel Writing Expedition, was; April 23, 2008 at eight-ten and thirteen seconds. And so, tomorrow, (or now, I guess, since I'm writing from the past and y'all are reading in the future), marks the three year anniversary.

Now, without allowing myself to digress into a nitty-gritty in-depth examination on the psychological processes behind blogging, I will say this and risk being a hypocrite: I am well aware nobody else out there, reading this, gives two figs about the precise date and time I started writing something that, never mind is still unpublished, but is, as yet, unfinished. But that's cool, because, even though I am posting this to the Blogosphere, it's mainly just a post to myself. I am essentially talking to myself over the internet. I just kind of want to commemorate this occasion in some indelible way that isn't in the same noxious and isolated vicinity as my diary!

This kind of time-tag makes you look backwards, at where you started out, and you follow that arc through the hours and the months and the years until you get to the place you are right now, typing this. It's pretty crazy that I embarked on this thing when I was fifteen, and how different it all was back then. How different I was. How could I have known, sitting in this same chair, at this same keyboard, staring at the same screen, that whatever I was then initiating was to be a three year journey of discovery? (I do realise I am beginning to float away with a red balloon, but go with me here.) How could I have known that it was just the beginning, and not the end, of something? Because even though I didn't write it down, and even though it wasn't committed to a hard drive, I still remember so vividly the thoughts compelling me to start. Driving me to start. This was my panacea, my salvation, my exorcism. It was how I was going to overcome what had pinned me down for longer than it should have. And I thought it was just that one hill, but it turned out to be an entire mountain range. It's taken me everywhere; back to basics and camping at the northern-most tips of Scotland, on a pilgrimage to the remotest village in a politically unstable nation recovering from civil war, literally to the other side of the world in Woy Woy and back. It's bore me up to stand at the highest pinnacle of happiness, of recklessness, and it's cast me down far lower than I ever thought it was possible to go. But it's always pulled me back again. It is kind of the one constant in my life. It anchors me. It has been the most amazing journey, ever, and now it's winding down. It's the last hundred miles. There's still a little way to go but there's so much more behind me, urging me on. I feel sad and relieved and happy, but most of all, I feel content. And I know it's time. 

So, to fifteen year old Me, chin up! Happy April 23rd! You did good, kid :).

  

In the process of typing this up, Rosie was attacked by a large hairy spider, those things which have six legs too many. In conjunction with a sight she saw three times today and which caused her heart to palpitate and explode like a kernel of corn, she feels this is an unequivocal sign from the cosmos that she must Sort Her Life Oot. She is also kind of wondering if she should squish the figurative spider in the same way her mother did, and then proceed to flush it down a metaphysical toilet?

Rosie would also like to confirm she has safely returned from her red balloon escapading, and that her poor readers should be likewise safe in the knowledge that a post of this nature will not be inflicted upon them again until at least May 6th. If one does appear, they should feel free to point out the fact she should be striving to pass her exams instead of procrastinating on the interweb. Depressing depictions of her life if she fails are not required, but will be retrospectively appreciated.   

Drip, Drip, Drop, Little April Shower!

I forgot how cute Bambi was :). Everyone should totally feel this way about the rain! You know the way people who suffer from SAD feel about the sun when it finally comes back in summer? That's how I feel about the rain. Although I am learning to appreciate the sun more. Slow but steady.

But yeah, who can believe it's April already?! It's three years ago this month that I embarked on The Great Novel Writing Expedition. Twenty-one Pukka Pads, 137 post-its, 651 Word pages, a whole turkey's quill-count of pens, one thousand and one late nights, one heart, one soul, a couple of kidneys, and I'm still counting. It would be beautifully sentimental if I could have the final manuscript D.O.N.E for the actual anniversary, but as I've switched computers during that time, I no longer know the date I first began. I am pretty certain it was the 28th of April 2008, but as philosophy has taught me this past sixth months, you can believe something that isn't true, but you cannot know something that isn't true, because then there is nothing to know. You'd have thought common sense would have knocked that into my head many moons ago, but I have none, so it was mathematically impossible.

Other obstacles getting in the way of The Finish Line include exams, and to a lesser degree, the fact I still haven't seen Sixteen Candles, Pretty in Pink or, indeed, Heathers. (This will make sense only to me.) In light of that, as soon as exams are over—and I mean as soon as, as in, at eleven thirty-one on Friday, May 6th—I am going to blow a certain predetermined amount of money on my Amazon Wishlist, partly to celebrate and partly to educate myself, and lock myself in my room for twenty days to finish the damn thing, despite the fact my bedroom door doesn't actually have a lock. Don't ask me why twenty days; that number has just been in my head the past few weeks, and if I happen to finish before that twenty days is up, then mazel tov to me! Alright, before that commences I may celebrate with friends in a slightly less regimented manner, but I have a plan, damnit!

You know, when I came on here to announce to the Blogosphere that it is April, I did not intend going on a rant about The Great Novel Writing Expedition. I do apologise.

Anyhow, here is this calendar month's pikchaaaa, darling;

Cahill Walk, Sydney Bridge, Sydney, Australia, October 2009.

See right down there at the bottom of the stairs? Yeah, just there. There used to be three Chinese tourists. They're not there anymore. MWAHAHAHAHA. Good old Photoshop.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaand, I'm out!