1. Fluid or something pressing onto the back of my eyeball. Is this cancer, a brain tumour?
I will take asprin (two a
day) and drink Britta filtered water until I need to pee every five minutes and
will never go to the doctor.
I will look at Tea in Infinity Foods that has the
word “DETOX” written on the box.
I will pick up the box and read the packaging. I
will look either side of me to make sure no one is watching before bringing it
to my nostrils and breathing in.
I will look at the price
and put it back on the shelf, promising myself I will just eat better and stop
buying junk food and take aways and only listen to French Language Builder by
Michel Thomas when I am walking in the wilderness, meditating on how to live a
better life.
I will start running
again.
2. I’ve got to tell you I feel
pretty incredible right now.
Incredible.
My room is glowing with
the soft sunlight filtering through my white curtains. Soon I will open them
and look at all the beautiful people that walk past my window.
Sometimes when I am
walking down the street I want to give high-fives to everyone I pass and use
the word “beautiful” three times in a sentence and for them to agree with me
and smile. But some people gain no pleasure from high-fives or conversation and
you have to respect peoples boundaries.
I cannot imagine a future
not feeling like this and every second before that I have ever experienced is
being re-experienced through this new emotion, filtered through the curtains of
feeling incredible right now.
3. A small ball of violent energy
is inside my chest. There are so many things I want to achieve.
I get a phonecall and we
talk from half eleven to half past midnight.
We have a weird
relationship, she says, although maybe she didn’t use the term “relationship”
but something else, softer.
Perhaps I have turned a
corner now though. I feel positive. I feel powerful. I can see myself devoting
more time to doing things that I want to do.
It’s strange how dinosaurs
haven’t evolved since Jurassic Park, she said.
We both laughed at that.
4. I want everyone to know. I always want everyone to know. Always.
I do not want to seem
obscure or mysterious in my feelings, I want people to know how I feel. And I
feel this is very human.
People like to take
pictures of themselves kissing a new partner on the lips, a close-up of both
their cheeks, half their faces, barely recognisable, because they want people
to recognise that they are not alone and they feel strong emotions for another
human being, and this behaviour is very human.
I want to post pictures of
how I feel to all my friends. They will wake up one morning and go downstairs
to make breakfast in their dressing gown and just as they reach the bottom of
the stairs they will see a collection of letters and take away menus. They will
look through them, not expecting to see anything special, but then they will
find a postcard from me with a picture of how I feel on the front.
And then they will know.
5. I feel like part of me is like this all of the time but maybe not right now because I
am suddenly feeling the effects of the coffee I just drank and it’s 9pm on a
Monday night and I haven’t felt like this from drinking coffee in a long time.
My chest is suddenly
restless.
My skin is vibrating.
I have been avoiding things
lately. I know this because when I avoid things I join internet dating sites
and masturbate more frequently and I am not like this.
I am not like this.
She asked, How was your
outer body experience, because she was more experienced with drugs and it was
just a joke anyway. I don’t know if this has effected her view of me, but she
is at least partly to blame.
I can’t tell her this.
I feel emotionally
resilient like nothing can get the better of me; I don’t feel like hugging
anyone, I just feel really awake at 5am and I write with restlessness thinking
repeatedly of her ‘Some guy I’d like’-description.
I feel like highlighting all of the previous lines
and then pressing the delete button and instead typing the word “jealousy” in
bold capital letters and I really hope this is not how I’ll always feel.
6. I feel like I’ll always tell myself I am content in
solitude. I spent the morning looking at google maps of Ukraine on street view.
I wanted to know what Ukrainian suburbia looked like, if it was anything like
the town I grew up in. But I kept on being drawn back to the city, where the
window frames were ornate in a typical Eastern European way and I was reminded
of Western film sets from the 60s.
There was one picture of a
model of a man with stilted legs hanging on to a balcony.
There was one picture of a
sign-post written in Ukrainian, a grey sky behind.
There was one picture of
an old woman carrying shopping bags in the middle of a crossroad.
Who takes these pictures,
I wondered. The indiscriminate capturing of a landscape. A photographer with no
artistic aspirations or pretensions.
I
think I want that job.
I want to work for google
and travel every country writing down everything about every street, without
similes or metaphor, without paragraphs or punctuation, until all my words turn
into a pixelated blur.
You will be able to go to
the ‘more’ tab on google.com and it will be on the dropdown menu under ‘The
World’ and you will be able to search for your childhood home or where you’re
going on holiday next summer and I will be able to tell you how mundane it all
is.
I think I would like that.
7. I feel like this is how I’ll always feel whenever I look back at anything
I have ever made after some time away from it.
All the faults become
clear and everything I thought was good turns into something pathetic.
I will worry about this.
I will walk and walk and worry and swear to myself
that I will do something.
Or, I don’t know.
I probably won’t do anything.
