- I do exist, don't I? it often feels as if I'm not here, that I'm a figment of my own imagination. there are days when I feel so lightly connected to the earth that the threads that tether me to the planet are gossamer thin, spun sugar. a strong gust of wind could dislodge me completely, and I'd lift off and blow away, like one of those seeds in a dandelion clock.
- Both Sam and Ray were audible masticators
- He looked rather vulnerable, as people are wont to do when they are wearing pyjamas in public
- I decided that I might buy some freesias instead. I have always loved their delicate scent and the softness of their colours - they have a kind of subdued luminosity which is much more beautiful than a garish sunflower or a cliched red rose.
- I nodded, trying to hold on to the feeling of my hands in his, cozy and safe, and the look of kindness and warmth in his eyes. I found, to my extreme consternation, that nascent tears were forming in my eyes, and I turned away to rub them before they could spill over.
- Unedifying spectacle
- Downed a tepid glass of Pinot Grigio and parried an outrageously impertinent question from the host about my private life
- Progeny
- Ascertain
- Furnish me with an answer
- I have often noticed that people who routinely wear sportswear are the least likely sort to participate in athletic activity
- She has a particular loathing for he overweight and I may perhaps have internalised this view to some extent
- Doughy and paunchy
- His sartorial choices did not flatter his unprepossessing physique: slouchy denims, baggy shirts
- He did not, it transpired, even have the correct change
- Immaculately clean and tidy
- Pristine and neatly arranged
- Abhor being questioned in this manner but it was clear that her interest was genuine and without malice
- Inconsequential matters
- Strident voices
- She regaled us with tales of her neighbours’ eccentricities
- Nondescript
- Save for a fat paperback and a packet of extra strong mints on the bedside table, there was nothing personal in the room, no clue to the owner’s personality
- I would never have suspected that small deeds could elicit such genuine, generous responses. I felt a little glow inside * not a blaze, more like a small, steady candle
- Fill a silence with banal, inane comments and questions should the need arise
- Was this fate interceding once again?
- It’s a matter of supreme indifference to me
- Carried it off with aplomb
- This occasioned a certain hesitancy in the handshakes
- Blond hair and large breasts are so cliched, so obvious. Men like Raymond, pedestrian dullards, would always be distracted by women who looked like her, having neither the wit Nor the sophistication to see beyond mammaries and peroxide.
- Whilst I am neither stylish Nor fashionable, I am always clean; that way, at least, I can hold my head up when I take my place, however unexalted, in the world
- Judicious choice
- Catatonic companion
- She deemed the moment apposite to remove my hands from the water
- I essayed some chitchat, aware that this was the done thing in the circumstances
- Extortionate
- Elaborate ruse to part me from even more of my cash
- Hoi polloi
- Her voice oozingly oleaginous
- I didn’t want to tell her his name quite yet - there is a power in naming things, and I wasn’t quite ready to cede it to her yet, to hear those precious syllables rolled in her mouth, for her to spit them out again
- She took in another lungful and expelled it with a sigh
- I loved the story of Elinor and Marianne. It all ends happily, which is highly unrealistic, but, I must admit, narratively satisfying, and I understand why Ms Austen adhered to the convention.
- Such small coincidences can pepper a life with interest
- I am not a woman who functions well on an empty stomach, and it would be embarrassing to faint at his feet for any reason other than an excess of emotion
- Preposterously expensive
- The poem combines 2 elements of which I am inordinately fond: punctuation, and the theme of finding, at Long last, a soul mate
- Taking things to an epistolary level
- Experiencing a maelstrom of emotions
- Self-effacing man
- He sings in the way that a bird sings; his music is a sweet, natural thing that comes like rain, like sunlight, something that, perfectly, just is
- The flaw in my plan, the hamartia, was this: there were no tickets available
- This comforting thought of home gave me the courage to
- I assuaged my disappointment with the consoling thought that, when it did finally happen, the encounter would be perfect
- Gravitated toward the bakery
- How blessed I am to live in a compact city, where lives can intersect so readily. Ah, but who’s to say it was accidental, I thought. As previously noted, the machinations of fate are often beyond human ken, and perhaps greater forces were at work here, throwing us into one another’s path in the unlikeliest of circumstances. Buffeted by fate, I felt like a Thomas Hardy heroine this morning (although I silently and passionately entreated fate not to create any future encounters for us in the vicinity of exploding sheep).
- Being somewhat less than soigne
- Prepared an opening conversational gambit
- Lesson: I must be prepared at all times
- Occurred to me that our lives might intersect in any unplanned way
- I wondered where else our existences overlapped. Perhaps we frequented the same post office, for example, or had our prescriptions dispensed by the same pharmacist?
- Liberating
- In the end, my mood soured somewhat.
- He stated, apropos of nothing
- Unforeseen day when I would look to him for social guidance
- Malodorous snacks
- Objets and bibelots which she had artfully placed around the room
- Scented, improbably, with figs
- Sybarite
- Articulate a response
- After this delicious repast
- He wasn’t listening, engrossed with whatever was on his screen
- Run with unsupervised abandon
- It’s shite going to stuff like this on your own
- He said something which, naturally, was rendered inaudible by the volume of the music
- Inebriated woman
- Recompensed by the owner
- He was reckless and profligate
- She somehow intuited the answer from my tense silence
- Obviously, I knew next to nothing about him, so I was embellishing the scant information I’d gleaned about him from my research.
- Her tone was dismissive, with an undercurrent of menace. The default tone.
- Eventually I managed to regain control of my emotions, and the embarrassing tears abated
- Over both scents there lay a faint patina of cigarettes
- Time only blunts the pain of loss. It doesn’t erase it.
- I had almost become inured to his illiterate way of communicating by the end of this exchange. (‘Cool c u then’)
- Either way, I needed to know at least a few salient facts about popular music, and, recent aberrant opinions aside, I suspected that he was my best source
- The day had not augured well from the start
- Life was so very precarious
- Appraised my situation
- I wanted to die - this time, in addition to actually wanting to die, I meant it in the metaphorical sense too. Oh, come on now, I thought to myself, almost amused; just how desperately, on how many levels, does a person have to wish to die before it’s actually allowed to happen? Please?
- Behaving in challenging ways
- This was something of a revelation
- Almost unthinkingly
- I’m not prone to envy, as a rule, but I must confess I felt a twinge when I thought about this. Envy was a minor emotion, however, in comparison to the sorrow I felt at never having a chance to experience this... what was it? Unconditional love, I supposed
- A life of indolence would suit me
- Fortunately, I’ve been blessed with an extremely robust constitution
- Poking around in your brain, dragging out your feelings and letting them sit there in the room, in all their shameful awfulness
- If you had even a modicum of social savoir-faire, you’d know that conversation is supposed to be a to-and-fro, a game of verbal tennis
- Obviously, in principle and reality, libraries are life-enhancing palaces of Wonder
- Neither of them spoke, so I felt emboldened to continue
- I approached with caution, fearing the noxious cloud might envelop me to deleterious effect
- I hoped that my clear, concise message might serve as an exemplar for him.
- All you hear these days is that everything’s going to hell in a handcart
- I realised what I felt... happy. It was such a strange, unusual feeling - light, calm, as though I’d swallowed sunshine.
- Sleeping more deeply than ever before, untroubled by disturbing dreams
- She said sagaciously
- I admired her dexterity and the confidence with which she undertook the task.
- Serendipitous timing
- Dissolute
- Not interested in the petty tittle-tattle of quotidian office life
- Augmented levels of responsibility
- Don’t be daft
- Neither was forthcoming
- Snide comment
- No one had ever bought me lunch before. It was a very pleasant feeling, to have someone incur expenditure on my behalf, voluntarily, expecting nothing in return.
- Life felt like it was moving very fast indeed at the moment, a whirlwind of possibilities
- Important to eschew cliche and precedent
- Gathering up the detritus of the previous evening
- The light was soft and gentle - summer was drifting ever onward and the evening seemed delicate, fragile. We walked in silence, the kind that you didn’t feel the need to fill.
- It was halfway to dark by then, with both a moon and a sun sitting high in a sky that was sugar almond pink and shot with gold.
- Discomfiting mix of institutional and outdated family home
- I felt the heat where his hand had been; it was only a moment, but it left a warm imprint, almost as though it might be invisible. A human hand was exactly the right weight, exactly the right temperature for touching another person, I realised.
- I imagined a man putting his arms around me and holding me close when I was sad or tired or upset; the warmth of it, the weight of it.
- Something rather febrile about her demeanour which led one to this conclusion
- Stared with uninhibited frankness at my scars
- Felt on edge, somehow
- Discombobulated
- I tried to think why, but was unable to arrive at a plausible conclusion
- I was in such a strange mood that this did not deter me
- You’re a creature of habit, aren’t you
- The process seemed almost industrial in its relentlessness
- Pondering this in spare moments throughout the preceding days
- I felt a flash of happiness, like a match being struck
- Shocked by the unscheduled intrusion into my evening
- Progress had been subsumed by more pressing matters over the last few weeks
- I suppose one of the reasons we’re all able to continue to exist for our allotted span in this green and blue vale of tears is that there is always, however remote it might seem, the possibility of change. I never thought, in my strangest imaginings, that I would find my job anything other than eight hours of drudgery.
- Status quo prevailed
- They were, so far, no more ineffectual than they’d been prior to my installation
- Several tortuous iterations of this process
- The art team availed themselves of chocolate quite so frequently
- We were so habituated to our lunchtime meetings that he did not even need to specify the venue
- Imminently
- We laughed far longer than his feeble witticism merited, just because it felt good
- She tried to steer me toward vertiginous heels
- I assuaged my concerns about the cost by reassuring myself that the entire outfit could be worn again and again
- He’d be opening up uncharted worlds for me
- Destitute
- Raison d’être
- Chastising myself for the thought
- I felt floaty and clean, not intoxicated, just very pleasantly numbed to sharp feelings
- Asking out of prurience or bored curiosity
- I could almost see questions crystallising, as though letters were emanating from his brain and forming words in the air
- How exquisite the anticipation - a pain, a churning pain inside me. I did not know how to assuage it- I felt, instinctively, that vodka would not work. I would simply have to bear it until we met, and that was the nature of this peculiar, blissful burden.
- I move into a fetal position. If I can’t be a corpse, then I wish that I was a baby, curled up in some other woman’s womb, pure and longed for.
- Haunting the world like a wraith
- Stupidity, self-delusion, a feeble connection to reality? Take your pick
- The crowd unable to permeate the layer of aloneness that encased me, encases me, I began to realise the truth.
- I was a thirty-year-old woman with a juvenile crush on a man whom I didn’t know, and would never know
- Who was this stranger, and why had I chosen him, of all the men in this city, this country, the world, to be my saviour?
- Decision time. I decided on more vodka.
- The wait was interminable
- The light was opaque, rendering the world in gray and black, a bleak absence of tone that weighed heavily on me
- I knew that people weren’t supposed to exist as I did, work and vodka and sleep in a constant, static cycle in which I spun around on myself, into myself, silent and alone.
- I realised with uncompromising clarity
- Later. I woke again. I kept my eyes closed. I was curious about something. What, I wondered, was the point of me? I contributed nothing to the world, absolutely nothing, and I took nothing from it either. When I ceased to exist, it would make no material difference to anyone.
- I have been waiting for death all my life. I do not mean that I actively wish to die, just that I do not really want to be alive. Something had shifted now, and I realised that I didn’t need to wait for death. I didn’t want to. I unscrewed the bottle and drank deeply
- Referred to the illness only in the most oblique terms
- These days, loneliness is the new cancer- a shameful, embarrassing thing, brought upon yourself in some obscure way. A fearful, incurable thing, so horrifying that you dare not mention it; other people don’t want to hear the word spoken aloud for fear that they might too be afflicted, or that it might tempt fate into visiting a similar horror upon them
- No recollection of how I had acquired it
- Sleep came like a sledgehammer
- The table was bare save for a vase
- I shuddered, acquiescing
- I can’t counter your reasoning
- I was momentarily thrown
- She raised a quizzical eyebrow, but I declined to elaborate further
- I felt marooned
- Startlingly accurate
- Asked a very interesting, pertinent question
- I tried to gather my thoughts into some sort of coherent response
- He isn’t prurient
- Acutely aware of my many physical and character defects
- Bon mots
- He stared heavenward
- It felt good to be part of a throng, and I took gentle pleasure in mingling
- Noticing details, that was good. Tiny slivers of life - they all added up and helped you to feel that you too could be a fragment, a little piece of humanity who usefully filled a space, however minuscule.
- The strange thing - something I’d never expected - was that it actually made you feel better when someone put their arm around you, held you close. Why? Was it some mammalian thing, this need for human contact? He was warm and solid. I could smell his deodorant, and the detergent he used to wash his clothes- over both scents there lay a faint patina of cigarettes. A Raymond smell. I leaned in closer.
- Unpicking and addressing things that I’d buried too deep
- Obscenity is the distinguishing hallmark of a sadly limited vocabulary
- invariably, I find the right answer
- a word sprang to mind: porcine
- lamentable decline in modern manners
- inane wittering
- I had neither imagined him, nor overestimated the extent of his beauty
- having perused at length the evidence
- it was disappointing that I had allowed myself, even for a moment, to indulge in sentimentality
- I feel sorry for beautiful people. beauty, from the moment you possess it, is already slipping away, ephemeral. that must be difficult. always having to prove that there's more to you, wanting people to see beneath the surface, to be loved for yourself, and not your stunning body, sparkling eyes or thick, lustrous hair.
- suffering other people's unkindness must be difficult too; all those bitter, less attractive people, jealous and resentful of your beauty. that's incredibly unfair of them
- eschewed
- lurid
- all the inhabitants were interchangeable: hairless, toothless old men who were either dozing or staring blankly ahead, chins slumped forward
- for reasons I don't wish to articulate to you
- music pulsing loudly from large speakers
- paucity of good manners on display in the so-called service sector
- emboldened by the apples, I decided to take a detour on the way home. yes. why not? it was time for a spot of reconnaissance
- the complete oeuvre of Lloyd and Rice would be performed
- knowing I was here on the street where he lived was giving me a funny feeling, fluttery and edgy, verging on euphoric.
- I couldn't remember the last time I'd felt like this - light, sparkly, quick. I suspected that it might be what happiness felt like.
- a deep voice, well spoken, measured. honey and smoke, velvet and silver.
- there: soft fingers on vibrating steel, and a chord shimmered into the air, nebulous and milky, like light from an old, old star. a voice: warm and low and gentle, a voice to cast spells, charm snakes, shape the course of dreams. I could do nothing but turn toward it and lean closer. I pressed myself against the glass. he was writing a song, working it all out - words, music, feelings. what a rare privilege!
- I tipped my head back and closed my eyes. I pictured a sky. it was blue black, soft and dense as fur. across and over the expanse of night, into the velvet depths of it, light was scattered, enough fo a thousand darknesses. patterns revealed themselves; the eye, exquisitely dazzled, sought out snail-shell whorls and shattered pearls, gods and beasts and planets. as we stood still, yet we rotated, and, whilst turning, moved in a larger circle, round and round the sun, and oh, the dizzying momentum of it...
- sheer spendthrift madness
- I had only one thing on my mind. or, more accurately, one person.
- cheap, sugary treats were the ruin of the poor
- sophisticated palates erred toward savory flavours
- sleep still felt far away, and I was in need of soothing
- sought my old faithful, its edges rounded and softened with years of handling. Jane Eyre.
- pivotal scene
- I closed my eyes. eyelids are really just flesh curtains. your eyes are always "on," always looking; when you close them, you're watching the thin, veined skin of your inner eyelid rather than staring out at the world. it's not a comforting thought. in fact, if I thought about it for long enough, I'd probably want to pluck out my own eyes, to stop looking, to stop seeing all the time. the things I've seen cannot be unseen. the things I've done cannot be undone.
- sundays are dead days.
- curvaceous splendor
- Waiflike ballerinas with huge limpid eyes
- there are scars on my heart, just as thick, as disfiguring as those on my face. I know they're there. I hope some undamaged tissue remains, a patch through which love can come in and flow out. I hope.
- disappear into everywoman acceptability
- ingratiate herself with fellow residents
- foolhardy
- the imbalance in the extent of our knowledge of each other was manifestly unfair
- I felt almost slighted
- Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. Windows into a world of marvels
- when the silence and the aloneness press down and around me, crushing me, carving through me like ice, I need to speak aloud sometimes, if only for proof of life.
- a philosophical question: if a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?
- live a life of sybaritic pleasure and indulgence
- every meal should be an epicurean feast for the senses, and one should go hungry rather than sully one's palate with anything less than exquisite morsels
- we didn't have a television; Mum called it the cathode carcinogen, cancer for the intellect
- eclectic assortment of goods
- back to more prosaic matters
- curb your rebellious tendencies
- shed it all over my clothes with gay abandon
- i would know who was there before i unlocked it. i found the trite theatricality of it rather dull.
- fob me off
- i like to have all the relevant information at my disposal at the earliest opportunity, so i can start to formulate my response.
- i ventured a small smile at the sight of his face, which was full of relief.
- the thing about Glen (cat) is that, despite her offhand manner, she loves me. i know she's only a cat. but it's still love; animals, people. it's unconditional, and it's both the easiest and the hardest thing in the world.
- the efficacy of neutral, unattractive surroundings. there was nothing to look at, save oneself, nowhere to retreat to.
- i'm happiest in the background, being left to my own devices
- i've spent far too long taking direction from her
- the subject of Anne had caused me so much distress, me trying furiously to build up my courage and direct my memory into places it didn't want to go.
- the memory, the truth of it, had come to me, quite unbidden
- Eleanor, i said to myself, sometimes you're too quick to judge people. there are all kinds of reasons why they might not look like the kind of person you'd want to sit next to on a bus, but you can't sum someone up in a ten-second glance. the way you try not to sit next to fat people, for example. there's nothing wrong with being overweight, is there? they could be eating bc they're sad, the same way you used to drink vodka. they could have had parents who never taught them how to cook or eat healthily. they could be disabled and unable to exercise, or else they could have an illness that contributes to weight gain despite their best efforts. you just don't know, Eleanor, i said to myself.
- to... to..." i broke off. it had been very, very hard to say that. it hurt, a real, physical pain, as well as a more fundamental, existential ache. for goodness' sake- existential ache, Eleanor! i said to myself. get a grip
- "oh, i'll never have children," i said, calm, matter-of-fact.
- i am not generally a wearer of perfume, preferring to smell of plain soap and my natural musk, but, were it possible to purchase a bottle in which the scent of new pencil shavings and the petroleum reek of a freshly rubbed eraser were combined, i would happily douse myself with it on a daily basis.
- i feel the need for green as a visceral longing
- i was seeing it with fresh eyes after such a long absence
- this is what i felt: the warm weight of his hands on me; the genuineness in his smile; the gentle heat of something opening, the way some flowers spread out in the morning at the sight of the sun
- symptomatic of my general feeling of Weltschmerz, of anomie, that i hadn't bothered to renew it. everything else was just trivia.
- all of the seats already had an occupant, which meant i was going to have to position myself next to a stranger. in a different mood, i enjoyed this game: one had ten seconds to scan the occupants and select the slimmest, sanest, cleanest-looking person to sit next to. choose wrongly, and the fifteen-minute journey into town would be a much less pleasant experience - either squashed beside a sprawling fatty, or mouth-breathing to minimise the penetration of the reek emanating from an unwashed body. such was the excitement of travelling on public transport
- the other eschewed the spare seat next to me
- i could only conclude, in the face of the evidence, that i did look mad.
- i went to the happy place in my mind for a moment, the pink and white fluffy place with bluebirds and gentle babbling streams and, now, a semi-bald cat purring noisily.
- i tried to fathom his expression
- i took some comfort in that
- feel the vague inklings of irritation
- i must confess to an illicit thrill of pleasure as i made the rude gesture
- classic hangover symptoms. thankfully i never suffered from them, blessed as i am with an iron constitution
- he flicked through a few more in a desultory fashion; i could tell he was losing interest
- we talked about inconsequential matters as we waited for our coffee. when it arrived, there was a lull in the conversation
- appeared blissfully untroubled
- i wasn't sure how i felt about that. is knowing always better than not knowing? discuss.
- i'd been feeling so light and free earlier, so centred in myself
- i had the worrying realisation that, before i was even properly aware of it, my brain was off accessing memories in places i didn't want it to go, scurrying into rooms before i'd had a chance to block them off. my body felt heavy, in contrast to my mind, which floated, balloon-like, just beyond my reach. now that it was happening, though, i accepted it with equanimity. there was a certain pleasure in ceding control.
- reading this, i was taken straight back to another place, another person; the person i was trying to be and the changes i was trying and failing to make, to myself and in my life.
- pottering around the flat
- ensconced
- the expedition (to the store) had taken 2 hours, from start to finish
- this was tricky. on the one hand, i could not deny that i was drawn to her. she had an undeniably rakish, alopecia-based charm and a devil-may-care attitude that would melt the hardest of hearts. i could tell she was a cat that brooked no nonsense. she was, at the same time, a vulnerable creature, one which needed looking after. therein lay the rub. was i up to the task?
- got his comeuppance via an elfin horde
- maintain a modicum of privacy
- we reached something of an impasse
- i felt calm, sure of the way forward. it was a novel sensation
- asking for help was anathema to me
- i took my leave of him in a somewhat distracted frame of mind
- recondite items
- the trip culminated with a visit to WHSmith, where the riches of the stationery aisle were ours to plunder
- 'the place wouldn't be the same without you, Eleanor. you're an institution'
- unsubstantiated rumours had abounded
- i felt the beginnings of a fluttery panic in my chest
- the sensation of being held by him was nothing short of miraculous
- he said, earnest, sincere. Kind.
- i said, quiet, relieved. Grateful.
- ostensibly
- skiving
- a list of insultingly banal prescribed questions from a form
- it was, to the visible relief of us both, a painless if somewhat tedious process
- glad to be dispensing advice
- purloined from the office cupboard
- he shuffled even closer, so that we were touching, sides together, congruent. there was warmth and strength there and, gratefully, i drew on it.
- 'i survived, Raymond!' i said, knowing that i was both lucky and unlucky, and grateful for it
- an obsession with home interiors was tediously bourgeois and, worse still, that any kind of "do-it-yourself" activities were very much the preserve of the hoi polloi
- divest myself of my outer garments
- in every walk of life, I encounter people with underdeveloped social skills with alarming frequency. Why is it that client-facing jobs hold such allure for misanthropes? It's a conundrum
- comestibles
- surprised at how proletarian they sounded
- sounded tetchy
- "I did briefly consider taking up smoking, but I thoroughly research all activities before commencement, and smoking did not in the end seem to me to be a viable or sensible pastime. It's financially rebarbative too"
- given the nugget of New information I'd inveigled from her earlier
- i don't profess to understand this Mug. It holds the perfect amount of vodka, however, thereby obviating the need for frequent refills
- she'd simpered
- barefaced effrontery
- i simply fail to see how the act of legally formalising a human relationship necessitates friends, family and coworkers upgrading the contents of their kitchen for them
- libation
- imbibe alcohol in public
- ceased to initiate any conversation with them
- cannot countenance the notion of inserting a teaspoon, licked and sucked by a stranger barely an hour beforehand, into a hot beverage. Filthy.
- drifted into pleasurable thoughts, thoughts of him. I wondered what he was doing at this very moment - writing a song, perhaps? Or would he still be asleep? I wondered what his handsome face would look like in repose
- my mind still focused on the putative beauty of my slumbering troubadour
- the backs of my hands were tattooed with black ink, his name written there over and over, inscribed inside love hearts, so that barely an inch of skin remained unsullied
- i went into the little white room inside my head, the one that's the Color of clouds. It smells of clean cotton and baby rabbits. The air inside the room is the palest sugar almond pink, and the loveliest music plays. Today, it was "TOP of the World" by the Carpenters. That beautiful voice... she sounds so blissful, so full of love.
- my routine was, for the first time ever, somewhat out of kilter
- at the office, there was that palpable sense of Friday joy, everyone colluding with the Lie that somehow the weekend would be amazing and that, next week, work would be different, better.
- the weekend stretched ahead invitingly, full of time and promise
- now that fate had unfurled my future
- before I tackled the horror that was the month-end accounts
- i don't need anyone else - there's no big hole in my life, no missing part of my own particular puzzle. I am a self-contained entity. That's what I've always told myself, at any rate.
- his social skills were woefully inadequate, especially for a people-facing job like his
- my tone went completely over his head
- After much reflection on the political and sociological aspects of the table, I have realised that I am completely uninterested in food. My preference is for fodder that is cheap, quick and simple to procure and prepare, whilst providing the requisite nutrients to enable a person to stay alive
nov 30 2017 ∞
jan 9 2018 +
jan 9 2018 +