Updates, minutiae style.
- I'm at a loose end.
- 5 and I still going strong.
- I'm kinda nocturnal now.
- I'm writing some.
- I'm not writing as much as I should be.
They are all crap. But they are still epic. More than that, they were a stepping stone. I went from Simple Plan to the Smashing Pumpkins, to Depeche Mode. Then Opus, Nightwish, Godsmack. Rammstein. NIN even, and yes I listened to more than just Closer. Then Girl Anachronism came along and I dived into the weird.
I was a pretty good kid. But musically I was a rebel. It was pathetic, but it's what we do. My best friend at the time listened to classical music only, maybe with a little acoustic guitar thrown in. Ten years from now he will be a physiotherapist living in Australia with two kids, I bet you anything.
I'm getting nostalgic, I always do at this time of year. Christmases seem disparate, disconnected events, but summers all kind of string together.
I remember lying in the grass on Hampstead Heath with three of my favourite poeple in the world. I remember baking a lopsided fudge cake for a surprise party. Hell, I remember swatting someone on the nose because he called the birthday girl to figure out where the surprise party was.
You people are good to still be reading my ramblings I will reward you. See I'm working on novella. 'Novel' is a scary, grown up word, like 'tax rebate' or 'pregnancy' or 'Ovaltine'. Novella is novel's cute cousin from New Zealand who you can fool around with for a while but there's no real commitment or repercussions. So I'm doing a novella. It's about love, and boys turning into men and girls turning into women, and how that's like two nuclear explosions happening simultaneously when love is a scrap of silk sitting between them. And it's about how they still hope it'll survive. I don't know how it ends yet, but here's how it starts:
On the morning before his twenty-first birthday Charles is
woken by a groan. It’s coming from the girl next to him. He lifts himself out
of bed and the room pitches like a ship, he has to sit still for a second. She
makes a grab for him, mumbling about her stomach, so he picks her up as gently
as possible, and carries her into the hotel bathroom. She whimpers in his
grasp, stroking his chest feverishly.
“Ups?”
She shakes her head and Charles sighs. He leans her against
a wall, and she mutters an apology as he bends down. He lifts up her T shirt
and slips down her panties. Then he sets her on the toilet and perches on the
edge of the bath right next to it so that he can hold her hand. She leans her
head against his chest, and he places one arm around her. Her hair is pasted to her forehead with sweat
and she trembles.
“It’s ok,”
She shudders as he speaks, then shits violently. He kisses
her clammy forehead and reaches to the windowsill above the toilet to get some
wipes for her makeup. As her bowels empty her body seems to be shaking itself
apart and her face is a rictus of sweat and disgust. He lets go of her hand to
tend to her face and she grabs a fistful of his T-shirt. She cries-reluctantly,
furiously.
“Shhh, sweetheart. It’s ok. It’s ok.”
She continues to spasm as he removes her dark eye makeup.
She can’t bear to see herself made up in the mornings; it drives her into fits
of depressive rage. It comes, Charles thinks privately, from seeing the tear
marks which have inevitably dripped down her face and been set there in streaky
black effigy. Once he’d suggested she buy waterproof mascara and she’d
scratched three red lines down his forearm. He didn’t mention it again.
“Uh…” she wheezes, batting away the wet wipe, “what’re you
doing my cheeks for? I’ve not been crying.”
“Your foundation,”
“Uh,” she says again, and her head lolls forwards. He
catches it, brings it back the hollow of his chest. They sit like this, her
trembling with exertion, for maybe ten minutes. Presently he reaches for the
toilet roll.
Peace,
TK xx
