May 15, 2009.

He's always very snappily dressed, which I always appreciate and is one of the pluses about dating designers (the egomania, childish self-centredness, maudlin tendencies and garden-variety insanity being the drawbacks, but hey, you gotta take the crunchy with the smooth).

December 28, 2008.

I felt something shift on those twisting Sussex roads as that record washed over me. I felt something fall away, something evaporate off my skin, dissipating into the dark cold air, left behind. Who was right, who was wrong, who punched through and who withdrew don't matter anymore. The show is over, the circus has moved on. In its place, something else will grow. It's me. It isn't me. It's you. It isn't you.

It's you.

August 18, 2007.

This is what relationships do to you - they melt away all your defenses but after it's over you don't get them back so you're just raw and broken and bloody, vulnerable with no hope of defending yourself, and all you can do is just cross your fingers and pray that the finishing blow is quick and direct.

July 26, 2008.

I was lying in the tall tall grass and looking up at the blue blue sky and running my fingers along a bull rush and everything was in three dimensional colour and so so bright and his green shirt made the gap between the grass and the sky not quite so wide. I wrapped a wide blade of river grass around my fingers and told him the truth when I could have lied.

Undated.

It is already summer. I had hoped for mornings spent sweating into your arms and onto your chest but instead I bleed into my brain with all the things left undone and unsaid, there was never enough time because I never envisioned the leaving coming so soon. Or maybe I stopped waiting. Or maybe I have better things to do. Or maybe you never liked me anyway. Maybe you were slow. Maybe I was impetuous. Maybe your arms never got around me. Maybe I am a master of escape. Maybe I always knew better. Maybe I don't have a clue. I can philosophise in a million directions, I can map the expanse of your shoulders in the grey morning light, we can fill the space between us with something thick and sweet and watch each other drown, I can spend the last stretch of my expiring youth fancying that I wasn't wrong and that you felt it too, I can slide headlong into winter and away from all this but I don't forget. I forgive but I don't forget.

May 16, 2008.

London is drifting into summer after a too-long and too-dark winter. I thought by now my longing would be over but not quite, not yet, every time I think I've gotten to the bottom of it there's one more level of want. My veins and arteries are exposed, laid out in beautiful patterns on the pavement and spilling into the gutter, you idly step over them while doing something else the way you subconsciously dodge puddles of vomit on a shiny Friday night street. I am bleeding, I am bleeding, I am bleeding because you never bled for me. A yellow moth settled on my eyes the morning before and whispered its warning that I chose to ignore, I should really be more careful, I should take my cues from buzzing insect symphonies instead of my own misguided misaligned and so often stupid heart. It's only ever gotten me into trouble and seems to want to march to its own broken watery death.

August 20, 2007.

I have been imagining myself in a room that's dark with heavy curtains blocking out the daylight, like the ones you tend to find in American road hotels. The corners and edges of the curtains are glowing with the bright light outside. I'm sitting in a chair across from the window - it's one of those mass-produced uncomfortable chairs that I find hard to believe were meant for use by human beings - and I'm staring at the curtain and watching the light bang and rattle against the other side. I can feel the chair's rough polyester upholstery under my hands, I can feel the hard narrow arm rests. I'm not comfortable. I get up with a certain amount of effort and throw the curtains open. Everything comes alive with blazing white light. It is warm. I close my eyes.