Louder than sirens, louder than bells.

My week. Hmm. My week.

I stepped on a small piece of broken glass in bare feet. I realised I most likely won't qualify for a working visa so will have to rely on my wits in Europe. My wounds from the fall I had over a week ago are still healing rather slowly and the scab on my knee just gets grosser. I got downgraded from full time at work to two days a week. I'm not sleeping properly. I owe my parents a lot more money than I am currently making because I was given an hour and a half's notice that I was losing a lot of work. I'm lonely all the time and it's so much more my fault than anything else's because I push everyone away at the worst possible times and then cling to them without explanation.

My mood is refusing to improve. I'm trying, I really am. I have this deep set belief that what you project, good or bad, is what is returned to you in life. So I feel like all of this is happening because I've made mistakes or been cruel or selfish. And I know that if I continue to be negative and nasty and useless that it'll only get worse. It's just so hard to ignore all of the things that are hurting so much right now.

If I was happier and friendlier at work then maybe this would *stop* happening. Maybe they'd find the hours for me. If I could get my teen angst together and get over myself, people would want to hang out with me and I'd want to hang with them and we could enjoy whatever time is left for me here in Melbourne. Maybe I could be more careful with my body and my mind and the hurts would stop finding me so easily.

It's all about hope, really. Every single terrible thing that happens, and every single great thing too. All that is present in my life right now and all that is coming. I'm trying to process and articulate experiences with that in mind.

And at the end of it all, you're waiting there in my head. Like a shadow standing in this ambiguous doorway that I want to be ready to step through but aren't yet. I want to come with you but I need to find you properly first. I've never been sure about you, of who you really are, but I know you're perfect for me. Or perfect for who I plan to be. When I've evolved enough, sorted all this out- sorted me out- I want us to be together. Whatever that means. Wait for me. Or find me first?

We're still holding hands through a catflap, aren't we?

I had my tarot read last night and it was beautiful. It was frightening and mysterious and confusing. For what it was, it was beautiful.

I also learnt about Buddhism, meditation and the inner lives of two of my good friends.

It's too soon to talk about it. It was too soon last night and I don't know when I'll be ready. But I want to be ready. A lot happened yesterday, the details of which I can't really articulate. But it was magical in a really melancholy, unexpected way.

Today I simply recovered from everything I discovered last night.

I am displaced.

When I was fourteen, I was older than I am now. I was someone who had done too much and hurt inside. I had learnt life lessons too quickly and I wasn't ready for that knowledge. Eventually, I buried it deep inside myself until I was ready to reclaim it and acknowledge who I am.

It was a strange year for me when I discovered things I was too young to properly comprehend. Love was the main thing but there were others. Life. Consciousness. Friendship. Acceptance. Innocence. Time.

I managed to distance myself from everyone who truly loved me. The people who could hold my hand forever and be comfortable in the warmth of us. Not the ones who were on fire and itching to keep moving and who burned me in their haste toward better things. But that's not fair. I was in a hurry, too.

I fell in love that year. I spent until now deciding whether that was true, and if it was, if I could deal with what that meant. I'm still not okay with the way I treated her or myself. We could only have existed as what we were, who we were, in that time. Our attempts since then to be around each other have always failed, probably because pain is the one emotion that never eases. It only gets submerged from time to time; still in tact, but sunk beneath the surface. When you're afraid of who you are, and what you've done, moving on feels impossible.

Which is why I retreated. I lost the friends I worked so hard to accrue. Or the friend, really. I became reliable, simple, pure. I ignored adolescence and focussed on being a unique blend of child and adult; at this I failed, miserably.

Having a breakdown at age fifteen is not great, but neither am I.

The entirety of "I" is a pretty big concept for a little girl. And I was very little, really. Being drawn to people who are bad for you, or who you're taught are bad for you, is the key to breaking your own heart. I did that so many times that my head gave way before my heart could. When my mind came to terms with how to deal with my self destructive behaviour, I was able to decide how to deal with the emotions that went with it.

My solution was to be boring. As boring as possible. Part of that was this; writing about these things like they're not real and I'm just a teenager prone to discussing their life online in a highly stylised way.

Some of my best friends, the ones who've known me since then, wouldn't believe the person that I was- or the things that I did- when I told them. Every now and then I feel my palms sweating a little and I know that it wasn't a dream and for a while that was the girl I was. But for the most part, I'm working to make that chunk of the past smaller, day by day. Because from a distance, even the whole world looks small; even my whole world at age fourteen. And I can see myself waving goodbye.

It's not faith if, if you use your eyes.

I thought after my last- very ugly- post (I read it back and wanted to cut off my own fingers to stop myself ever writing anything so vitriolic ever again. Ugh, it was bad. Apologies.), I might try writing about less... stupid? topics.

My life is nice and boring right now. Work and seeing friends. Every now and then I know I really am inhabiting my "old lady" moniker when I get really happy in my battiness.

I've started talking to the characters in the books that I'm reading when there's no one else in the settlement room with me. I giddily drink in the smell of pine leaves in buildings prematurely decorated for Christmas. And I lament my aching feet to anyone that will listen.

Oh, and just to be uber positive in this entry; here is an overdue quote for you (from last week).

Heard:

"It's the awesome threesome!" - Amanda at work describing me, Annie and Allison. I do love those girls.

7 things.

Some stuff you may or may not know about me. Because a regular blog post felt irregular today, for some reason.

1. Learning about young celebrities is a weird sort of hobby of mine. People think that when I talk about these popstars I am joking or being ironic but I'm not. They fascinate me.

2. I like pineapple juice but I can't stand the texture of pineapple itself.

3. I'm too chicken to go see a movie on my own but I really want to(that one was for you, Annie).

4. I have a good deal of my friend's property on my floor and soon enough it's going to feel like home when I trip over a bag of her CDs in the morning on the way out of my room. Seriously, I'm getting rather attached to the bags of stuff. Little tykes.

5. I worry sometimes that my sarcastic voice is becoming my real voice, both in my mind and in the minds of the people around me, and that one day I will wake up and actually be that racist, sexist, homophobic, mean etc.

6. I'm not ambidextrous but I use cutlery like a left-hander and write with my right hand.

7. I don't think Flight of the Conchords is all that funny. I put that last because I knew that approximately thirty seconds after I wrote it, I would be hunted down and forced to say that its unachieved potential and limited premise as a comedy is actually a total hoot.

Everything you do is simply kissable.

Or not.

Trying to get a passport organised today was death. I know I shouldn't complain because this is, literally, the only way to get overseas. But two trips to the Post Office for interviews and two rejections for stupid reasons later and I'm losing my oh-so-famous cool. Why must one have a driver's licence to avoid all this extra paperwork? So if private transport isn't my number one concern I have to deal with all this extra identity verification shit even after all the Keypass, bank statement, Medicare card, account card, birth certificate, mother's birth certificate etc. drama? Yay for the age of technology, identity theft and suspicion.

Other than that life is fine. I mean, it's only life, right? It's not something you can choreograph or fix or refine. I spend a lot of my day being wasteful, like today when I tried to make something happen that obviously wasn't meant to be. But I have to reconcile myself with the fact that things will be how they be and if I don't understand or appreciate it at the time I will later because something, somehow, will be fixed or improved or created or prevented or enhanced by every second I feel I've squandered. Even regrets are really just residual hurt or anger. Everyone knows life goes the way it goes and in some way or another we all learn to embrace what happens. I spent a day of my life on this paperwork/passport/stress/bureaucracy that was never going to work in my favour. I'm sure it's taught me something, but maybe I need to learn something else before I can comprehend this lesson properly. So tomorrow is probably "An Introduction to Ink Smudges on Passport Photographs". Wait, that was yesterday. I guess I should go check my timetable...