I'll cut the telephone line just to keep expectation alive.

Dear J,

I missed you this week. We normally have three days together, three sweet classes that you make better with your voice and your face and your capes. But you weren't there; no explanation, no smiles from the back of the room or the bus or the lecture theatre. I'd say this made me suspect you no longer loved me but, indeed, you never did profess to love me. Quite right; it would be wrong to love me when we've known each other so little for not long. Still, I like you a great deal and my days are longer when you're not making me giggle with your funny little confessions, whispered with that conspiratorial air you have. Our lecturers were dry and you weren't there to commiserate with me when they were done; our tutorial was all me tripping over my own tongue without you there to interrupt and outshine me as you do so well. You're a new friend and I am always afraid I've jeopardised or ruined our fledgling bond with my last silly comment or forgetful look or over-affectionate gesture. Have I done that, J? I joke that the only friends I ever make are beautiful gay men that I fall shamelessly in love with and, truly, you're the beauty I love the most right now, who brightens up moments and sweeps minutes away with fervent chatter. I'm enjoying my platonic infatuation with you. I'm not sure how healthy that is but I don't think I can stop but if I know you as well as I might well do by now, you'd find it amusing and not annoying. I don't think many likely-lesbian girls fall for you, J- as lovely as you are- and I'm quite enjoying being one of the few. It makes one special, doesn't it, loving someone or something in a sort of strange, rare way? Manic Pixie Dream Girls are like that, in film and life, and I've always believed that if I were skinnier and prettier and had better hand-eye co-ordination, I could be someone's MPDG. So, J, without having your permission or your phone number or your heart, I plan to be yours. Mayhaps you'll find me sitting at your bus stop one morning in the fog eating chocolate ice-cream out of the tub with a plastic spoon, reading classic American poetry aloud from a dog-eared paperback that I ferreted out of my neighbour's recycling bin. But likely this blog is the best I can do to impress you and it's nothing you're ever going to see. I just wanted- no, needed- no, had- to let you know how I felt about your having been absent from my life for three days that I really would have liked for you to be there. I'm not sure why I needed you so very badly, darling stranger.

love- yes, 'love', because I'm afraid I might well do, dear friend,

H.

Today

my favourite song is Noisettes' Never Forget You;

my Born This Way t-shirt would say Emotional Yo-Yo;

my favourite food that I don't have access to is chocolate ice-cream;

my Uni reading that I am incapable of doing is Anthropology;

my only legitimate concern is a rather impressive tension headache;

my hope for the future centres on New Zealand and a guitar pick;

and my only certainty is that all of this will be different tomorrow

which is really very comforting.

My sister's okay. I've tried to create some boundaries between us so that I am not her everything because she's been dealing with so much lately that it would be tempting for both of us to let her just lean on me endlessly. I just don't think that would ever make either of us happy and if she's going to get better it has to start right about now or else I can see her just continuing to go downhill for years. I couldn't handle that. So I guess lately I've been distant but that also kicks in when I'm not doing so well which I'm not right now. I don't know what I have, the Doctor calls it depression but I'm not sure... anyway, whatever it is kicks in occasionally and turns me into a person nobody likes and that's happened again. I've had trouble getting out of bed, my appetite is going up and down like crazy, I either sleep all day or not at all and I'm sluggish at work, at Uni, when I'm with people... I'm pretty shit at my life right now. I don't even know when assignments are due, my boss seems to be noticing me having stopped working at work, every member of my family is unimpressed with me- though my mother is nice enough to pity me as well- and I'm not putting the effort into being a friend that even I would normally deem necessary. I'm not listening to people properly, my short term memory sucks, I'm rude, I hate everything for making me exist when all I want to do is lie down for the next ten years. I want to wake up finished with something good. I don't want to be in the middle of accomplishing something mediocre.

You are my equal and my likeness.

It took me a long time to read Jane Eyre the first time around but by the time I was finished, I felt changed somehow by the story, because despite the things I didn't like about her, I was like Jane in ways I couldn't yet properly comprehend. And then when I was eighteen I walked away from the only home I'd ever known because I felt, strangely, that I deserved more. And I ended up alone in a farmhouse in Canada, in a room without a curtain or a light and woke up before dawn when I had no idea what to expect for the coming day. So I wandered downstairs, barefoot, out onto the wraparound porch. I crept round to the back of the house and sat with my knees pulled up to my chin and looked out at the sun rise over the lake that preceded the horizon, among a landscape I'd never known before. I waited down there for an hour, watching to see what this new place was all about. Scared and exhilarated. I imagine that kind of feeling is only allowed once.

Anyway, I went to see the new adaptation today and it was lovely and heartbreaking and reminded me, as always, of all the reasons it's sometimes important to run away for the right reasons. And those horrible moments when somebody asks you why you don't believe that they love you and you have to admit it's because you feel unworthy. The times when all you have to sustain you is a love you can't touch, work that will never properly reward you, and people that do nothing but mildly ease numbness.

Except it's all Christian and idealistic and uncompromising and other things one should probably take with a grain of salt. But when you identify with something- and really, a love for pretty words is all I have- you have to revel in that, I think. Because otherwise we just feel alone and ungrateful for being adrift in a world that'll always be a little alien, long after we stop being sheltered and unsure of what we think. Jane was right about what she needed to do, ultimately. I think I am too.

The riots rage in other countries and one of the best friends I've ever had journeys across the sea toward home. It all feels significant somehow, but all I can think of is the ducks I saw playing the fountain in the Exhibition gardens today while it rained, making me think of all the fun it's possible to have that we don't.

Note to self: don't blog while sleep-deprived.

You remember it later, read it back and feel bad about yourself. Ugh.

Character? Or rock-hard thighs?

Well, Blog, you're officially unread. And perhaps unreadable. For as long as it's you and me, anyway, I think I'll just riff. Which is so markedly different from what I've been doing until now.

I am super sick right now which I mildly revel in because I've had to take time off work and just bum around the house. It's given me time to think and ponder some stuffz which ultimately feels overdue but nevertheless lovely. My birthday was yesterday and due to being ill and having made no important plans previously it was spent eating junk food, watching TV and hanging out with my sister and a fellow sick friend. So basically how I would likely have spent any other Monday night this year. I joke that turning twenty is essentially the quarter-life mark, like, sixty years to go. The reason I am so openly macabre is simply due to my belief that twenty-firsts are ridiculous milestones for us all to celebrate when legally and socially they mean very little these days and in this country so let's look at something close to that that has at least some significance. Nope, even written down like that I still sound crazy.

My family and friend got me beautiful gifts which was wonderful and the fact that I am turning another year older at all deserves celebration, as ever. But I doubt being a year older will feel like... anything at all, to be honest, until I've left the house for the first time in days and seen people. I think I'm becoming more of a dreamer as I head into adulthood which is strange but I spend most of my time these days idealising things and planning for far-off or unrealistic futures rather than truly living in what I have. I can't bring myself to be sorry for that though so while I am still very much nineteen-years-old and wondering what it'd be like to be twenty and still clueless, I'm happily contemplating all the novels I'm going to write and the beautiful cities I'm going to see.

People have been asking me a lot about post-grad plans and the fact that I have none doesn't seem to stop me talking a really big game. But I don't know what to do since "write" seems way too self-indulgent and insupportable so I say "social justice" and hope no one calls me on how broad and cliched that answer is. What do I do though, really? Where do I take myself, how do I live with myself, what do I 'work on' for the next decade or half-century or whatever of my life? Identify a passion- how do I do that when they're such short bursts and are so varied and I have to pick just one? Knowing that I will always choose paths rather than be forced down one or step straight onto one out of indifference or fear makes me curious to see which children's story will resemble my life. Ruby slippers? Bread crumbs? Red hood? White rabbit? I take heart in the fact that they all end happily and try not to worry about the turmoil to come in the meantime. Besides, if it's anything like last year's adventures and my childhood reading preferences, the chaos in the middle might be my favourite part.

I'm in a fair bit of pain right now, with throats and heads and things, so I don't really know how much sense I'm making. It seems absurd that I'm of a generation that works out their issues publicly- AKA on the internet- before properly dealing with them privately when for so long the assumption was that one should only do it the other way around. I'm just musing on my identity and mental health in the most public forum there is because somehow it feels safer and more anonymous than doing so in my own head, or talking about it with people I love across my own kitchen table. I worry that one day I'll regret that there are so many pieces of me scattered across cyberspace, little crevices of my memory and consciousness that I can't see in the darkness but that unknown others may uncover with flashlights and feather dusters. It seems fairly self-obsessed to assume someone would bother though, so mostly I feel fine about displaying all my neuroses here, not bothering to censor myself. I guess I hope I never have reason to regret having such low self-esteem.