I Was a Stranger

It's a quiet maelstrom into which I'm slipping. Glassy whirls of cosmic haze have caught me adrift and I  can do nothing but watch myself from afar as my uninhabited form spins in dizzying descent.

I only wish there was a soul on this earth who had lived as much as I have in my short years. Everyone is through with me so prematurely, through with dealing before I've ever had my share; I am thus left a stranger on this lonely road still burdened with the ghosts of my past - bereft and abandoned, that dark, sharp-taloned Raven known as sorrow the sole companion for my journey. No-body knows the suffering from which I am desperate to be relieved. 

This curious new path was largely unknown to me before, or at least to this extent. It feels as though life is spiralling into a state of unprecedented chaos and I do not know how to halt the progression, or even if I would if I could. Everything is taking over me and in my frailness I merely succumb to the tide. I'm tired, so very tired and the task of sustaining my defences during such an unholy war is becoming too much. It has been three nights since I slept at all and some time without food. Now a rather more fresh addiction - if the term is valid - is spinning the world beyond mere delirium and into further disarray.

My altered state is albeit a highly disorientating one in which the vision before me is a rippling vision of flickering scenes in progressive time zones; meaning that I have no idea which scene - which world - is reality and which was simply a transient precursor of the scene to follow, only to vanish like a dream. I am rapidly waking and re-waking into yet another dream after dream. The world is not true. Reality cannot be. Though I am not afraid: there have been times where I have fallen into this experience accompanied by feelings of intense terror and desperation to be secure and finally grasp what is real again. Now, however, I can let it wash over me, and treat the voice as a friend. 

Yet why do these behaviours cause my conscience a small sense of discomfort when they remain my only means of surviving a life that I cannot cope with? It seems cruel that the door to my shelter is also the one to my prison cell. 

In all honesty I don't give the highest regard for my own existence, but I have this great fear for the sake of others that something has set in motion that I will not be able to turn back from. There is already so much to contend with but my reality is becoming so deranged and distorted that I am uncertain what to do. I want all of this to be gone and to never have been at all.

I can't close my shelter.

Waking Up

So. I went for this walk.

It was raining an awful lot even though earlier it had been a good day except only weather-wise because I was having a bad day. So I thought, I’m going to go on a really long walk from Shinewater through Langney past Pevensey up to Sovereign Harbour and round to Princes Park and burn the zero calories I’ve consumed today and chill the fuck out. Mojo was asleep so I thought I’d go it alone, with my phone, like a gnome. Then I thought, whilst on this walk, fuck, this is taking me a long time. And I’m alone. I don’t like being alone. And I’m fucking tired. It’s raining, which is, without a shadow of a doubt, an absolute pathetic fallacy for my mood and life in general. But at least that means I can wear my Dad’s massive Barbour which makes my legs look slightly less fat. I’m going to have to employ coping mechanisms. What coping mechanism can I use in this situation? Probably the two I prepared earlier. I find being at my Dad’s really difficult and and I don’t care what you say for every means there is a just cause or something.

So I was walking along and by this point I was getting really tired. I passed two young lovers and a sleeping ice cream van and it made me think some more thoughts for a while. I was coming up to the Langney roundabout which seemed longer than it was but I’m really very very sorry that this story is getting too long. Holy moly. I wasn’t really thinking particularly hard as I was crossing a road but I was wise enough to know that when a red fiesta is approaching from the left it’s fair to cross as long as it’s in the distance so I did and the prick didn’t even have to slow down but he beeped because I had to maybe run a tiny bit but mainly because he was a prick which scared the shit out of me and when I landed on the other side of the road my heart was doing a funny dance and not a pretty one at that. By this point I figured that I might not quite make it all the way to Princes Park tonight. So I sat down at the nearest bus stop and said ‘Fuck’ out loud, like a don, because my bag was so heavy. I sat there for either ten minutes or ten hours and watched the rain, watched a bus pass, nearly stop with the bus driver glancing back and forth at me as he approached deliberating whether or not I was worth picking up, but then carry on; then I decided to stand up. As I was doing up my bag I realised that it had suddenly caught up on me and that everything was rippling tremendously and my self-dialogue was getting really really loud and I was beginning to have vivid conversations with myself in my head but with happy thoughts as oppose to sad ones and I thought I’m fucked this is good. 

I figured that I wasn’t going to make it home and I was beginning to worry as I didn’t fancy sleeping on the side of the road and I didn’t have the heart to phone my Dad and trouble him to jump in his car and collect me. So I turned around and started walking back and tried to phone Mum to tell her that I was having a lovely walk and it was turning my day around even though I was super tired and secretly worried about getting home and Dad making me have something to eat but she didn’t answer her phone. So I carried on and thought, let’s burn some more and shake things up a bit more. Let’s make this interesting. The cemetery would make an interesting route but then I remembered that that’s what horror movie directors would call creepy so maybe not. So instead of going all the way back to Milfoil Drive I took a left at Friday Tree, which made me a tiny bit pleased because I noticed that it was actually supposed to say Friday Street. I walked and walked and walked - it seemed to take forever and ever and ever. I like that symmetry. symmetry that like I .I reckoned that I would have to turn left at some point to basically do a circle on myself and end up back at Milfoil which I also thought was pretty damn clever but the only turning ahead said something Drive, but no it said Grove… Drive, Grove, Drive, Grove, which one could it be? What will this strange location be like? Drive suggests a closed end.. whereas Grove suggests a road with trees…. Which one? Am I squinting as much as I think I am? Suddenly. The obscurity evaporated: DROVE! I have no idea what that means. Still, I walked on and decided to take the next left because by the time I had finished thinking I had passed Something Drove anyhow. By this time I was on my second spliff.

After a while I saw a white camper van ahead which reminded me of pleasant memories of happy families and holidays to the Isle of Wight in Dad’s converted ambulance. Then fuck, my roach fell out. I think I might have told my Mum if I was still on voicemail, or imagined telling my Mum, or told myself or someone else that it was a filter and then following the phrase with copious giggles. I tried to put it back in but with little success as the roll was pretty goddamn wet with all the rain and all so I thought I’d go without, like the master that I am. I thought also, this is going to get me fucked. Like drinking from the bottle. Without the filter. Or maybe not. I don’t know. It’s getting to the point that I wish this psychological diarrhoea would give it a fucking rest to be frank. Anyway. Enough of that. I reached the camper van and realised it was parked in a pub carpark. I thought, maybe I could be an absolute daredevil like my Dad and sneak through the carpark and over the trees at the back and hope there’s not a brick wall on the other side or any parents putting their children back into the family car or police vans called to a local brawl. So I strolled through as nonchalantly as I possibly could wet spliff in hand and sometimes mouth and did a runner through the trees but as I write this my phone is sporadically vibrating because it keeps thinking it’s on charge but there is no wire plugged in and even my brother agrees I’m not making this up I swear to God it’s freaking me out IT’S MESSING WITH MY MIND. And I keep getting distracted by my Rowan’s incessant babbling that he pulled his tooth out and that he hid it under the sofa for me yesterday followed by the exultant phrase ‘Yeah Mimi eat i’ in a bowwl.’ But anyway. Thankfully there was no brick wall.

Then I had no idea where the hell I was. Sorrel Drive No.1-2 I thought, better not walk up there or you’ll be sorrel. So I went left again and thought I don’t recognise that construction site but then I thought just ignore it best ignore things you don’t recognise. I passed an elderly lady walking her dog as I trudged on and I really was beginning to wonder if I was going to make it home at all and I was so bloody thirsty but I smiled real horrorshow. Then I thought I saw a part of the bus route home I recognised but then I thought just ignore it best ignore things you recognise. Eventually I came to the top of the hill and I turned one of two directions and it was going okay again.

I carried on walking, I definitely saw a real-life squirrel. Then I turned out exactly where I wanted to be - homeward-bound that is - so kind of not so much where I wanted to be. I’m not sure now. Things seem good. I thought I know what I’ll do I’ll surprise the boys by coming in the back way and running in to the glass doors splat all soggy and shout hello but then I thought that would be rather undignified so I searched for my front door keys in my bag. I felt what I thought was the antique miniature bottle of eau de parfum attached to my keychain that I bought for a few euros in an amazing vintage warehouse in Treguier not Trebuchet in France last summer when everything was lovely but it was in fact my sugar-free fresh mint breath spray and all I kept thinking was I must brush my teeth when I get home I must brush my teeth when I get home I must brush my teeth when I get home and several more visionary scenarios branched off from that.

This isn’t how I normally write I’m in quite an altered state of mind.

On the way back I think I might have overheard/seen some domestic abuse. I still feel bad about that. I carried on walking. A police car drove past and I thought that was lucky/nearly unlucky had they passed earlier or had I been a slightly faster walker which for once makes me thankful I was tired and then I imagined a whole scenario had any of the above alternatives arisen involving policemen searches which I won’t go into.

Then I got home and I was very wet. On my hair. On my head. Then I sat down and wrote this story, even though it took a little while because I got distracted by family banter which was nice, watching Gulliver’s Travels intersected by sexual innuendos, my macbook being out of battery, taking ‘I wonder how tired I look ‘photos on Photo Booth after I plugged it in, then my Dad bringing me his reading glasses which he has used as he has got older and his eyes weaker basically suggesting that my eyes are shit which made me laugh and cry a little bit but the glasses were super funky so then taking more photos of that. I’m sorry that wasn’t a list of three, I’m really sorry about that.

So there you go. There’s your bedtime story for the night kids (except probably not for kids.)

Essentially, this story was already written word for word in my head on the way home. 

I’m thoroughly surprised that I remembered it all to be honest.

Soaked to the Skin

Why is it bleak here?
Winter has come once again
Tears are welling in my eyes

Comfort

In some uncertain light, comfort sighs. The soul's kawanami.

It's more than strange to have known absolute happiness amidst such intense grief. I had not thought it possible. Lying there as though I could forever in perfect, inexplicable contentment, when for the most part I long to escape the torture that is life altogether - these sentiments blossomed, vernal sacraments promising a future and a hope. 

Suddenly I am lost for words. I generally try not to censor the flow despite every anxiety that the result is a stream of consciousness which is emotionally elaborate in excess - yet now I find that every expression is a struggle. I don't know how to explain what I cannot, what I will never be able to be. It has been the strangest week of my entire life - which is saying an awful lot given that I've been in various psychiatric institutions - and I just don't know where to start. 

I'm still in a state of partial disorientation after the week's indulgences in copious quantities of substances I shouldn't be using but it's a reflective condition; one during which I have the ability to recognise, my thoughts order and release them in a hopefully reasonably comprehensible form as oppose to having some absorbent glass wall deaden every vessel of meaning in my mind and heart and then shoot from its exterior an action which is so entirely undetermined it seems as though it was born from thin air. Despite the sad reality that the almost frighteningly dizzying highs are subsiding, and my mood mellowing in accordance, I am still able to appreciate the good times that have been. I cannot and will not let myself crash completely. 

The week was far from devoid of turbulence, commencing with a wild night in Brighton spent, after a great gig with friends, chasing someone such an emotional and physical wreck that she was a danger to not only herself but others around her including me and those I was with. I don't think it was situations of trauma and moments of intense anxiety including various panic attacks that made it such an extraordinary week however; quite the opposite: for once in my whole life I found myself wanting to hold myself in a moment of time forever and ever as oppose to wishing it away completely. Newer still it wasn't only for the wrong reasons. It wasn't purely for starvation or the influence of intoxication, though undeniably both played a substantial part. I knew peace.

Insecurities will always invade any suggestion of a relationship which exists in my world. Somehow here however, some reciprocal connection, an inexplicable bond which I doubt can be defined so simply as lust or even love or good company rendered a sense of ease between us - we were, quite unconditionally, meant to be together at this time. Fate. Magic.

Now after the bliss of discovering, at least for one transient moment, true happiness I am slightly at a loss. I don't know where to find myself without another, when it seems that it is in that other that I have found home. I long to feel the comfort of being embraced again and adoring such a gesture as oppose to feeling terrified in its grasp. The sense of security once is beginning to become evanescent, drifting ever more distant on the horizon and thus persuading me further toward a means of gratifying self-destruction. Though I know this road well and have been on it for some time now it seems the downward trajectory is accelerating with alarming abruptness which contradicts the easy tranquility of my more pleasant mood and the preceding events. Physical deterioration is beginning to set in more rapidly than before, almost as some ironic remark from the universe about the imbalance of life. Maybe this is all I will ever know: my situation being good at one end of the spectrum means everything on the other must suffer as a result. Either way, I would sacrifice anything for the brief bliss I have known over past times - something I never imagined I would ever express.

My body may well be worn but my heart has found a rhythm which I hope can find the will to sustain. It's difficult to keep a hold on an abstract feeling, especially one so rarely felt. I can only try to remember. 

Shelter

It's difficult to self-express in the light of this dizzying oblivion. I do not know what's real anymore. I'm not sure who I am; what I've done. I don't know if any of the past week happened, or whether it was a dream, or even if I'm still locked in such a curious succession of images and events, of rippling sensations that may or may not be reality. Though the intense feelings of disorientation are subsiding with tentative lethargy I am not yet grounded. Still it seems difficult to determine where I am, if I 'am' at all.

I promised myself that my entry to follow my Parisian adventures would be entirely devoid of misery; that my bons sentiments would sustain themselves after my return to England. Tragically it's past the point of refusing to acknowledge the fact that I've crashed since coming home, for I have plummeted deeper than ever. Relaying the positivity I felt throughout my time in France will remain the priority of this post, but I cannot deny the fact that I don't know quite where I stand with myself.

It was a beautiful vacation - truly and utterly perfect. During our journey to London my manic excitement was thriving to such an degree that I could not imagine that it was reality, in a thrillingly delirious sense, not the dull confusion I know now. Pessimism forewarned me that something was going to go wrong. We would miss our coach from Victoria to Bercy, it was inevitable. Or maybe there would be a confusion at check-in, we'd forgotten the relevant documents or something. Perhaps even a horrific accident - to collapse and die before we'd even reached our destination would be so fitting with the scheme of the melodrama that is my life. To my surprise, everything went relatively smoothly. The 11-hour coach journey was anxiety-inducing to say the very least and it wasn't only me who found it a challenge - Lucy too was weary after a night's discomfort and lack of sleep - but after that rough patch we had arrived in Paris and everything was wonderful.

We stayed in the centre of Montmatre, minutes away from the stunning Basilique de Sacre-Coeur. I could not remember the last time I had been so blissfully happy - never without pale sorrow staining the outskirts of my ecstasy of course, but, comparatively content. It wasn't only everything that we did over the brief vacation which was so incredible, but to be so at ease with another person, to feel happy with them - it was the most valuable aspect of the whole experience. There was not one moment that I felt anything other than wonderfully comfortable with Lucy; whether we were laughing non-stop or walking leisurely around the canal in silence. It is almost too good to be true to have someone you love so much.

Meeting my beautiful sister Jane after so long was more lovely than I can describe. The picturesque settings of Le Jardin de la Vie Romantique, home to George Sand and Chopin were beautiful - it could not be more perfect for Jane and her partner Niz to impart their good news of my sister's pregnancy. We then travelled to Le Louvre art gallery where fate had it that we should meet my friend from youtube Clara (even though we hadn't expected to be lucky enough to find her amongst the rippling hoards of tourists!) The art of course was breathtaking but meeting Clara too was incredible. For the first time in a long time, I felt inspired to be alive. The meloncholy beauty of the Père Lachaise Cemetery, the majesty of Le Tour Eiffel, the bustling busy of the inner city juxtaposed with the ethereal peace of the Sacre-Coeur - suddenly existing was farther from the torturous end of the spectrum and nearer to exquisite. 

Physically, it was a struggle. Walking for miles round the beautiful city each day was a joy, albeit one that took its toll; particularly when I was existing purely on a little soya milk in my tea in the mornings, administered by my friend. Nevertheless that was a milestone for me to accomplish, given that I've never consumed calories under the supervision of figures of greater authority than Lucy, be that my parents or a medical professional. It was very, very difficult, but I did it, I got by. I trusted her when she told me it was alright, and that I needed it, and after the first sip of tea I managed to convince myself that I wasn't doing it, or simply numb the anxieties away, cigarette in hand. At that point I could feel a little glimmer of pride, or at least thanks to my dear friend for supporting me, with the knowledge that if she hadn't then I wouldn't have had any energy at all to achieve everything that we did. I could not have been more thankful to her for encouraging me to drink half a hot chocolate when I was near to collapse on our last night, for it allowed for more dancing at Le Paris Social Club - another fantastic experience.

Perhaps the disorientation of returning to England didn't help matters, but tragically, since coming home  I have suffered my most severe crash. It seems so unjust that other people can lead such temperate lives, with things either being - consistently for the most part - reasonably good or reasonably bad. I have the misfortune of clinging to a pendulum oscillating between states entirely diametrically opposed: either things are on a surreal high, or a low so intense that I am desperate for death. Subsequent to the thrill of Paris, it shames me to say that my mood has plummeted to the latter condition. I made a vow to myself on the way home that I would ensure that my positive memories of our adventures would sustain my sentiments. However, inevitably what goes up must come down - it seems this may well be the story of my life of which I have no control. 

It hurts to feel so utterly bereft; that nowhere provides any peaceful sanctuary for you, a homeless wreck. After coming back to Sussex it is almost as though it has confirmed to me that the pain will not end. Every time that things seem to be good, they are destroyed before I have had the chance to fully embrace them. Everything I love turns to shit.

Seeing the Rolling Stones should have been the best night of my entire life. Instead I spent the morning having the worst panic attack I have ever suffered after a period of intense dissociation and loss of control the previous night to the extent that my Mum nearly called an ambulance out of fear that I was having a heart attack. Nothing can describe the crippling pain of despair, which physically grips every nerve, each vital organ being crushed as though in the claws of some demonic force with a lust for blood. Neither of us thought I'd make it to Hyde Park, but after escorting me on the train my dedicated mother managed to hand me over to my Dad, and eventually I came to be glad that I had gone after all. 
I cannot even express how incredible the Stones were. I was crying again, but with awe, and perhaps the residues of the morning's torment. Jagger's boundless energy, the screams of the hundreds of thousands of fans and the fireworks filling the London skies following the last bursts of their encore... I can only wish that I had been in a better place to make the absolute best of the moment, as oppose to shrivelling to a shell of a person as soon as the ecstasy of the evening had left me.

Things have to change, and they have to change for good. I simply cannot go on like this any longer. I need to find shelter somewhere. I want to be able to say that I'm doing better, and that I'm happy to be living. Misery seems to hit at the worst moments and I've never wished to be someone else more in all my life, especially with more important events approaching including my sixth form prom. It seems as though I can't escape myself - neither the excruciating volatility of my mind, nor the grotesqueness of the body in which I'm trapped. I want everything to be okay again. For this neverending war to be over.

All I can do is battle on.