asfarasclouds...

Well, as far as clouds go- although they appeared, cheeky and winteresque in the sky today, they were utterly absent from my evening.
I took a big deep trembling breath at work today, and wrote down all the things in an email to B about things that were making me feel ick- no accusations, just a statement of facts as simply as I could put them.
And when I hit send, I felt bloody petrified, but also about 80 tons lighter. It was out there. Words that take on shapes of their own. But what the hell was I worried about?
I still don't have a very full and definite grasp of communication, but boy is he helping a lot!

And tonight, after a very grown up meeting with a financial adviser type person, I floated home, thinking to surprise him with a slice of cake (it's carb day, we're allowed)- but there were none left at the pastry shop. So imagine my melting surprise when I opened the door and told him the bad news, only to have him say "that's because I bought the last two"...

I've worked about 2 and a half hours, now a soak and a film, and a textured happy bundle of gratitude.
Tonight for the first time (and it doesn't sound like a big deal but it is) I listened to Flame Trees without a hint of tears. I remember when I came back from Oz and I wanted to play mum the track and I just couldn't, not without imploding. Barnsey's old rustybucket rasping voice and all those images from home. But tonight it didn't hurt.

It might not be spring yet, but the air is still drenched hopefully...

...

It's not even the end of January and the air was rank with spring today, rank with spring and full of hope. For the first time I felt incredibly lucky to have a desk facing a window- even the pigeons looked happy. (Or at least smilingly dazed in that feral pigeon way)...

This is the first day this year, where I have felt almost completely cloudless. I had trips and smaller falls throughout the day, where I felt my feet get muddied, but overall, I felt like this unexplained self-pity might be ebbing away.

Other than smelling the flowers I must also remember to think of all the things I have to be thankful for.
So what does this nutty girl do? She listens to Garth Brooks until my head is so full of memories and home and Mandy May that I can smell the dust in my mind and the prickle of the hay, at the memories of those private school parties.

Re-re-re-reading Kindersley's Don't Ask Me Why and although I'm sure the more serious amongst us would consider her pulp fiction, each time I read it I gasp with recognition. Perhaps it's just because I'm a dag at heart. Dag, yep, that's me.

Sah reminded me of one of my funnier awakenings, at the end of a futile, yet often beautiful relationship, when I called her up at the end of it, and told her "She floggeth the dead horse no more" - that's the kind of smile I want to go to bed with tonight...

goodnight!

altogether blue

but in a good way.

last night we went to another pfl concert - alcohol free with rasping cigarettes. This diet is hard but bloody hell it's worth it :) How good not to wake up with an imagined family of dead squirrels in the mouth... so we set the alarm diligently for 7. At 7 the alarm sounded, we changed it to 8. When it sounded at 8, we turned it off and rolled over.
And that was the best thing we could have done. Waking up at just before 10, and a breakfast of fruit and nuts was just the dish. Now there's a calmness, a quiet okayness (making up words as I go alone always reminds me of David Brown's call: to depthify) as we work through our Sunday, but at least we're working together.

Lunch at mum's and a phone date with Sah will be my weekend 'gifts'. Sometimes I dare to believe that my sadness and mood swings just come from being tired, because when I'm rested I can smell the flowers and see the sun behind the clouds. Andrew reckons my sadness and mood swings are because I'm a woman. Ho hum :)

So, blue sunday - and not a hint of Morissey's greyness.

forgiveness

Last night the mood began to thaw. There may even have been a smile of old as we sprawled, or more precisely lay crammed in our tiny bathtub.
It may be surprising, but I'm not very good at talking. I know that once words are out there there's no taking them back, and sometimes I'm terrified of the answer they might bring.
And this morning, in the milky darkness of the bedroom, when the alarm went at 7 (on a Saturday!!) he took my arm and curled it around him and I felt humbled and quietly happy.

This year has not got off to a good start and I wonder sometimes why that is. I don't think being homesick is sufficient excuse for all the apparent damage.

There's a light on in a kitchen across the courtyard from us- early on a weekend morning, I wonder what grey monsters lurk in their lives? I should be happy, I know that...but even knowing that, sometimes I just feel too tired to care about what comes next. And more than too tired, I just feel like I can't be bothered. This scares the shit out of me. Where did that old zing get to?

strange tic

so there's this girl, right? and she has rather an amazing life - full of good things in the present and full of a warm and keening nostalgia for the past. Things are going swimmingly, yet she has this mad tic that makes her do things to fuck up. The tic last night was to read emails that weren't mine- because i'm a dick.

I thought, throughout this year with B that i had become a better person. And in many ways I have - no more cheating, no more lying, trying to talk about stuff even when it's difficult, but the truth is I'm not so good at talking after all, because if I were, I'd just say what's on my mind and not snoop.
I've been burned once already this way- what the fuck was I expecting.

Humble and pissed off at myself.

the leopold hotel

I was listening to Run to Paradise this morning on the crowded and winterpeoplesmelly trolley bus on the way to work, on my brand Spanking new mp3 player ... and I whoomped back into the atmosphere at the Leopold hotel in bicton back then....way back then.
And of course, the memory drifted to Gareth, who had been watching a world cup footy game that night and I had gone out on my own, and got shitfaced, and felt happy, and then anxious and then not very much at all and then how rude I was. How rude without real excuse.
Stop the torrent now, before it engulfs me.

By the way I made $400 aud with about a 20 minute stint in the studio... guess what I was doing?

-just remembered-

on a boozy night in Belgrade almost eight years ago, I remember staggering up the stairs after Wanda towards the end of her engagement party, and asking when you knew that love was for real, that it was IT... and she very simply explained that she knew when she realised she couldn't imagine a reality without H in it. Simple as that.

I just remembered that and it felt warm and real in my head so I thought I'd write it down...

and when

and when home feels further away and relationships around me feel older than the hills, and I feel cast adrift, words are there. It sounds worn out and worn through, but coming home today with distance heavy on my shoulders (Dale's right, the world might be getting smaller but from where we sit, that's a crock of shit) I sat down to acquaint myself with Sean O'Brien, and as I read a sad poem, full of the strain and grey of England's north, I felt washed with warmth and little sparks of sad electricity.
Only the impossible is worth the effort, right?

Anyway, I hope I'm not breaking any laws quoting O'Brien here:

Be with me when they cauterise the facts.
Be with me to the bottom of the page,
Insisting on what history exacts.
Be memory, be conscience, will and rage,
And keep me cold and honest, cousin coat,
So if I lie, I'll know you're at my throat.

Learning to love the questions

's been a good weekend, long with much contemplation, a little jealousy, a little sadness.

Last night, on the way home from the spa with B and his parents in the car, I watched the frozen night-scape flit by outside the window, and listened to his dad intone about his own childhood, holidays by the lake and all those memories. And I couldn't help the push back into my own past, into those unforgettable days at GGS, the daytimes, clad in light blue and approval, and then the nights - and I felt myself sink into a kind of funk that was neither good nor bad, just deep.

B and I are doing the 90 day diet, and Friday night we went to a concert at Base in Szfehervar. Everyone was there. Indeed everyone plus another 300 others.
And even without drinking- anything but mineral water - I had a good time. I love the fug of acceptance I feel whenever I'm with Szabi or Mob, the way they love me for me and not for being with B.

But then late on Saturday morning, when we were getting ready to go to the spa, as I put on those hawaiian print bikinis I got walloped with the memory of shopping with Dale down bridge road, richmond and I hated Hated the distance.
Funny then, that getting back to Budapest a couple of hours ago, I felt that despite the anger and frustration I sometimes feel at this crazy Hungarian city, it was good to return to it. Good to see the lights and squalor and crowds.

Learning to love the questions, as Rilke said, for while I may be older than when I first read those precious words, I feel only a little wiser, and even that only sometimes...

A Mighty Heart

Hope and faith...

I watched this film, knowing the outcome from newspapers and the internet. Daniel Pearl was killed. Yet right up until his colleagues in the film received the horrific video of his death, hope was incandescent in me, that maybe, it would turn out differently.
What faith, what God, condones this behaviour? To cut short a man's life when you don't know him and he has done nothing to you...in the name of some 'higher' power.
God is great, they kept saying in the film, and I kept thinking how is it possible to have such strength of faith.

It scares me, and it makes me sad, from somewhere right in the middle, that this is the kind of world we live in.