Album: Sour by Olivia Rodrigo
Food: Courgettes cooked in cheap white wine and thyme. Plenty of black pepper and salt. Serve with spaghetti and parmesan.
26.05.21
It is rare to feel like things are standing still. Even if the future stretches out in front of me like the Atlantic to an ocean liner, I’ve still got that little fish feeling, a silver mackerel chucked about in the ebb and flow beneath the water’s surface.
I’m listening to Olivia Rodrigo and wishing I was listening to the album aged 17. I’d play it at full volume and feel seen, understood and valued despite never having had a relationship that never passed the 3 date mark. Reflecting back over the last couple months, I can say with full assurance that I’ve lost my mind. After careful thought, I’ve decided I don’t want it anymore. In my short life I have lost thousands of things. First, denial (it must be around here somewhere), then anger (you took it!), then depression (that was my favourite of all my jumpers I have nothing to wear now) then, finally, acceptance (it’s fine I’m over it I literally cannot be bothered to look for it I’ll just move on with my life).
I’m crazy happy. The face in the mirror changes daily, but each version has big, uneven eyes and brows that won’t grow in the right direction, so I know it’s still me. The skin I wore for years has been shed and the next layer pinks slightly when touched. I could sense it growing, cell by cell, and I wear it well. When I am old, what will I think of the girl who has been walking in my worn-out Nikes? Will I be proud of her? Will I ever be able to gain perspective on decisions I made, or with time do we become less accurate, losing the blessing of context, the flavour of the sugar that once tingled my arteries and urged me forward? In February I didn’t eat for two weeks. Food would rot against my tongue like cotton wool. I looked incredible, I felt like I might die.
Guilt is a terrible feeling. It burrows and gnaws in a way I’d never experienced before. I’m feeling a little bored and lonely tonight. I’ve misplaced the art of doing nothing. Instead, I’ve fallen in love with small things. With chopping vegetables. Today I cooked courgettes in white wine and thyme. I sat on the loo and drank the broth from the bowl, nursing a particularly incessant UTI and listening to 2000s RnB and thought of little else than the salt on my tongue. It is perfectly possible to rewrite yourself. We only lightly keep track of the narratives of others. If you don’t press on your pencil too hard you can come back and form new lines amongst the sketches.
I pledge to never stop lying to people at parties and I pledge to try and keep some of my brain for myself. I also pledge to experiment with fake tan and do my nails and try my best to distinguish between dreams and blurry life. I had forgotten how it felt to be held, to feel your heart suspended, warm air massaging the edges. I'd forgotten what it was like to masturbate with your eyes open. I’m so pleased galleries are open again. I’m learning to let them make me feel, rather than think.
27.05.21
The most miserable May of my life has ended. Woke up to blue skies. I can do anything.
28.05.21
Pre-party jitters. Eating eggs on toast and drinking OJ out of a wine glass. The air is a heavy summer storm and I’m wearing a skirt, feeling exposed and steeling myself for a difficult tube journey. The nasty smell of sriracha being washed down the drain is sitting in the air. I have a lot to achieve in the next five minutes but this is what I feel like doing. Determined to put my best foot forward tonight but unsure of which foot that is. Come on Ells, get your shit together.
30.05.21
Lying on my backpack in a patch of barely-there grass in front of the Tate Modern surrounded by other 20-somethings drinking wine out of plastic cups. Muffled busking undulates on the air but mostly I hear chatter and echoes from across the river. My phone has only a few flashes of charge left and I have nowhere to be and nothing to do. I’m thinking about starting a blog. It’s a very 2000s thing to do and it's laughable to think there’s any readership market for the rambling confessions of an unremarkable mad woman, but it would be nice to be a writer elsewhere than within the pages of an A5 notebook. Around me pigeons trot through the maze of ground between picnic blankets, neck mechanically jutting forwards and back as they dither between searching for crumbs and evading capture by two screaming French children.
I’ve unknowingly been squeezing the contents of my water bottle into the inside of my rucksack. I’ll lay everything out around me and get it to dry. Grateful to be alone. With someone else I’d have to stage a song-and-dance. Oh no, I’ve spilt my water, I’d explain, slowly revealing each item for the group to examine for degrees of ruined-ness. A staged shock, a self-deprecating joke. My friends would feel a vague sense of discomfort at both my own inconvenience and the deviance from a perfect afternoon.
I just fell asleep. How nice to trust that strangers will look after your stuff and be proved right. On the phone with Ash today (a lie, truthfully sending back and forth voicenotes) we agreed that our current lives do not pass the Bechdel test and having Sex and The City-esque crush obsessions was not particularly post-structuralist feminist of us. So I cancelled a date and took the tickets to see The Making of Rodin myself. I know, I feel empowered by me too.
In a way gorgeously lacking in both class and artistry I am currently writing in a Five Guys. Not any Five Guys, mind, the one that overlooks the entrance to St Paul's Cathedral. A great moment of modernity in action. I could go and sit on the steps in the sunshine but I’m enjoying looking at them and sitting inside, totally anonymous and with a great sense of missed normality. I’m here because I needed the loo. It seized me in a moment of great panic in a way I’ve been told is uniquely mine, that no one else goes from nothing to unbearable urgency in such a short space of time. So I marched back across Millennium Bridge, with the blue vastness of London blowing with the wind across me, and St Paul’s rooted ahead, lurching out as if it were the focus of a 3D picture. With the brown water moving beneath me I felt that rush of breathlessness usually reserved for mountain tops and beaches. So now I’m in Five Guys, having made a lucky escape with the bathroom - when I came out there was a queue - dipping salty chips into a milkshake that has every free topping apart from bacon. Is there such a thing as excess?
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