Shoring up the gaps

whit’s fur ye’ll no go by ye.

After the past few days of wobble I’m trying very hard to stay positive today. I’m having a hard time of it given that I’m in the office attempting to complete work in a few hours on a Sunday afternoon that should really be taking me the next two weeks, but anyway.

Life is short. That’s just how it is. No one person can do everything, or even all of the things.

Every choice I make, every day, limits the experiences open to me from that moment on.

But every choice I make is still a choice to do something. To live.

I need to trust that most of the time, I will make the right choice.

I need to trust that the choices I make will help me create a path and a life that makes me happy.

Too much

I’m doing a dangerous thing tonight and writing in anger. This post may be up and back down in a matter of hours. But right now, I’m just sick of it.

To be let down in small ways should not be enough to upset me, but it is the lack of importance, lack of respect, lack of consideration for me that is signalled by the letting down that hurts. And the hurt turns to anger as I realise I am losing my trust. I am a hugely trusting person. I am loyal, and if I love you I will do anything for you.

The quiet heaviness

I’ve been feeling very mortal today.

It’s almost May. This year is already one third done and I feel like it’s slipping away with nothing to show for it. But if I try to pin that thought down and define what exactly I would want to have done, I come up empty. Only a month ago I sat the GAMSAT, the biggest exam I’ve ever taken, and probably the first exam I’ve ever sat that I literally couldn’t finish. I am proud of myself for getting through it, disappointed in myself for not preparing adequately, and still not really acquiescing to the idea that I did genuinely spend the first three months of the year working hard and taking a risk for my future. If that’s not having something to show for my time I don’t know what is.

In the ether

It’s interesting, I’ve noticed my posts on here are quite unfailingly positive. Probably proof I’ll never be a good writer; I hate to kill my darlings.

I definitely don’t feel positive all the time. I get hugely frustrated, and spiteful, and lonely, and desperate, and mulish, and that level of very very quiet when my inner world has gotten too big and is threatening to swallow me up. And sometimes I go to write about it, type up the first sentence, and…stop.

Ogres have layers

So I appear to be scavenging and collecting and hoarding and recording positivity.

I’m texting and talking and counting. I’m facebooking and instagramming and blogging. It’s all happening in a big flurry and all at once.

And now that I have noticed I’m doing it, I’m fascinated.

Your life will not go unnoticed

There’s a Richard Gere movie that I half-watched many years ago. It’s got Jennifer Lopez in it I think and it’s about dancing. And the whole set-up is that his wife thinks he’s cheating but actually he is just dancing, and just needs to find something special and new and exciting in his life. His wife is Susan Sarandon, and I have forgotten almost everything anyone in the movie says apart from the impression I got from one of Susan’s monologues.

Lifting the veil

This never was my town
I was not born or bred
Nor schooled here and she will not
Have me alive or dead
But yet she holds my mind
With her seedy elegance
With her gentle veils of rain
And all her ghosts that walk
And all that hide behind
Her Georgian facades
The catcalls and the pain
The glamour of her squalor
The bravado of her talk

Louis MacNeice

This is a lament for Dublin, but my mind sees Edinburgh. Beautiful town.

Pieces of my heart remain scattered on the cobbles.

First impressions

Isn’t it just the happiest accident when you meet someone who is totally ready to like you?

For a person like me who can, without warning, become completely awkward in a snap-second, it’s a warm bath, sigh of relief feeling. So often I meet new people and string together a few sentences of awkward small talk at best. At worst it’s a smile with no eyes, an inability to make eye contact, an immediate memory slip of a name, a rising blush, and a ‘Hello’ so tiny it’s barely audible.

To see a world in a grain of risoni

I attempted to make vegetable soup on Monday night. Chopped my veggies, stirred my stock, and as per the recipe, added half a cup of risoni. Bubbling and warm and aromatic. A beautiful autumn dinner to come home to for the week. I split it up and popped it in the fridge.

On Tuesday I pulled out a box of my soup to reheat. Tipping it out, I realised my soup was gone. What had gone into the fridge as vegetable soup with risoni had come out of the fridge as risoni with vegetables.

Gutted.

Still tasted good though.

Under April clouds

September has come, it is hers
Whose vitality leaps in the autumn,
Whose nature prefers
Trees without leaves and a fire in the fireplace.
So I give her this month and the next
Though the whole of my year should be hers who has rendered already
So many of its days intolerable or perplexed
But so many more so happy.

Louis MacNeice

It’s mid-April now. The weather can’t make its mind up, although mine is set. This is the time for crisp mornings and cool sun and light breezes. The time for that spark as something instinctual in us scurries to finishfinishfinish because winter is coming.

I stumbled upon this maybe seven years ago and although I have read the full poem it is this isolated paragraph that hits me every time. It thumped through my brain in time with my footsteps as I hustled down Edinburgh laneways. And still, in Melbourne, in April, it whispers.

I don’t know if I am her, or if I am still waiting to meet her.