I can’t sleep in my room at the moment. It knows too much. I haven’t really been allowing myself my phone either. My phone and I have become too emotionally entangled, it’s become an accomplice to all my baggage. It knows me to be too pathetic and we’ve reached the level of intimacy that only garners disgust and maybe an awkward side hug at pre drinks.

When I try to show the wound I disgust myself. I cannot find a way to explain it. I feel myself becoming very emotional. Not in a tender way, in a hot, raw, bloody sense. In my box room in bethnal green, sitting cross legged on my catholic guilt stained sheets, my emotions are less than desired. You put sunglasses on to avoid looking at it, at me. I lock the door and leave the mess there.

I’m hurt. I’m bitten.

When we take off, I cross myself. When we land safely, I cross myself. I’m so ruined it’s almost an insult. God laughs when he sees it. And then he cries. We land in Florence.

Wherever I go I have to take myself with me. So we run into a problem. Everyone hears about you. Maybe not right away, but it doesn’t take long. I take me, and I take you and so me and you begin to blend. And I am you, maybe even more than I am me.

We visit Tracey Emin’s exhibition: Sex and Solitude. I won’t try to pretend to know much about art. My favourite room was the smallest one. It looked like a chapel. It had about six or seven small canvases with blue and grey paint. They pictured bathrooms, bedrooms, and sometimes a figure just laying there. Paralysed. But all figures in paintings are paralysed. To make something good you have to first make everything stop. Faline wore white, I wore black.

We packed up and headed on. I have my rabbit in my bag. I have a few stuffed animals, they are all rabbits. I have accumulated them over the years. It is not an extensive collection, though it is too many to justify for a twenty one year old. I am twenty two in two weeks. These are the formative years, big birthdays and sad summers.

I write this in a taxi from Florence to Tuscany. I don’t really mind to pay for a taxi because they have better windows than buses do. I don’t really mind to pay extra to ruminate with music and a good window. We barter for a better price. He agrees, but only for a cash payment. When we paid he conveniently doesn’t have any change. We all know we’re being played. We open the door and get in despite it. I don’t really mind, I really don’t mind, I’m very sorry, I’m looking for God, I’m waiting.

As we approached a tunnel we saw a lot of smoke coming from the other side. We drove straight into the fire. Me, faline, rabbit and a fifty year old money hungry italian man in a tiny Citroen. He instructs us to put our windows up. You can drive towards fire, as long as you have some form of protection. But then you won’t feel it on your skin. It doesn’t feel the same. (Do I sound like your hinge date?)

I want to feel the fire on me, in me, everywhere. When we come out the other side, there was just more highway, trees and a wooden cross. It could also be a telephone wire. I couldn’t quite tell. Italy is very religious. God is language. The fire appeared larger than it was. A fact realised only when on the other side of it.

We spend Easter in an empty house in Tuscany. The next day the Pope dies. We leave only for one dinner. We were indulging. We order three desserts. One after the other. A chosen, conscious greed. We are full after one. We continue to order. The waiter warns us against it, we seek it out anyway. I don’t like to eat at the moment but I’m pretending to be someone else. Outside we smoke a pack of cigarettes. I haven’t smoked in probably two years now. Maybe less – when I quit something I try not to count, I just aim to forget I ever did it and slip into a new skin. People think you quit something when you don’t like it, really, you quit when you like it too much.

Later I lay in bed and smell the smoke on my fingers. It lingers for ages. No wonder my ma could always catch me when I smoked. The sin engulfs, it clings to the skin. I can’t move.

When the flight lands, I’m scared to go back to my empty. When the doors open everyone gets up like a fury.

i have trouble letting things go. i know it to be true that if it goes once it is always gone even if it comes back. i hold onto things strongly and it makes them wither away. 

i have been losing things recently. my glasses. and other pieces of me. i feel funny and i can’t see right. winter is coming and the world is looking barer for it. the trees are down to their structure and i feel the same. it is cold to be stripped from things. but winter must exist for spring to come. 

i have dyed my hair many times. when things leave i tend to take it out on my hair. my hair started to fall out from the damage. i decided to cut it off. not all of it, but some of it. so i know that for things to grow back, they must first be cut down. my friend comes into my flat and sees five centimetres of my hair on kitchen roll on the table. abigail you kept your hair? throw it out! i clean and i do throw it out. and i find a spider above my windowsill. it has been there for a while because it has a fully formed web. i leave it. i do not want to be the cause of a broken home.

i keep seeing videos of huge spiders in people’s houses. i am terrified. it is spider season. spiders feel like carcasses to me. they are like fossils. they seem to remain, even if you do take them outside, they come back. but i am too scared to pick them up and take them outside. i do not want to touch the past incase it crawls all over me. i can see it. it lives on my walls. it lives in the dusty corners of my mind. you are still in every room, because i carry you with me. but i will not touch the spider. i will just stare. maybe they feel soft. i will not know. 

This wasn’t the first time I’d seen a mouse. After all, I worked retail for just under six months. That translates into thousands of sales, seven hundred and eighty-four hours (Jesus Christ) and three dead mice. Bad things tend to happen in threes. I went to an interview recently and I've learnt how to talk about my retail experience in an employable way. I tell them that I developed a good work ethic, organisation, flexibility - you know the drill. All of that is actually true, but it’s not what I tell my friends if I ever talk about my time in retail. I tend to lead with the mice, they’re more interesting. I was warned, a dirty vintage basement in Brick Lane plus a damn cold winter means mice were to be expected. And though they made me uncomfortable, I was able to turn a blind eye, I mean, they were dead for one and a mouse in the workplace is completely different to a mouse in your home!  

It was close to three in the morning and I’d just crawled home. I was in my bathroom moving slowly. I heard the mouse before I saw it, classic. And then, before I could process the noise, a very much alive and very energetic mouse ran straight towards me. I screamed twice, darted into my bedroom in my underwear and alternated between hyperventilating and jumping around. How shamefully typical that my first response was to post on my instagram story. I received different reactions. Some were shocked. My more local friends were merely shocked that this was my first mouse. Then I called my mother. I only realised how little I still was in a crisis. “The mouse has to go,” I said, trying to muster some authority from my position perched nervously on the corner of my bed. “It has to go.” This was my home, I’d lived there for ten months, which was longer than I lived inside my mother. When I first moved in I was greeted by a huge spider in the bathtub. I let it stay there. I figured it had lived there longer than me (which at that point was only a week, my shit was still in boxes) and so really, I was the imposter. Since then, I'd seen the flat through two seasons, plastered the walls with art and the flat had become my flat. And, at some point in that process, my flat had become what I called ‘home’ while the house that was once home was a place I visited. A place I hadn’t been back to in a very long time. So the mouse had to go. It was making me feel little. It was making me wish I was back at a home that wasn’t there anymore. 

The next day an exterminator and my father came. I waited downstairs. The consensus was that the mouse must have come in because I left the back door open, but I was not to worry, it was a one-off. I’d read that a singular mouse was rare, in fact in the last twenty four hours I'd read just about every article on mice ever written. Anyway, according to google, where there was one, there were usually many. Mice travelled with their family. But this mouse was an exception. It was a lone mouse. We couldn’t find it anywhere, they told me, we looked everywhere. The exterminator did set up traps just in case any more mice were to visit. It must have left out the back door, they said. I wasn't convinced. Everybody assured me, Abigail, it’s left. We’re going to go home now. 

Later that night I heard a scuffling. Right by the back door, there it was, huddled up next to the step. Oh fuck. There you are. I knew you hadn’t left. I didn't scream this time. It was so little. This mouse was an intruder. It had no family here and no reason to be here. Come on. I opened the door. Please, leave. Leave before you get stuck in one of the traps. I was overtired and rationalising with a mouse about how it could save its life. This is not your home, go back home. And miraculously, it did. I shut the door, sat down on the step and burst into tears. I wasn't managing very well. 

The following morning, I left too, unrelated to any further mouse concerns, just at a wits end. I ended up going home. A lot had happened in the past year and as such I avoided going home. It wasn’t the same. Whatever I was looking for, wasn’t there. But it gave me other things. For one, I slowed the fuck down. I forgot how comfortable my bed was. I became domestic, I’m always a much better cook at home than I am normally. My family was sweet and welcoming to me. At night many aeroplanes and one shooting star flew over the house and I watched. Hit with a heatwave for the end of summer, I took my littlest brother to the beach. The tide was in and the kids were playing in the water. I took his shoes off and urged him to go in. We stood by the edge for a while. Go on, I teased. Are ya scared, don’t be scared. He laughed and laughed but wouldn’t so much as dip a toe in. I’m scared, he squealed, climbing up on me. Well then, you don’t have to go in if you’re scared. The water would be there next year. And you’ll be bigger.

On my last day there I sat outside. The house next door was undergoing major construction work. The new owners had knocked most of the structure down, leaving the home bare in its basic brickwork. The tall property that once stood there was now completely hollow, as easy as that. The machines were very loud. I wondered how anyone could bear the noise for so long. Home could be loud too. It was filled with noise. But mostly it was my mind. That night I felt anxious, replaying events in my head, remembering why I ran from this place. I knew it was time to leave again. The only catch being, wherever I went I had to take myself with me. My mother gave me some cakes to take back with me. Back in the city I recalled my visit home fondly to my friends. As I age, I have less expectations for things. I don’t need things to be perfect as long as they are good. I went home for five days. And it was good. And here I find myself referring to it as home. 

The mouse did not come back to my place. And I doubt it will. I’ve found that fear can be exterminated but shock tends to stay a little longer. The body remembers what the mind makes a pact to forget. I don’t think I was really scared of the mouse, just a little shocked. I regret screaming so loudly at it. It must have had quite the shock itself. And I’m not scared of going home, the idea just shakes me a little. At least I dipped my toes in. 

By June every day was spent in little dresses, floral, mesh, frilly, paired with tennis shoes or Mary Janes and long socks. I’d successfully mastered the art of getting up on the roof of the building attached to my terrace with only a minimal chance of a very painful death. Summer in London was my favourite, even though everyone was dotted around everywhere. The bareness of the city actually made me enjoy it more. My friends were travelling around but I was still in East London, the rats were everywhere and the parks were overflowing. I was reading Acid for the children and particularly loved the early chapters about growing up in Australia. I ran around E2 pretending it was the outback and in return the city gave me a heatwave. Though it brought a certain sense of hysteria, as a heatwave always does, I was grateful for it. I saw London in a new way, as somewhere wild, as somewhere to be explored rather than trapped in. The sun set later and with no day job I felt like I had endless time, although I’m told time always feels endless when you’re young. But I was on a mission of discovery and things were changing.

June 25th ~ 

I was always one of those fools who every concert I went to ‘changed their life’, just as every book I read was the best book ever written. Perhaps it was a rarity that came from being young and full of firsts or perhaps art really can save a person, at least for a night. Regardless, the 25th June changed my life: The Goo Goo Dolls, live in the Apollo. It was a hot sticky day, even by the evening and the tube smelt of sweat. My red curls, which were way too long by this point causing me to manically chop half of them off by the following month, were piled messily on top of my head. Fifteen seconds into Iris and everybody was screaming. I stood there paralysed, tears running down my cheeks. I think part of me is still there. Time is so funny. We’re all so concerned with it, constantly. And then there are moments where it stands still completely and it doesn’t seem to matter, like my time could be up the next day and I would be okay for it all to end. Fleetingly fulfilled. The money would come back but I would never be there again, twenty and so very fragile listening to my favourite song ever made. 

July 16th ~ 

I woke to the sound of rain. I tried to romanticise it but struggled. It had been raining everyday for a week. I felt starved of a summer. I fell in and out of sleep. Each time I began to dream I saw your face, floating through my subconscious. How unfair it was to be someone who remembered everything. Something was in the air. Everybody around me was breaking up. Romantic love was already pretty doomed in my eyes, it was just too much. Too passionate, too fuelled, too desired to ever be lasting, like a thunderstorm. Perhaps a love without lust was the only love that could ever prevail, it was so genuine. Sometimes one would wish their lover was not their lover, that they had entered their life as only a friend, a brother, a neighbour, so that they could be around in a lasting way. 

July 28th ~

People were starting to say Thursdays were the new Fridays, a sentiment that had trickled down from the corporate crowd. Everyday felt like Friday to me. But I enjoyed the heightened pre-weekend atmosphere. Wrists were stamped with new ink, above the last and down the stairs we went into the Gaz’s rockin blues. Gaz himself was in a darkened corner wearing a top hat. We did too many rounds of shots. Alternating between vodka and tequila. We danced and danced and danced. Eventually we fell back into the plush seats. An older man came and sat in the middle of us. We must have often looked very young and silly, to everybody but ourselves. Like we needed saving, or destroying. A woman in her thirties came over to us when he became too touchy, she caught my eye and told me distinctly to stay away from him because he was “a fucking creep.” He overheard the conversation and told her to fuck off. He didn’t like her, he said, he liked us but he didn’t like her, those were his words. She knew better and that made her unlikeable. I cradled my head in my hands as they snapped at each other, I was horrifically drunk. For a while he was funny. He claimed Annie Lennox was his babysitter and drawled on about how Jimi Hendrix had touched these walls. He gave us advice, he talked and talked. The only thing I can really remember him saying was stop chasing the rockstar, become the rockstar. Not too shabby. “These boys don’t know shit, I’ll show you what real love is,” he said and tried to shove his tongue down my throat. That was a kind of ‘love’ that was nothing new to me. Sometimes I found shit like that amusing, but when I gave it too much thought I always ended up feeling hollow and gross. My friend grabbed my arm and we were off, up the stairs and back into the night. Overcome by a sudden darkness that could only be found in the deep crannies of Soho, we decided to chase the sunrise. We hopped and skipped to Trafalgar Square at 4am, listening to I’m every woman over and over again. It was almost completely empty and we danced. The air was cold and my feet were starting to hurt but I was too drunk to really be aware of those things. It was only when I peeled off my bloodied socks the next morning that I felt the delayed pain. Once we’d danced it out, we sat defeated on the steps and waited for the sun to rise. But it didn’t. The sky became lighter, but the sun never came out. On my way home, my star necklace fell off - faulty clasp. I hadn’t even noticed. A kind woman chased me down the street to return it to me. “Don’t lose your star,” she said. 

August 2nd ~ 

New tattoos! There was something bittersweet about new tattoos, knowing they’d stay with me for longer than a lot of people. Knowing I’d probably get more in the future, that would never be seen by people who knew every inch of me. And then my body wouldn’t belong to them anymore, in the way it once did. Interestingly, tattoos, something that will always stay the same, were a permanent reminder of how much everything was changing. I had five tattoos by this point. I was itching for even more. I had to pace myself, I had so many years left. I don’t know why in my head I think I don't have the time to do and be all the things I want to be. The man who tattooed us was gentle and kind. He told us about growing up in Rio. He moved to London for his lover, a decade ago. She was from London and he was from Brazil. Interestingly, they broke up, he stayed here and she went to live in Brazil. It was like they met, fell in love, fell out of love and then crossed over paths. Now he has tattoos that she has never seen and she lives in his home and in his head. I couldn’t stop thinking about it, how people walk with us for a while and then we separate, but they keep a part of us with them. I couldn’t stop thinking about how much of an impact we have on each other. And I tried to think of ways that I could be better for the people around me. 

August 30th ~

To mark the end of summer, I held a carefully curated yard sale. All of my old clothes were hung on cheap metal racks on a side street adjacent to my flat. I’d combed through my wardrobe ruthlessly, if I’d worn it that summer I decided it had to go. I had a feeling I’d be a very different person the next summer and these clothes would be alien to me. I rarely become attached to clothes, besides my staple brown leather jacket (which had developed a growing hole in the left arm over the summer) and my cowboy boots, everything in my closet was fair game to be auctioned off. The idea of someone else wearing something that was once mine excited me, just as it did when I found something cool at the thrift store to adopt and would spend the afternoon wondering who it had once belonged to. A few months previous I’d thrifted a jacket in Islington and found a photograph of a man wearing the very jacket in the pocket. I pinned the photograph on my fridge and every time I wore the jacket I would go to the fridge and show the man. Look! Your favourite jacket lives on! I ended up putting that jacket in the pile to sell but I kept the photograph. I never was able to style it to be as groovy as the man did, his balding head and dad glasses creating a perfect contrast to the fringed cowboy style ensemble. On him it looked surprising, eye-catching, unexpected. It looked less special on me, more predictable - even clichéd, my cascade of long curls and silly dresses taking away from the rebellion that the jacket had once been. The man looked like an accountant or something. Now what possessed an accountant to purchase a jacket like that? Ha. The jacket, and half of the clothes I had to my name were rehomed that day and I held a sweet two hundred and fifty quid in exchange, more than I’d made all summer! 

i am not overly concerned with how i look. when i say sorry i mean it. i still sleep with my rabbit. my tastebuds are changing. i drink hot water before bed not because i like the taste but because my mother does that and her mother does that. and i learn from the women around me. i eat blackberries and peanut butter and things to make my brain grow. i am quiet. i have three favourite films. i try to imagine love i have not encountered yet so i can become it. i entertain the idea of ‘yet’. i am not someone who cares particularly about the weather, at least not enough to complain about it in supermarket queues. in fact, i like being in supermarkets. i can carry heavy things. i care about bands and writers and artists. but maybe only because i want other people to care about those things too. i like being under trees. i know our fingerprints look like their rings. and on some days that’s enough to make me believe in something bigger. but i do not go to church. i am running late. and in circles. all the time. my brain is busy when you touch me and my eyes are closed. i lose my airpods everyday. little things can make me rageful. my legs are bruised. i desire what i fear. and i fear what i desire. i still sleep with my rabbit. i am significantly happier under the influence. i always lie to say i’m taller.  i do not return calls. i do not make my bed. i do not like soup. i crave to be full. i am not extraordinary. 

there are both good things and bad things about me though i do not feel either are clearly distinct. i think i walk the tightrope. i do not change as much as you might think i do, but the way you look at me does. so i do not know how to answer, besides only the fact that i don’t think a bad person would spend so much time worrying they’re a bad person. and most of these things are okay, a lot of people do not order soup, a lot of people are not extraordinary.