June 4th ~
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!