Breathe

When you're making your own rules, how do you know what they are? She was talking about Blink, it came to mind numerous times in the last days, but there's that gap after the blink, and also the gap before the blink, where you have time to mull or sit upon your choice. You start to question the snaps. Do I want to move? Or is it what I keep saying, just changing something because I feel the need for change, and I already chopped my hair off. Maybe I'll get a car, or a baby, or a tattoo. Or maybe I'll just move house.

When I got back from Lisbon I disdainfully turned down Hermitage Road thinking where the fuck do I live. Trailing my case down a cowering residential street with grim signs of life, disheveled front lawns, free-for-all scraps tipping onto the pavement, a gated concrete development of hippies I have no time or care for. Sweeping, but felt. Where is my energy here, and whilst I might love baking and dancing round my huge room, she's right, these things are stagnant, autonomous, wasted, till taken out into the world. That'll be a fifteen minute walk and a tube, or 6 miles of pedaling then.

I had a brilliant day yesterday. Successful. A potential house, a real one, my favourite gallery, some street chips. I walked through the park in a downpour, giggling under a tree eating an apple for about twenty minutes. The storm stopped and I stayed. That's how long it takes me to eat an apple. I giggled and photographed the green ripe sycamore seeds for my mind, their bright-apple looking both fresh and alive, and dead and void. We browsed the garden centre, that delicious life smell, all oxygenated and wonderful and fresh. The cafe was closed, the other one was open. A weak peppermint took the chill off at our brief, spontaneous meeting, we chatted frankly and I got the bus and it was fine. It was.

There's that worry, horror, where you feel meeting someone you have lost touch with will be just so terrible awfully difficult. But I'm glad I knocked on my old home. Three homes in one day. We had a lot to say to each other, this flash-of-a-person who both hardly knows me but knew me mostly at the most difficult time. I realised I was an absolute and utter misery for the entirety of 2009, a transition of a year that had to happen. Sunday seemed to be a day of self congratulation, taking stock, being free and seeing choice.

I did that thing where potential change makes everyone appreciate the now, and you see your immediacy with peeled eyes. I got home, this one, and people are nice, and everything is a version of amazing, and cracks are pasted. Maybe it's fine. Maybe the real possibility of change gave me new height. But here I am, unshowered on a Monday afternoon, having the same crippling problems. Home-career-relationships. No arrows, no pointers, no handrails, no call backs, no shoves, no-one behind or in front. I am the blink. Blink. Wherever I want. I just wish I knew what needs to happen.