Linear
Diary entries, flat footedness and postcards x
She’s back! And she’s better (exactly the same) as ever. Blog number 2 comes fashionably late which is actually pretty cool of me when you think about it. I’m playing hard to get via the medium of blog which is subversive and meta, and I will hear nothing to the contrary.
In recent news, my family cockapoo has been diagnosed with a rare health condition that mostly affects dogs but also affected J F Kennedy. She is mostly fine now, but has to take 8 pills a day, which she refuses to eat unless they are hidden in Extra Mature Cheddar Cheese. This is a great shame because she had finally lost all 2 kilos of her covid weight gain (dropping Luna’s weight loss exercise routine (no jumping) on my TikTok Live tomorrow at 4:73 am GMT). Despite, or rather because of her new Keto cheese diet, she has almost immediately gained one of those kilos back.
The last couple of months, I have empathised with Luna. Not only are we both high maintenance girlies with a penchant for finer foods. But, like Luna, I’ve also had this bittersweet feeling of constantly taking two steps/kilos forward, and one step/kilo back. Whenever I worry about my life progress being not really very linear, I always try to remember: J.K Rowling was fired from her job before she became an internationally renowned TERF.
Ever since I was a child, I’ve had this adorable habit of writing bold claims and empty promises in the first page of various floral notebooks. Like David Sedaris, I hoped to forever have a pool of my own inherently beautiful yet suburban anecdotes to draw inspiration from. Yet, unlike David Sedaris, I did not live in a Suburb, or have much follow-through as an eleven-year-old.
Many questions arise from this first, and only entry of my diary. Firstly, who is the ‘all’ that I am referring to and why must I show them a picture of myself? If I am talking to my future self or selves, then would I really require a photo of myself to prove to them that I am a ginger? Or perhaps my past self knew that I would eventually post my diary in my second blog, as blogging is entirely consistent with my quasi-alternative-Bell-Jar-reading-philosophy-girlies brand.
I would also argue that I definitely did not, and still do not really know the meaning of ‘soft features’ other than knowing that I almost certainly do not have them. The image that comes to mind is that of Antony Gormley’s Another Place – an installation of cast-iron sculptures on Crosby Beach. The purpose of the sculptures are to weather away over time, so their faces look faded and blurred.
For context, when I visited the beach, scattered with a hundred ghostly figures, I was nearly moved to tears. Not by the art piece but because my boyfriend had left a block of expensive cheese on the floor of the bus on the way there and an ash-coloured bulldog puppy walked past me whilst wagging its weeny little tail stub.
I’m not sure what could have been so truthful about my life aged 11 and two months. Maybe I had a raw authenticity back then that I lost somewhere between December 6th 2011 and September 2014, when I told the girls in my year 9 class that I had met Rita Ora. Why lie only to choose such a mid-level celebrity?
Thinking back on my bold and delulu pre-tween self, I have definitely progressed a lot. I am still very pale, still a ginger, still quite delusional, but I’m now probably about average height rather than tall for my age. So maybe I’ve actually regressed? Regardless, I think that I don’t always have to interpret my life progress in terms of linear steps. In part, because I am incredibly flat footed and have very weak ankles. So, of course my steps will be slightly different to everyone else’s.
Walls If my bedroom walls could talk, They would bitch about me behind my back, About how my sister printed off all the things she liked, Tracy Emin Jackson Pollock The Office (US version) etc., And stuck them up using bluetack, And then I printed off all the things that my sister liked, Lily Allen Hozier Glee (except for the last 3 seasons) etc., And stuck them up using bluetack. Or how when she grew out of that, She bought cheap blackboard paint, So she could turn her wall into a chalkboard, She did drawings and wrote things like, ‘Fuck Trump’ and ‘Piss off mum’, I used her leftovers and wrote, ‘To do list’ at the top of mine And then never wrote anything else. I still don’t like enough things to fill a wall, And I don’t think blackboard paint works because chalk is impossible to get off it. When she painted her room white again, I painted mine a pale fleshy pink And then when she moved out, I waited a year And then so did I.
This poem was published in the print magazine ‘Unknown Quantities’ and written for the theme of: ‘Places & Time’.