Starting Over

and over and over and over and over and over again

Every few weeks or so, I find myself climbing up Blackford Hill to speak to my Grandfather. Only when I really need to pretend that he is still around. We sit next to each other on the bench, and I can feel his strong, skinny thigh pressed against mine. The wind smells like him and even though he has never been here, I know the only places he exists is are wild ones like this.

February is thick grey wintered Cate Blanchett Tár (at least I assume - none of my flatmates have agreed to go see it with me). February slips away from me while I take to my bed like Tracey Emin at Netherfield, and I spend most of it in increasingly filthy sheets, thinking about all of the things I should be doing instead of shivering through my fever feeling very sorry for myself. I’m tired through February, mostly because it’s easier to be tired than upset. I can feel the tar slipping into the folds of my brain.

January is starting to sink in.

I think that my art should be better because I’m sad, but I’m still pretty fucking shit at writing, so that’s irritating, I guess. February is spent reading about the coolest people I’ve ever seen saying the cleverest things I’ve ever heard and once again, I circle back to my hatred of the internet - it is, indubitably the worst thing that has ever happened to my ego.

I feel like a conspiracy theorist on Reddit.

I feel like a sex worker being put through an industrial shredder.

I feel like a woman going into credit-card debt for her cats.

I’m always vibrating at a slightly different frequency than everyone else in the room. I’m sure it’s mostly my narcissism and complete lack of self-awareness and ache for everyone to be completely obsessed with me and refusal to acknowledge that anything is wrong. Or maybe I’m just that meme of the person in the corner of the party and no one gives a shit because literally shut the fuck up.

March slips through in rehearsals and writings and trying desperately to make something that means something and feel a sense of accomplishment when it is done. One of my sisters tells me she sees herself in the ones that I put in the play. I didn’t come up with the characters, but I don’t think I am physically capable of writing sisters without writing mine. Maybe that’s a sign of a bad writer - that I’m unimaginative and bored. Sci-fi and fantasy are genres perpetually inaccessible; the only thing available to me is the world’s most uninteresting biography. But I can’t look at a painting of three women without finding us in it, without us being my first thought. That’s just how it goes. Everyone is nice about the play, but I don’t think I will ever know whether it was good or not, the same way I’ll never know what I actually look like.

I’ve been writing long, rambling and pretentiously poetic emails to my friends who don’t live in my city. I can’t write a diary anymore. I don’t have the discipline or the bandwidth to document this period of time. I turn to Substack. Like I’m an influencer. It’s not that I have to put all of these words somewhere - that I need a sense of publication or performance to validate them - it’s more that throwing them into the digital ether removes myself from responsibility. Or maybe I do, and I’m still searching for someone to tell me that I’m doing a good job, and that I’m very advanced for my age, actually, and exactly what to do with my hands.

It’s April, apparently. April feels like I was in the hospice last week, socks on linoleum floors and hushed voices and hysterical laughter and wine stains all up and down my Grandfather’s arms. April is a different kind of quiet, in the library and outside wrapped up warm against the world ending. My heart is hurting. No, like, my heart is actually hurting. I spend a Saturday afternoon in A&E. I am dismissed, after an EKG and pregnancy test. No chance of either. I text back everyone apart from his widow and my therapist. I don’t go out, or I do sometimes, or I go out a regular and appropriate amount for someone of my age. I am very busy. I have literally nothing going on.

How do I explain this?

The receptionist pulls on her Wolford tights every morning. This Tuesday her left toenail rips a seam right up to where her hip meets her thigh.

Shit. She thinks. I can’t go into work like this.

There is a pause.

Fuck it. She goes. It’s time to quit my job.

So fuck this. And fuck you. I’m starting over. Not for nothing, not for the first time, and certainly not for the fucking last.