January/February/March/April Disposables

This camera took forever to fill up.

The Alan Turing memorial looking creepy

I needed to fill it up

There's a crab there somewhere

This one looks like some distant planet

Manchester doesn't photograph so well

I had nothing to worry about but grass stains on my dress

PS Cecily is still alive I promise

Nothing ever started with a kiss

As I returned to school for the (last ever) first day of term, I'm finally starting the last stretch towards something that might actually resemble adulthood.

My Easter holiday was lovely. Other than the cold that started on the last day of term two and half weeks ago, and thanks to my Dad reinfecting me, I still have. My parents and I went away to a little holiday cottage somewhere on the border between Devon and Cornwall (we're still not sure which side we were actually on). Something about the physical separation from home gave me the chance to temper some emotions that I would rather not be having. For the first time in forever I was able to interrogate some of my insecurities rationally, rather than confronting them through a cloud of emotion. This resulted in some refreshingly logical thoughts, and although I'm nowhere near over feeling as romantically inadequate and innately unattractive as I do, it has meant I'm more a peace them and can accept, for example, that it's counter productive to feel guilty that those are my insecurities, because yes, it may be tied up in patriarchal bullshit, but my feelings still matter and there's no point making myself feel worse. How long this will last will remain to be seen, but for the moment I want to hang on to the feeling of lying out on the grass under the sun, with nothing to worry about but avoiding getting grass stains on my dress.

Last night I read the diary I wrote between Friday 15th April 2011 and Saturday 14th April 2012 cover to cover. Although I have dipped in from it from time to time, watching myself develop over a year was an odd experience. In all honesty, the subject matter hasn't changed that much, despite how much my life has changed from where it was when I was fourteen, but it's good to see them in their beginnings. Mainly because it turns up angsty beauties like this that can only be written by an over dramatic fourteen year old:

Sunday 10th July 2011 - "I think I may be forgetting someone now... Oh yeah! Me. But doesn't everyone. I think I am liked and popular with my friends, but I don't think the boys I know would give a shit if my face was bitten off by a dog. Not that it would make much of a difference."

It's almost sad to read about the friendship I had with people at my old school who don't even reply to my occasional facebook messages.

One of the books I read last week was "The Opposite of Loneliness" by Marina Keegan, a collection of short stories and essays. She was a huge over achiever: graduated magna cum laude from Yale, had a musical being produced at the New York International Fringe and had a job lined up the New Yorker. But a few days after graduation she died in a car crash. I was apprehensive that her death would romanticize the collection, and it was on my mind all the time while I was reading, which isn't helped by the structure of the anthology that is clearly there to play on that idea. But the collection truly is remarkable, even if the short stories often rotate around the same themes and images (much like my diaries) considering she was 22 years old and never planned to have these published in the form that they are in. I've become kind of obsessed.

The waves broke on the shore

"To be loved by Susan would be to be impaled by a bird's sharp beak, to be nailed to a barnyard door. Yet there are moments when I could wish to be speared by a beak, to be nailed to a barnyard door, positively, once and for all" - from Virginia Woolf's 'The Waves'

From my tumblr

Reading Fleur's post on how she is not ready to leave school has made me realise that for me the opposite is true. I'm over the school system. From now on it's just revising and doing past papers, which when done in a classroom just drags on forever, and inevitably ends with just having rather non-consequential conversation with whoever I sit near and then feeling guilty at the lack of progress I have achieved. I'm over having to leave to my house at 7:15 each morning, because it seems like the moment I get back in the evening I have to go back to school. The routine is mindless and I want to be free of it. I'm over being aware that it's going to end soon, but it not being the end yet.

 I sometimes forget that I went to a different school from years 7-11. The last year and half has been so much more happy and tangibly significant.

Easter Holiday reading list: Mrs Dalloway - Virginia Woolf // The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald //  The Waves -  Virginia Woolf // Dracula - Bram Stoker // The Opposite of Loneliness - Marina Keegan