The difference between a gun and a tree is a difference of tempo. The tree explodes every spring, but the recoil hits you in autumn - like a wave of pressure to the gut, leaving you aching and utterly without equilibrium.

Or perhaps it's just sleep-deprivation and stress. Either way, I can't make sense of anything.

(misquotation from Ezra Pound)

Caught halfway between restlessness and apathy. I can't get anything done. I bought a bag of satsumas from the co-op and ate them all in an afternoon ( Read more... )

Oh, the last week has been frenetically up and down. November is such a bipolar month. Dissolving into tears at the slightest thing one minute and then upupup!! the next. Saw Nana on Wednesday - she's looking terribly frail, like if you touched her she might snap, all bones and paper-thin skin on a body that used to be snuggly and buxom and full of ( Read more... )

So much for psycho-activity. Since I stumbled to lectures yesterday morning I have achieved precisely nothing, falling asleep in Ancient History and blurring my way through supervisions, my mind working in slow motion, skipping jerkily from one idea to the next as if blinkered, unable to really take anything in. Iain and I went to the co-op to buy ( Read more... )

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I'm not sure how this entry will turn out; continuous prose seems to be beyond me tonight. Even my essay is still in note form, and it's due in tomorrow. ( Another last-minute crisis. )

I rang my grandparents today. My nana keeps sending me postcards, and I've been meaning to write back for weeks but somehow never got round to it, so I phoned them on my new landline. She's going into hospital again tomorrow. The chemotherapy's stopped working. This is the fifth batch of chemo they've given her, and the radiotherapy never came to ( Read more... )

After industriously getting up on time to go to my 9am lecture, I discovered to my delight that my 10am was cancelled. Hurrah! My reward for a good deed - I actually have the rest of the day to do justice to my essay. This is a cause for celebration ( Read more... )

This essay has been dragging on for days now, and is still unfinished. My books are overdue but I can't seem to concentrate. I keep compulsively putting on hand-and-nail cream and checking my email, and staring at the page - and every so often something makes sense and I scribble an excited paragraph, terribly written but for a moment seeming ( Read more... )

Seeing Alex in Stratford this weekend was like a catalyst, in many ways; realising as we talked our way through three bottles of wine that I would never meet anyone quite compared to her, who I connected with so implicitly, so directly. And we have our moods but it's always there, underneath it all, like a thread. And then that strange, sweet sense ( Read more... )