or When Mildly Inconvenient Things Happen To Shallow People.

Have you ever had a migraine? It’s like a headache, but a headache so bad it wakes you up in the middle of the night and leaves you lying on the pillow trying to turn your head slowly over without crying. It’s like a headache in that it’s in your head but a headache doesn’t make you start raking over everything that’s happened in the last two years while forming your duvet into a vaguely human shape which you hold then lie on it’s ‘chest’ sobbing. It’s like a headache, sure.

Last night I was dreaming about glitter and cupcakes and buttholes, when a banging noise in my head woke me up. As I opened my eyes the room was spinning. Somehow I dug out the migraine pills in the biscuit tin on my bookshelf, took one, and lowered myself gently back into bed. In the morning when I woke up it felt like the banging had turned into a huge pulsing balloon of pain. More drugs, more painkillers, more darkness. It was all going ok till I ran out of painkillers and realised I couldn’t leave the house as the building’s supervisor was coming over to do a spot check. So I made my little duvet person and hugged it hard.

Hugging is not something I am very good at. In general I dislike being touched, I hate hugging, and will not pat someone’s arm unless I am under extreme duress, or they are crying. Outside of a relationship physical contact is pure, utter, torture. As I lay hugging my duvet person I thought about the last time I hugged someone properly. The last time I really meant it. And I missed it. I started to think about all the little things I missed from a relationship; like giving someone little gifts, or watching someone do something nice for me like cook dinner, or run a bath, and feeling that swell in my heart. Duvet person was collapsing under the weight of my hug so I rolled onto my back. I wished I had someone to go to the shop for me and buy the fancy Neurofen that has the magic mix of things that make migraines go away. I wished I could reward them with a slice of pie I’d made the night before. I wished they could stroke my hair and watch X Files with me and tell me it was all going to be ok.

Obviously, none of this happened. The building supervisor came over, I went to the chemist, I bought the magic pills, they halved my migraine, I got back in bed. The duvet person got demolished, I lay down and let the chemicals do their work. I wrote this blog post. I did not buy anyone a pair of socks to say thank you for helping me. No-one brought me a cup of tea. But it’s ok. I think it’s ok. In the future when I am being brought painkillers and tea and hugs and X Files I will think back to this day and it will have not been for nothing.

“You’ve got the craziest tits I’ve ever seen.”
I am lying, naked, on my back, looking up at him. It takes a while to form the words. “What did you say?”
We both look at my breasts. “You have got the craziest tits I’ve ever seen.”

Earlier, in the bar, as we kissed, arms listlessly by my sides, I wondered what I was doing there. Then the optimistic part of me, the part that wants to make a rainbow out of every shit storm, decided that maybe if I got into it, faked it a little, that maybe I’d get there. So I leant in and imagined I was kissing someone I was crazy about. Someone who was going to bang me into next week.

“I thought you had the cigarettes?”
“I thought you did! Wait here. I’ll go ask that guy for some.” A minute later I return with two Luckies. “Ugh.” I slip into my high pitched voice. “Look at you! Whoring me out!” Even though he is frowning, I laugh.
“You’re being weird.” He lights our fags and passes one back. “You’re hot when you’re normal.”

In the shop, buying more cigarettes for the journey home he opens his wallet. The free drinks are swirling round my head: rum, absinthe, tequila, beer. The constant imploring to ‘just be normal’ is making me act out like a naughty toddler. I am hopping from one foot to the other, thinking about the time I danced round a 7-11 in Guadalajara with my friends, high as a kite. He takes out his wallet, checks how many notes he has. A couple of receipts are sticking out and I grab them, tear them up and throw them on the floor. He calls me weird again and I tell him I’m going home. Outside I can’t decide if I’m more angry with him for being so square, or myself for deliberately acting like a manic pixie dream girl. I hail a cab for us anyway.

“If you want to go home with some normal girl who doesn’t do silly voices every two seconds then you’re standing with the wrong person.”
He pushes the beer across the table at me. “But you can be normal, I’m sure you can.”
“Why bother trying to be something I’m not?”
“Like I said, you’re hot when you’re normal.”

When I wake up I stare at the wall for a minute or so. We are spooning and there is nowhere to wriggle to. When he wakes up it starts again. I wonder if I pretend a little more whether I’ll start to enjoy the seventh hour of fingerbanging. In my head I am flying through a glitter filled sky fucking Michael Pitt but even that can’t get me there. For the first time in five years I fake it. It seems, to the uninitiated, rather convincing. He leaves looking chuffed and a little hungover. I shut the door before he can ask for my number, go back into my flat, put on the loudest song I can find and bunny hop round the front room till I feel ill. Me and my crazy tits feel much hotter now we’re not pretending to be normal.

Stills from artworks by Jeremy Blake

Sometimes an object is not just an object. It is a memory, a feeling, a reminder, an albatross round your neck. And that object just stares at you, day in day out, from a mantlepiece, mocking you. It could be anything. Once, for me, it was a 3ft high Winnie The Pooh teddybear, which now I think about it is pretty menacing in itself, but that fucking thing stared at me every day with it’s big goggle eyes and I hated it’s guts. A stupid gift someone had given me with no thought other than ‘you’re a chick, you’ll like this’. So one afternoon I took it out to an abandoned lot opposite my house, stuffed it full of deodorant cans and set light to it. It was bliss. A wave of pure endorphins shot through me as it’s legs careered of in different directions. I had never been happier than I was in that pure moment.

But sometimes a teddybear isn’t enough. There was a night once which involved a group of very polite skinheads who were into Morrissey, me, The Columbia hotel, and £5k worth of damage to a hotel room. My memory of the entire night is a flashing Skins style montage of leaping insanely around, dressed, then in my underwear, and at one point wearing only a shower curtain as a toga, and standing on a burning mattress while I commanded the skinheads to circle the bed and chant at me. If I had thought burning the teddybear felt good then smashing a toilet seat with my bare hands across a bathtub was like a four hour long orgasm.

Today I was tidying, in a perfectly good mood, dancing to Big Pimpin’ and thinking life was pretty good, when I came across a cache of notes, letters, and a book. Each one in turn upset me so much that I ended up sat on the floor in a pile of crumpled notes and dirty bedsheets, and feeling like I was going to need to listen to Fiona Apple for about five hours to recover.

I hated those stupid bits of paper I hated all of them. I wanted to burn them but I’m very clumsy and our house is pretty rickety and old, so I thought better of it. All I could think of was how every time I saw them I would be sad or angry or pissed off and thinking about something that I didn’t want to think about. They weren’t even particularly erudite, and so hardly worth keeping for posterity. A dirty mixture of anger and sadness was welling inside me. Then I had a great idea.

I opened up my sash window as far as it would go, ripped them all up into tiny pieces and let them flutter away in the breeze. And it felt great.