Sunday 7 April 2013

/14/ Little Miss Vulnerability

I was having a little think about what to write this week (no doubt that will be up in a few days if you are interested in an in-depth exploration of why I blog) but after stumbling across this dormant blog where a girl literally just documented her life as a student in Trondheim, I thought what the hell, I’ll just document. Also, my girl Ellie is an icon for me of balancing honesty with story-telling so that’s what I’m aiming for here. I’ve been chatting to a friend lately about the vulnerability of my blog, and I’m trying to decide whether that’s something I want to reign back or embrace. Let’s see how this goes…

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I had a really good week.

  • I went to Pizza Hut with a friend from College who is in the year above and works in the College bar and who has lately become one of my closest friends. We went to have a quick lunch and gorge ourselves on unlimited salad and pizza, but somehow ended up staying for at least two hours, talking about nothing in particular and trying to fend off an overly enthusiastic waiter.
  • When seeing telethon friends in London after just a week apart, we got stupidly excited, to the point that we largely giggled for at least the first hour after which we lapsed into a back-and forth of conversation interspersed with regular bouts of bone-rattling laughter.
  • Catching a train north to Rugby and chatting the time away with my travel companion about Norway and Oxford and other things and sometimes no things at all made the journey pass in the blink of an eye.
  • And finally, I finished the week by celebrating a friend’s birthday with a silly, post-adolescent, uninhibited talk/dance/drink/sleep party which made everything right with the world. I twisted and shouted to an odd and wonderful collection of songs, looked at baby pictures of the birthday boy, dozed off on a human pillow, and had ice cream for breakfast. Yum!

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The best part of all this is that I felt like I belonged with those people and like the person filling up the space between my skin and my bone marrow was really me. It was such a pronounced sensation of affection and comfort, buoyed by limitless laughter and soothed by easy silence, that I thought it was worth writing down.

I’ve not felt that happy and at home since I went to Iceland at the beginning of what would end up being an unplanned Gap Year, where I met two groups of extraordinary people who felt like family, and where I had experiences which made me want to dance and sing and laugh and write for ever until I became art and joy.

(That wonderful feeling lasted two weeks by the way, and when the comedown came - and how it did, like a sledgehammer in the belly of the night - it left me feeling bitterly alone, and I thought it would never end. The feeling carried on, much to my displeasure, during my first year of University, and though surrounded by people, I felt so separate that it seemed more realistic I would forge a meaningful relationship with the solitary inhabitant of a remote star than with my next-door neighbour in College.)

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Bearing this in mind, the fact that I have spent the last week (the last few weeks, in fact!) buzzing around from friend to friend, is quite brilliant! Having good friends is more awesome than growing space rockets on your feet and being able to fly around to exotic destinations, pissing rainbows and trilling like a prepubescent chorister.*

See, I was wrong; about everything from a fortnight in Iceland being the high point of my life,  to the remoteness of my next door neighbour, who has actually turned out to be an excellent person that I value more than I'd find easy to say.

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Fiona is happy and things are good. This was quite tiring to write though, back to normal next week. I miss my camera; these photos were all taken back in October.

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*this actually sounds quite stressful to be fair.

2 comments:

  1. Are these film photos? Which camera did you use? Love the leaves... :-)

    ReplyDelete
  2. @Chestnut Mocha

    It was a disposable camera, so film, yep!

    ReplyDelete

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