feel a sort of glum despair over the loss and irreplaceable nature of Mr Ryder. I summoned all of my energies to keep moving - sitting in the library and Reading about homoeroticism in Brideshead.
Letters (unposted) are starting to pile up on my tale. Books and bits of paper and receipts and hair pins litter all available space - chairs, cupboards, shelves...
thursday 7 april
Wrote to Lucy. Feel something close to loneliness.
I grow cold, I grow cold,
I wear the bottom of my leggings rolled
"when you're young, I think it's harder to know what you want, how much of others you're willing to take in... I was always reinventing who I was... I used to roam around the streets in the late afternoon, stopping for a coffee here and there."
- Siri Hustvedt, What I Loved
friday 8 april
"Stockholm is too divine, darling. You'd love it. I'm starting to forget what you look like, and what you sound like, it's rather horrid."
1.8.2011 (23.16)
saturday 9 april
met M for coffee. We talked well into the three-hour mark, on art, literature, life... touched on the subject of Donald Trump with the barista, leafed through a copy of Private Eye to read about George Osborne imploding (v. amusing), critiqued the art on the walls of crying children ("that one is Paul Merton", "that one is watching us eat his chocolate") and sea captains ("he's looking at us like he's on The Office", "he's experienced great sadness and lives alone on an island, but surrounds himself with beautiful things", "that one isn't even a sea captain; he lives in the city and wears the outfit to make people thing he is one"). We even discussed my future life as a '20s socialite with absurd scenarios including champagne breakfasts, furs, and visiting Claridges and animal sanctuaries.
Dried off a Little (from a sudden downpour) in the library, Reading most of my facebook correspondence with Mr. Ryder. It was a desperate situation, really. Half-shame (of my complete lack of social grace and articulation, compared to Charles's) and half grief. It is like I have lost someone almost as in death. Now Sebastian has gotten somewhere inside of my soul, I don't know how I will be able to enjoy (or, endure) the impending summer without Charles. I have skipped the Prologue, Et in Arcadia Ego, and moved straight to exile.
wednesday 27 april
my life is a real culmination of the LORD's sense of humour.
saturday 30 april
"it was sad to see his tall figure receding in the dark as we drove away, just like the other figures in New York and New Orleans: they stand uncertainly underneath immense skies, and everything about them is drowned. Where go? What do? What for?"
- On the Road
I want... total oblivion... until I am not quite here - not quite anywhere - somewhere where I'm not sitting with cold fingers and a throbbing heart and a brain in the middle of an infinite field of dry yellowed grass, starched stiff and withered by the sun. The only rain in sight is the salt water that wells & drips from my eyes and down my cheeks and colours my face grey.
monday 2 may
"'What is he aching to do? What are we all aching to do? What do we want?' She didn't know. She yawned. She was sleepy. It was too much. Nobody could tell. Nobody would ever tell. It was all over. She was eighteen and most lovely, and lost."
- On the Road
it was a fine day; a perfect day. I went down to the park and sketched and read and Sal Paradise's prose became suffused with it all, it became a dream. The warm sun, fresh green grass and dark dirt filling my nostrils with its scent, birdsong, the sound of the fountain, murmur of voices, footsteps. And then time was up and I raised myself from that good place and cycled through the cobbled streets, bouncing over the stones, my head filled with Mexico and Dean Moriarty and the pubs had opened their balconies and people spilled out of them sprawled on the chairs, old men sat talking on white benches. Tulips and daffodils sung out in their brilliance, a white-bright colour of red and yellow in the grass. The rows of cherry trees lined the pathway and that scent of spring, that indeterminable fragrance, a bouquet of the freshest flowers, the curl of sap on the tree, a drop of dew, just lifted up and carried past me as I lifted up my head and tried to find more if it, the blossoms & branches throwing shade on my body as I cycled through that enchanted garden ~
