cures for things

Recently I've been writing. A lot. And I don't know why, maybe as a cure for loneliness, although I've figured out years ago that the best cure for loneliness is the Cure. (Mainly because the Cure is the best possible cure for almost everything.)

And I don't know where this loneliness stems from, or why it causes a chronic build-up of words in the joints of my fingers, ready to pour out as soon as I set a pen to paper.

I'll breathe through this, I know I will. This faint phase of melodrama and cliches will slide on by, I will find myself listening to bands that are not quite as New Wave and 80's as my current chosen cure. In the meanwhile I consider it completely acceptable to dance around my room to Just Like Heaven at night when I can't sleep.

hands and knees

things i know but don't yet understand #6

I've been trying to figure out why I seem to fall in love at the drop of a hat, and why people drop so many hats near me. 

Thom Tuck

post-birthday meditations

This is what I looked like yesterday, on the morning of my 19th birthday.

I woke up late to the sunshine and crept through the empty house to make myself a cup of tea and open some presents. My present to myself was a quiet morning, just the radio for company and a bit of bossa nova. I gave my eyes wings with eyeliner and put on my favourite dress, the one I bought in Amsterdam with my own hard-earned money. I still feel like an adult only occasionally, half-heartedly, in brief pockets of time.

Turning nineteen is scary because it's so close to twenty. And twenty sounds like far too much. But I do like this steady flow of time, these anchors that make me stop and go, okay. Nineteen. I've been around the sun nineteen times. That's quite something, isn't it?

19 (a letter to myself a year ago)

A year ago you were in Paris and you were busy turning eighteen, drinking your first legal glasses of Champagne and smoking your first legal cigarettes. There are so many things I could tell you about what will happen in your first year as an adult, but I almost wish I could leave you there, on that street corner with smoke in your lungs.


In the year to come you will cry. A lot. In the good ways and in the bad. You will think you can't go on and then you will roll back your shoulders and know that you can, and will, go on.


You will meet people who will make you feel as insignificant as possible and you will realise that the people who make you feel good are the ones who were closest all along. You will leave some people behind and you will let some new people into your life. They will be almost incandescent in their brilliance. You will recognise them when you meet them.


You will write a lot and worry constantly about not writing enough. (It is enough.) You will make yourself and the people around you proud, and you will also be a disappointment. Forgive yourself your failures.


Know that the summer ahead will be the best summer so far.


There will be bars and late nights. There will be loneliness, but there will also be holding hands and sailing and playing the ukulele and studying. These are the things that matter.


You will break your glasses. You will pass your exams. You will apply to university. You will chase far too many trains, especially in the night, with heavy feet and a light head. You will spend most of your summer in various parks in Helsinki. (It is a good way to spend a summer.) You will call V in the middle of the night. Several times. You will change in ways you could never have imagined, but I like to think you'd be proud of me if you could see me now.


You will learn to understand who are the people who really matter. Talk to them. Tell them. Be grateful every day for having them in your life, because (and I'm paraphrasing Virginia Woolf here) you would become transparent without them.


It will be a good year. I wouldn't change a single minute. Take the chances you feel like taking and know that you will land on your feet, eventually. And even if you don't, there will be people around you willing to help you, if you let them.


So I won't leave you there on that street corner in the 5th arrondissement after all. Chin up, head high, off you go into your future, my past, and know that it will be pretty damn spectacular.

3 a.m.

Last night I couldn't sleep. All around me my friends had closed their eyes and evened out their breathings and there I was, eyes wide open in the pitch black.

And despite knowing I could reach out a finger and poke them into the staying awake with me, despite knowing they would gladly talk and listen, I just crept outside to look at the stars.


And it was so quiet I thought for a moment that I had gone deaf.

I don't think I have ever felt as lonely in my life. Not in the summer weeks spent alone in a house too big for me. Not on the deck of a ship in the middle of a sea at four in the morning. Not ever.





But there are the things so much bigger than three-in-the-morning loneliness.

There is winter sunshine and there are nights in bars and in the almost-countryside. There are upcoming birthdays and early mornings and cafés and midnight confessions.

There is this gruelling, grinding, endless uphill battle of trusting. It might be the most difficult thing I have ever done but I refuse to stop trying.

I will forgive myself these insomniatic weaknesses. I will forgive myself, and others, and I will go on. And the next time I'm awake at 3 a.m. and I feel my ribs closing in on my lungs, I will wake someone up so I don't have to look at the stars alone.

I will love you no matter how many mistakes I make when trying to reduce fractions, and no matter how difficult it is to memorize the periodic table. I will love you as the manatee loves the head of lettuce and as the dark spot loves the leopard, as the leech loves the ankle of a wader and as a corpse loves the beak of the vulture. I will love you as the iceberg loves the ship, and the passengers love the lifeboat and the lifeboat loves the teeth of the sperm whale, and the sperm whale loves the flavor of naval uniforms. I never want to be away from you again, except at work, in the restroom or when one of us is at a movie the other does not want to see. 

Lemony Snicket: The Beatrice Letters

skeleton me

(On a completely unrelated note, I might have started another blog for my rants and things. 

Go check it out if you are inclined to enjoy reading, well, rants. And things.) 

mornings

Today I had a massive exam and my hand is cramping and my head is hurting and my brain is decidedly not working.

My favourite things right now: 

yoga class first thing in the morning, 

lying on the floor of my room drawing massive time lines (history revision), 

collapsing into bed when I know there's enough time for all the unslept hours to flee my veins, 

holding hands,

going to see some real live ballet tomorrow with V.

Also I wrote some poems for my final creative writing diploma thing and I actually like some of them, 

which is new.

Augghh I'll be back maybe when my head is back on my shoulders and heart back in my chest. I feel a bit dislocated you see. (But the blogging hiatus, that's still officially going on. So. It might be a while.)

so

I hereby instate a blogging hiatus. Because of, you know, exams. Unpleasant, I know, but a girl's gotta do and so forth. So I'll see you on the flip side, sometime in late late March. (Although I might pop in every now and then. In case I have something to say.)


Today was nice and tomorrow might be even nicer. There are amazing amounts of winter sunshine and snow to skulk through and this morning the sky over Kallio was blue as anything -- fresh as if issued to children on a beach, as written by Virginia Woolf.

I don't know. I'm just ridiculously happy for no reason at all, and that's the very best kind of happiness. Bursting at the seams.

On that note. Goodbye.