confessions

I cover the floor of my room with essays and textbooks and old postcards. I always leave my scissors on the floor and I never step on them, not even when I stumble out of bed at six in the morning in November, with eyes screwed shut and creaks in my bones. (I don't know how this is possible.)

Sometimes I scare myself with my carelessness, carelessness to do with both people and possessions.



I alternate between hating my hips and sneakily loving them. Some nights I stand before the mirror and I look at myself and I think about what Meg wrote, about how my hips will "hoist groceries and children" and in those words and in those moments I am filled with appreciation for my body and everything it can bring.

(This is a recent development, this forgiveness that I seem to have picked up somewhere, at some point. I can forgive myself my hips and I can forgive myself for loving them; how grown up, how necessary.)




For the first time in years, I've spent a solid period of time without fancying anyone and without wanting a relationship. It's been a long enough time to mark this as significant, a good few percents of my life so far. For me, this is an achievement, something I've worked on, something I've given to myself initially as a punishment and then as a gift: here is your life, here is the person that is you, now learn how to be without the chronic hope of an anchor, a mirror, a buffer.

And I think maybe I have, at least a bit.