I Didn't Even See The Snapchat (a poem...?)

You forget that humans have so much blood until you see it.

Lines of it, horizontal and vertical and sideways and diagon-ways, slant-ways and knife-ways.

He doesn’t show you, doesn’t try to hide, merely exists.

Your mouth forms words over and again that stick, pebbles in your throat. It’s a 99 pence plastic stocking filler toy that’s gummed up and broken before you even start.

“What happened?” (The “again” is silent.)

He answers in shards of light. They said, they said, they said, he said. So many third persons. Are they all the same one?

He rips the bandages off and tells me to smell the iodine. Hospitals and childhood and hostels come back to me, become me. I portrait myself, paint my face into being a deity of indifference.

I cannot meddle.

He was worried, that he got blood on his sheets. Angry that he ruined his favourite pair of jeans. He has to wear shorts now, the bandages poking out from underneath them. Glowing ghostly white, and the plasters are pale too.

Literally, he was sewn back together. We have the technology, we can rebuild him.

He had a friend with him, waiting. Who came, because he sent an A&E selfie. I can’t believe we snapchat fragility now, hashtag wrecked.

When he goes to pee, I see it, on his desk. Such a tiny, innocuous thing, this snap blade of his.

I pick it up, carry it with me as a token with a smear of his blood still on it.

I recite voodoo spells, wrap it in chains and tie it to a cinderblock, throw it in the poisonous lake that bubbles away in the centre of our campus.

(How strange, to have a university with a toxic centre. It’s a metaphor, I’m sure of it, it must be.

I just don’t know what for yet.)

The geese flee. Flapping, squawking refugees from that slither of metal and cold.

I take all the sharp edges from the world to my power-sander gaze, scratch off the sharp corners, marshmallow the steel.

I hear him come back and put it down.

He cleans the wounds, airs them out. Hanging them out to dry, like laundry. A clothes horse of himself.

He says he keeps the blade as it is safe. Safer that burning his flesh or snip-snipping arteries with scissors. There are only two scratches on his wrist, tiny and parallel. Tally marks?

There is no desire to die sooner than natural. We both want him to stop hurting.

What scares me most of all is how sensible he is. Rationality, parceled up with curly hair and a firm grasp of logic. 

He is too sensible to really hurt himself, I say, when I can't sleep.

If he did die, I would sob bitterly. Should have done more, said more, hidden Ninja-like behind his door ready to protect him from himself. Should have Big Brothered his medication, strung him up in Spiderman silk so he could not move.

Worse still: one day, it would stop hurting. A person, reduced to a blip in my life, anecdotally.

Self-harm discussed over tea and toast. Pass us the butter, are you okay, one time a long time ago my friend died. Well, obviously.

I mean – the “one time”, that is. Obviously. Death is a pretty one-time thing.

Nerds with Nerf guns taught me stuff.

Presented without context.*

- If you find a potato on the street at 5am, you should always always pick it up.
- If you are drinking wine at 5am at your friend's house, you should probably not have anything too important planned for the next day.
- It is perfectly acceptable to send drunk Snapchats on trains at eight in the morning.
- It is also perfectly acceptable to spoon on the floor of trains. Especially if you are still drunk from the night before.
- Apparently study drugs are "fantastic but taste like balls".

- Taking no spare clothes to a field full of mud is a really bad idea.
- Trying to run around on less than five hours' sleep in the last forty-eight hours is really hard.
- Running around while sleep-deprived is easier when drunk and harder when hungover.
- Nerf gun bullets are capable of doing actual damage, judging by the bruises on my arms.
- Sheffield is a demon hill surrounded by demon hill spawn and no matter which way you walk, it will be uphill. 
- TEAM SPUD.

- Trams are great.
- Sexist tram conductors are not great.
- Friends who stand up to sexism in its insidious day-to-day forms are great.
- Taking an oversized hammer on the tram is great.
- Oversized hammers are great.
- Unexpected punchlines to hammer jokes are great. "Stop! ... Collaborate, and listen!"

- Blue hair will not always help you get spotted in a crowd.
- You should bond with people over your suspiciously similar hair colour.
- Dexterity beats brute force in any fencing match.
- People actually want to be your friend and sometimes they go out of their way to help you.
- Sometimes people you have only known for twelve hours will lend you their pyjamas while they wash your jeans and socks and let you borrow shirts when you have no change of clothes. These sorts of people are to be treasured.


- Furries are not what the media want you to think they are.
- Frozen is still amazing.
- It IS possible to order £700-worth of Domino's.
- There is nothing wrong with playing Cards Against Humanity over breakfast.
- Mentioning Prince Albert piercings in a group of guys will cause much confusion and squeamishness. This is doubly so if one of the guys in the group has one. And it has a fairly large gauge ring in it.
- Twitch Plays Pokemon has made the leap from weird internet phenomenon to something that spawns intense esoteric debates about religion, community, free will, and the power of technology.
- Running around a park with fake blue and orange guns is cooler than whatever you did with your weekend.
- Everything is awesome.

*This weekend was Assassins Varsity in Sheffield, for student Assassins Guilds across the country. About eight different universities were represented. That's all you're getting.

"Good enough" is good enough for me.

When I say "that's good enough", it implies I have reached one of two stages.

The first is the point of frustration. When I have been toiling away at something for hours, or sometimes just minutes. This is often something I don't care about as much as I ought to, be it a blogpost or an essay or icing a cake. This is the version where I throw in the towel and accept that I cannot be bothered to work any more: it is the "fuck it, that's good enough" mentality.

The other arises more rarely. It applies to the things I really care about, more often the things I write out of an obligation to my own sense of artistry than the things I write out of academic necessity. It's an acceptance that I will never be as good as I want to be, unless I work hard. And that's okay: I can't just jump into being perfect. I have to work. For now, this is good enough.

Good enough.

Sometimes it's hard to remember that we are our own person, isn't it? It seems like we're surrounded by people telling us we are not pretty enough, our skin not smooth enough, our conversation not sparkling enough, our rooms not tidy enough. Admittedly yes, my room isn't tidy, but it's tidy enough for me! I can find anything I want on this desk, if I spend some time wading through the salmagundi of papers on it and remember to move my biscuit tins.

"Fuck it, that's good enough" is what I say after ten minutes of half-hearted tidying up, or two days of staring blankly at the third chapter of Plato's Republic. It's also what I'll say about the prologues I draft and re-draft. And it's the fear of it - of not being good enough - which means those prologues are left as forewords to stories that never get written. 

I am tired of not thinking myself good enough, and I am tired of my own lazy standards.

So that is my new year's resolution, in the broadest possible sense: to never settle for being less than enough. And to remind myself that things do not need to be perfect. Strive for better, but recognise when "good" means "good enough".

This blog post isn't great, but it's something - and something that has provided a temporary portal away from the stress of my exam revision. It'll do. Fuck it. For now, it's good enough.

What we talk about when we talk about stress.

Recently I've been sleeping a lot more, and dreaming a lot less.

This isn't how you're supposed to respond to stress. You're supposed to lie awake long into the small hours of the night and twitch with anxiety. Stress is supposed to give you nightmares or patterns of interrupted sleep. You're supposed to eat less and less and slowly wither away, consumed by a vague but lingering sense of panic, in the back of your mind or the pit of your stomach or some other fringe of your body.

I haven't been getting that.

My A-level exams are looming. For my international readers (hi, I kind of can't believe you exist), A-levels are the standardised tests you do in England at the end of your last year of school. Their results arbitrarily determine your future, if you get into the university you want to or are sent to your insurance choice or have to go through the confusing process known as clearing - which seems like a January sales-type deal, where you apply to empty places that other universities have due to their applicants messing up - or if you need to retake your exams. Of course, if your future doesn't involve university, then they are a lot less relevant.

But the fact of the matter is that I am relying on my grades to get to university. My offer from the University of York is fairly low and pretty easily achievable for me; I can drop a grade from my predicted mark in each subject and still exceed it. Perhaps this is why I'm not stressing the way my friends are.

Of course, with everything I do, I feel like there is a niggling fear that I will fuck up, and I will fail. Every time I write an essay, I turn it in thinking about how I could have improved it, and how it's my own laziness which is preventing me from doing so. When you don't have to work hard, sometimes you stop caring. I'm worried that this will happen to me, that I will become complacent from treading water and suddenly sink. I am cool and nonchalant, but inside my head I am afraid of doing it wrong.

This is what stress is to me. I don't down bottles of wine or party into oblivion to forget, but I don't obsessively revise either. Stress over my impending trip to Japan is probably compounding issues - it's less than two months till we leave and we haven't finished booking accommodation! That is stressing me out! What if we get to Kyoto and have to illegally camp in a park?! By comparison, I'm finding it a little difficult to care about the GOP position on immigration or William James' essays on religious experience or the dramatic presentation of power in King Lear.

Sure, my future might hinge on how well I can bullshit about Webster's poetry, but what if I don't book a hostel in Hiroshima in time and have to pay an extra five pounds a night?!

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I have no sense of proportion. I am a little bit stressed over a lot of things, so I focus on the most innocuous because - well. That's just it. I don't know why. Maybe because it's the least scary.

It'll all be over soon, and until them I guess I will continue to sleep less and eat about the same amount, and hope it all works itself out in the end.

Perhaps I will write love letters.

The English language is an amazing thing. It's malleable, and adaptable; it grows and changes and, magpie-like, picks up words and phrases from other tongues. We are a country forged by invasion. We speak words every day that we inherited by Romans and Saxons and Vikings. We are influenced by Greek and French and German. And yet, we only have one word for love.

On Wednesday, I looked around a university to find out if I wanted to go there. It was St Andrews, a pretty university in a pretty village on the pretty coast of Scotland. It wasn't so pretty when I was there. It was raining so hard the drops bounced off the ground, forming a grey mist for several feet around. I knew all about the course and I had looked up the different halls of residence. But I had to visit.

It's like online dating. You might be the perfect match on paper, but you have to meet in person, to find out for sure. To see if you click.

St Andrews and I didn't click.

On my third date with The Boy, on his birthday, we were sat in a bakery in London, on barstools, eating cake with shiny metal forks. I sighed, and told him all about the fact I was torn between two universities. It had been a long time since he was in my position. I don't know if he ever felt that indecision. I just wanted to talk through my feelings, and had arbitrarily decided he was going to listen to me.

One university was a more logical choice than the other. It was a case of practicalities, I supposed.

He looked at me over his carrot cake (all our conversations seem to happen over food) and said, "Don't make a logical decision. Base it on your feelings. Go with your gut."

I had assumed, therefore, that I would fall in love with one or other university. Naively, I had thought that when I found the place I wanted to go, I would just know. I would become enamoured with the campus, the town, the dorms. The very feel of the place. I would leave, and know in my bones I wanted to go there.

York was... nice. I could imagine myself there. St Andrews was also nice. But neither one made my heart pound and flutter. Neither one gave me that swelling in my chest, or the sensation of my blood skipping in my veins, that made me think "...oh. I want to come and study here." Neither town felt like home; they felt like places I was passing through.

And so, with no emotional component to make me select one place over the other, York seemed more sensible. It is closer home, closer to a big city, and with better travel links should I wish to escape the campus for the weekend. I don't love it, but I feel that maybe I will come to. Love at first sight is all well and good, but it's got a limited scope. I think I prefer the love that grows and develops, which falls for flaws as well as the pretty veneer over them. 

I firmly believe you can fall in love with things other than people. Love is a word with many sub-categories. Saying "I love you" to my friends is different to saying it to my grandad, or my paramour, or my cat. When we talk about "love letters", we think of notes written in copperplate to a husband, a girlfriend, a romantic partner who makes your lungs feel squeezed and gasping for air.

I think we need to write love letters to everything and everyone we hold dear. I need to write love letters to my friends, to my family, to individual aspects of life that makes it worth holding onto.

If I could, I'd write a love letter to a place. I'd write it to Bawdsey, a village in Suffolk, a place which smells how I imagine 1955 would smell. I would pen the letter on a rock from the shore; write it with a stick of chalk; fashion an envelope from the leaves in the graveyard where my paternal family are buried; post it out to the slate grey sea and watch it wash up on some other beach, in some other town that smells like another time.

Perhaps one day I will want to write a love letter to York, to its castles and history and cobbled streets. Perhaps one day, I will want to write a love letter to The Boy (because it's so much easier to communicate when there's a piece of paper to act as a barrier between you. And a text just wouldn't be the same. It's all very well having the versatility of English, but that counts for nothing when a smile can wipe your mind blank. I can't imagine heaving my heart into my mouth; I'd rather keep it in my fingertips.)

The way I see it, we all cultivate our own language. It's a personal amalgamation of slang and phrases and injokes and gestures and expressions that is so uniquiely us. It bends according to how others speak, what we read and what we hear. It's our own little take on English. And in my take on English, love still means many things. I love home. I love my laptop. I even love you, dear reader. I think I mean love most when I write it down, because letters on a page are a solid record. They are there long after the whispered Iloveyous have evaporated into the air. I want love to exist than more than just a memory: I need the proof.