The Unofficial Guide to Life
Life can be very, very blue until suddenly it is not. I often think about those winter mornings when it was always dark and I was always cold, rushing to places I didn’t want to be and worrying I was too old when I was really very young. There weren’t too many good things about those mornings – being half-asleep and fighting for the spot by the door on the skytrain – except for the sky.
Continue reading “Pink Skies”
It’s May, the most gentle month of the year. So far, it’s rained every day and I’m wearing a winter jacket again but I don’t care and neither does anybody else. It rained on my walk today, the type of rain that falls sideways and makes your hair stick to your face. I passed shops I had never seen before, saw signs of life in places that were once deserted. Chairs and tables have appeared in empty spaces. People, too, seemed to have sprung out of nowhere, their shapes visible behind glass windows where I once only saw my own reflection.
Continue reading “Coming Alive”
In the time that I’ve sat here doing absolutely nothing, the sky has turned dark and I can longer see anything outside my window. I’m not surprised that the darkness came; I’m surprised that the light lasted this long.
Continue reading “Light at 9pm”
Finding yourself on the road again is a bit like going back in time and a bit like going towards the future. It’s like the past because the scenery blurring in streaks across the window are full of ghosts: former places you used to go to or abandoned landscapes. You’re moving forwards but the melodies you’re listening to are full of memories. Only the songs that meant something to you last spring, mean something entirely different now or don’t mean anything at all.
Continue reading “On the Road”
In sophisticated settings, people are always drinking whisky. It’s a real grown up drink: the classy men and the alluring Anna Kareninas of this world drink whisky. So do larger than life people, and people who are falling in love, and young and stupid people. It’s the type of drink I imagine writers drink, the bohemian ones who smoke a lot of cigarettes and never sleep during the night.
Continue reading “Whisky, Whisky, Whisky”
Everybody knows that change is inevitable but somehow it still manages to take us by surprise. When I woke up this morning it was cloudy, and then it was pouring rain, and then it was hailing, and finally it was sunny. Each time the weather changed, I looked up from my computer screen in wonderment. I thought for sure the sun would stick around this time; I thought for sure the rain would keep on falling. The sky looked so certain, and confident, and set in its ways. But it changed all the same, unexpectedly and loudly and quietly, all in the span of a few hours. ‘That’s Edinburgh for you,’ people say. Yes, but it is also people, and plans. It is also everything.
Continue reading “Change”
My kitchen was one humongous mess the other night. I may have been more clumsy and careless than usual, but basically everything that had the potential to spill actually did. There was milk on the counter, and broken egg shells, and spoons on the floor, and an ever growing pile of sticky dishes in the sink.
Continue reading “A Mess”
I have this weird obsession with being young and staying young and preserving childhood the way some people preserve peaches. Maybe you do too. In movies, which is where I got most of my ideas about how people are supposed to act and how life is supposed to be, teenage girls always seemed to be obsessed with getting older. In a heartbeat, they were willing and eager to cast everything around them aside for bigger and better things.
Continue reading “Being Young”
Just like that, it’s Monday again. It’s funny how that happens, every single week, and each time it takes me by surprise. At least there’s no longer a dread associated with it. There’s no longer any feeling of panic, or urge to stop time, or at least, slow it down. Now, there is a calmness that comes with Monday. A sigh of relief that here we are again, we made it. There is a comfort in this routine I’ve built for myself; there is safety in the regularity. I wake up in the same bed, I look out the same window, I read, I drink tea, I work, I write, I eat dinner, I go to bed. And then I do it all again the next day.
Continue reading “Monday”