Rambling thoughts.

I stood and stared into the sea and I heard God speak and it baffled me. Yet I knew in that moment that there was hope, there was future, that standing there at the edge of the sea was what I was meant to be doing at that moment of my life.

The first time someone I loved left me I was 8, my best friend moved to the other side of the country and I didn't see him for a year. I spoke to him every day, I cried myself to sleep, I started wondering if it wouldn't be better if I died because then I could be with God and this would be over. On two occasions I got close to trying to kill myself, in those moments God stopped me, images came into my mind of me lying on the kitchen floor dead and how my parents would react and I knew I couldn't do that to them. It was like my world had fallen apart. Though then was still a chance, I planned the journey down to visit him, I knew which trains I had to get, where the changes were, I worked out how to get into London and which train to get out, which boat to catch when I got to Penzance.

You see, he was one of the people who got me through the day, who kept me going. He wasn't like the girls who would be my friend one day then hate me the next, he wasn't going to turn around and stab me in the back, him being around made the rest bearable. When the stones came hurtling down the clay track behind me, I ignored it, I forced it out of my mind. I got through to the morning because then I get to see T again and I'd forget about everyone else, about how much they hurt me. They didn't stop though, every chance they got for ten years. Then this grief stricken girl goes home because someone has died again and they vandalise the car they see her driving.

In 2008 I went home four times, each because someone had died, twice they wrecked the car. Then somehow last summer I thought I was strong enough to take it on. I didn't see them, they weren't there. Maybe they've all been locked up or left, maybe it's safe now.

No, it's never safe. Not there, each place is a memory. I remember the days I hid in my room away from the window scared if they saw me they'd throw a brick through it. The days I didn't want to leave the house because there was no route where I was certain I would avoid them. The abuse I would get between the bus stop and my house if I went out. The jeers from the bastards who yelled those insults at me for the best part of the 14 years I was bullied for.

I have good memories of that place but I don't know where they are. I can't find them. Maybe the days I spent down in Angie's book shop lost in a world of fantasy and adventure. Walks with Emlyn round the meadows.

Right now it is so easy to blame myself, to come up with some reason why it's my fault, my fault that they never stopped hurting me, my fault that everyone died. These memories are coming back, the moments that part of me knew had happened, but the moments I didn't remember before. At least now I know where those mysterious bruises came from... ontop of the pain, the memories, over and above that is how much I loved Adam, how much it would all be bearable if I could once more look into his eyes and rest my head upon his shoulder.

I need to find another way out. I need to find a way to do this work I want and need to do, all of this, I need to find a way to live without this taking over. For the last few days I've been wanting to rewind to before this summer, to change it so I didn't go back. I was so happy, so full of joy, so alive, nothing could contain my happiness for just being alive. Then my heart broke again, for that little girl who was powerless to do anything else, and for Adam. I feel like a shadow that's bleeding and I want this over. I want this to end more than anything.

I want to go back to the girl that can take on the world. Who has hope and happiness and love.

I dreamt last night of a man I have loved and still love, it would be easier for that love to die with death, but it still lives, yet he does not and it burns me up.

This is not a short journey, it is not a quick moment that passes like the seasons, it is slow and it is painful, and I must find a way to live. A way to be without the agony that encompasses me, that makes me dread the sleep that I need so desperately, this life is something new.

How Morwenna Happened

I'm sitting here trying not to look at the screen I'm typing onto because my head decided half way through my lecture this morning that it wanted to have a migraine, but then my head was too alive to sleep and so I'm sat here typing.

I've put together a playlist with the songs I listened to one spring, round about Easter, March 2003, David Bowie, Daniel Bedingfield and Alanis Morisette, these songs aren't about how good or bad the music is, but about the memories that flood back. I sat curled up in the corner of my bedroom, this CD playing reading Guy Gavriel Kay's Fionavar Tapestry and after three days of reading I walked down to Angie's bookshop and looked through the shelves for something I wanted to read and found nothing. What I needed was something that would jump into my hand and keep me gripped hour after hour. So I sat down and looked through University and College websites, deciding on where I wanted to go. Then with nothing else to do an idea came to mind.

An idea that changed my life.

"I've been writing short stories, but I'm tired of these short stories, they don't go anywhere, and I can't find anything I want to read. Why don't I write something? More than a short story? A story that I want to read. What's stopping me? All these ideas running through my head. Right, okay, I'll write a book."

I thought of names, I thought of places, I couldn't work out surnames so I opened the phonebook at random pages and used the names that stood out. I set it in Cambridge and on the Cornish coast, and an island and... started with seven characters and now have over thirty....

There were two people I told about the stories that I wrote, as I sat day after day with a pen and a book and then a computer and pages and pages and files and files and all of this. Two people I would share those stories with as they sat with me. One has been suffering from ME for 7 years, the other is dead.

My manuscript exists, the story unreadable because of the parts that I knew and forgot to write, the writing terrible and in need of rewriting, but the ideas are wonderful and fill me with joy, there are parts of it I cannot read without crying both with sadness and happiness. It is a wonderful story, and I want to finish it, to give to Tamsin and in memory of Adam. I want it written perfectly, beautiful and printed, bound, I want it like that. For them and for myself, to remind me of what I have done with this life, what I am capable of and the things that I truly love.

The battle tonight, every night, is that I lost someone, someone who got me through being a depressed teenager, someone who was a part of that in a positive way, but that is when he was a part of my life.

So dragging myself through the memories of him, also drags me through the memories of who I was. Though that is more emotive than rational. I feel who I was.

Listen now:

You are not the child who lives in fear of the morning, tomorrow you do not have to walk to the bus stop and have abuse yelled at you, you do not have to get on the bus and face the glances thrown at you by the girl who'll be punching you in the face on Thursday, there will be no one punching you in the face on Thursday, there will be no one to graffiti your work, there will be no one to steal your things as soon as you put them down on a desk, there will be no one hitting you over the head on Friday morning, there will be no one screaming you down, you do not have to fight to get your jacket back, because no one is going to steal your jacket, you do not have to run away from the places you want to be because there won't be people there treating you like you don't deserve to exist, there will be no one throwing rubbish at you on the bus, there will be no one throwing stones at you as you walk home from school, or leave the house to clear your head. There will be no one to bring you down and make you feel ashamed of existing.

You have a right to live, you have a right to life, you've endured this much.

You are allowed to live! Its hard to know that when again and again they told you you weren't, but they were wrong, and they are not here.

Adam

Rarely have I found the words to say what I need, what I want, where I am.

So time for some straight talking.

Adam, I love you. Adam, I love you. If I could hold you in my arms tonight and never let go I would. You who shared life with me in a way that no one else did then. Ashes is all that remain, ashes, memories and tears.

You never knew, what I did, what I'd done. I fought to keep you alive and you never knew. I saw you, I saw your life falling, I could see the danger and I contrived to keep you away from the fools in my class who were dealing drugs. I saw the sadness you held from losing your best friends and I couldn't stand for it. I stood up to them and got them talking to you again, that night at the Suffolk Punch as I drank JD.

How was it that I was the only one still talking to you? How was it that I was the only one seeing you? Why did you come and sit with me all that time? Why did you stand with me as I waited for my buses? Was I just Harriet's little sister? No, I don't think it was that, or at least it wasn't just that.

You chose to spend that time with me, talking, I barely remember that life, I hardly remember what we talked of. I know I read you every poem. What did you see in me? What did you think of me?

As you treated me with more respect than anyone. You threw away your fags as you saw me coming because you knew I wouldn't hug you if you were smoking because of my asthma. Such a small gesture, but something no one else has ever done.

You'd be by the tree, I remember, I remembered this summer, six months ago I tried to walk across that space and broke down because I knew you wouldn't be standing there again. I used to walk that way just incase you were there to say hello to. Like you used to walk past my table in Starbucks just to see if I was there.

What did we have? What was it? A friendship made of random meetings. Where did you go? Your number was the first number on my phone, when you had a phone. I miss you, I miss you, I miss you.

I just want to looking into your eyes and said "I love you" because the school girl crush disappeared into a friendship and a respect that could only be called love, and I loved you, so deeply that I'm too scared to let go, I'm too scared to say goodbye.

You who took me as I was, who never minded what I looked like or what I wore, as you would throw your arms around me and I would drink deep of the smell that was your leather jacket impregnated with aftershave and cigarette smoke, that smell that was you. Burying my face in that jacket, your chin brushing against my forehead.

I want that moment again, I want you again. Now I've passed the age you were when you died, I can't believe that. It's almost three years and my heart still breaks because I just want the chance to say that I love you and to brush my lips against your cheek again.

I want you to know that I loved you because it was not a love that required a response, it was not a love that needed you to love me, it was offered freely, with no request or intention. I just wish that you'd known, maybe you did.

It's in the moments when the darkness is clouding in that God sends those people who will just sit with you. It's in these moments that Christ shines. When a friend goes beyond the call of a friend, because in Christ we are family. When the fears and the pain wheal and cloud, when you're clinging to the moments when God has spoken to you clearly because even though you know you are walking alone, you feel that you are alone. Suddenly, yet slowly, like a whisper of the Spirit on the air, you know that you have family.

In this moment I realise that the painful thought process that would have happened as I sat alone in my room, the thoughts and memories that were dragged up by love and grief, thoughts that I cannot stem as they crash in on me. These things were spoken, they were voiced to a friend, who sat in patience as I ebbed between releasing the fears that tore at me and holding them back. Now they have been spoken, listened to, now they will not tear me down - at least not tonight.

Elegy to a Writer.

I do not write to entertain. I do not write for amusement. I write because the words come rising up inside of me, like the music does when I can no longer hold myself back from dancing. I write because I cannot hold myself back, but also when I do place these words into form I hope, I pray that these might inspire one day someone, probably myself most of all. When I began to write a book the aim was to write something that I wanted to read - I couldn't find anything that fitted the sort of story that I wanted, so I began to write. It let me express feelings that I couldn't, it helped me know that I had something that was mine, that could never be taken from me or destroyed.

I've been trying to force myself to do academic writing this week, I am not well enough to do academic writing and I knew it at some point, but kept forgetting. I've been hating myself for not getting words onto a page, I've been remembering every moment where my identity as a writer was threatened, I've been grieving the death of a friend who used to sit with me as I wrote. I bought a ring yesterday to wear on the little finger of my right hand - I used to have rings on that finger and the feeling as I wrote was something special, then they used to mark the paper and so I would take it off and it would sit there as I wrote then be put back on. There were four rings - the first three broke for various reasons (the two of them had been replicas of sealing rings that I used to seal things - they hadn't been made for such work). The last one was stolen, the guy that stole it told me that he'd taken it later that week, I repressed that, I had no memory of that, until yesterday, suddenly it flashed into my head, this memory.

For years writing was all I had, a green exercise book and my Grandfather's Parker is how I started to collect my stories together. Then my first A4 black hardback and then my Waterman Ici Et La and A5 black hardback books, a green twisted glass pen with a pot of rose scented red ink as well. Together those stories sat, and now both a black A5 and a blue A4 collect my stories, my poems, my prayers, my thoughts, I write now with a Waterman Hemisphere, the ink changes colour dependant on my mood and purpose, most often grey because it looks elegant upon the page.

I no longer know how to write in desperation. There is too much in my mind to let the words flow without question. Yet I want to let them, I want to let go.