What a wonderful week!

My week began Monday morning about ten to eight laying fully clothed on the floor and disturbed by some eighty-seven year-old lady crawling in on me while my body already rushing stashing sleeping bags and making things normal, sixty-five minutes of sleep in my brain - and as body rushes, pushes socks under boxes, thinks frantically - and, thankfully, "glad I'm not naked" - this head of full of thoughts, this sense of doom: oh my God, what did I do last night? What did I write? Rushing round and feeling horrified, and naked, and mad; I don't know where my head has gone; I don't even know what I am anymore; life has begun new and raw and, is it the lack of sleep, or have I done something to my nervous system in those mad seven hours of madly typing mad till 6.45 in the a.m. when all should be asleep and I'm out in the cold morning investigating bin thieves and chatting with the police...
    I think: I can't put that up there, what on Earth was I thinking? I'll delete the lot, I say, and write something new; I must be mad; oh God, what have I done to myself! I feel too raw.
    I turn on the computer and I do write something else. I write a disclaimer. My mind is somewhat more settled. I toss a coin and it says, "don't delete." I toss another coin and it says, "put it there." I delete the disclaimer and say, "that's pussy stuff" - and then I swallow hard and think, ok, I'll put it there, come what may, I don't care. I am me; I express what I feel; the chips fall where they will; it's better to be yourself and lose your 'friends' than to pretend, to maintain the pretense, and lose yourself in the process. I'm more awake now, more human - my brain has returned and I'm starting to remember what I am: a brain in a mind in a body with arms and legs and feet on Planet Earth in the year 2007...
    I put it there; I swallow hard; I wait. I'm prepared for the worst. I'm strangely elated.

Writing what I wrote last week seems to have given me great confidence; at times, this week, I felt like a writer (whatever that means). The words fall out of me one piece at a time, the sentences and paragraphs building themselves before my eyes; I've no idea where they're going - just a vague one or two ideas of something that might be in there when I start - but in the end it seems to make some sort of weird and wonderful sense. At first, though, I detested it - but in the re-reading I came to love it; in the meantime, I've fluctuated between the two. And, today, it seems like a long time in the past, something done, put away, the doors it opened walked through and now new corridors to skip along and marvel at and explore...
    Can words change reality? I think they can. Was there something in the air last Sunday? I think there was. What magic was weaving its wonderful spell those afternoon and evening and early morning distant but connected hours while words spilled from me and feeling existed elsewhere? What spell did the alternate reality of a city full of explosions and light and excited, sky-bound faces cast upon my hands and fingers as they curled around hands and fingers so effortlessly and differently and, yes, those words had done something.
    "It's beautiful," she'd said.
    Heart leaps for joy and fears and doubts are gone and, really though, that is all I can say about that...
    But I found my mantra: the one word to repeat in body and brain until past is wiped clear and all that remains is shining glittering present, as I wanted, as I wondered for. What would I be without all that? I asked. And now I know.

Oh, Rory! Mad Rory! Heart-aching, brain-awake, electric-body, life-lovin', eternally sad and simultaneously ecstatic, feeling, open, alive-not-dead Rory - are you okay? How long is it since you felt this way? And how recent that you believed and truly believed that you never would again? How many days since...

Kissing (0)
Oral sex (1)
Doing something romantic (3)
Seeing my name in print (5)
Eating fish and chips (6)
Staying up all night (7)
Wanking (9)
Falling in love (11)
Seeing a girl cry (21)
Seeing my mum (49)
Cooking (56)
Hitch-hiking (92)
Eating chocolate (106)
Appearing on TV (109)
Having sex (129)
Crashing a car (196)
Holding a baby (211)
Doing the dishes (239)
Ending a relationship (279)
Crying (295)
Hugging a saint (376)
Going shopping for clothes (801)
Riding a freight train (833)
Drinking alcohol (1079)
Eating meat (1079)
Buying a caravan (2137)
Headbutting a Frenchman (2407)
Sleeping in a shop doorway (2552)
Spending a night in jail (2619)
Taking drugs (3190)
Being drunk (3243)
Getting arrested (3386)
Kissing a boy (3618)
Being on American soil legally (3773)
Wearing underwear (3936)
Stealing a bicycle (4142)
Losing my virginity (5538)
Discovering Everton (8260)
Getting born (11609)

And back back back, till I was just a dot...