And what now? You have always been in others and you will remain in others.

Eyes slipped past sleep. I have an ache in my gut. Not for anyone else but me, pointing a playful finger. It's derisive, clean and I don't like this thing, holding onto me. I don't like this place. The opinions of the others are law, and law isn't to be broken, but my thoughts and my gut don't work like that. They look down when others are looking up. They stargaze when other's avert their eyes to their shoes. Scuffling feet, darting eyes, someone told me my gaze moves like a ping-pong ball. Brings me back to those days in my childhood when I had to wear a patch over one of my spectacle lenses to correct my lazy eye. I would wear a patch, or any kind of silly accessory- a fez, a sombrero, clogs, Malvolio's yellow ribbons to the knees- anything to correct the scattering that scatters my gaze and misaligns my aspirations, intentions, points of view, too far out of the scope that's correct, too far a deviation from the standard. My heart rattles like a tin cup. My lungs are littered. When I do the things I'm meant to do, and by that I mean, what others do as if second nature, I feel bewildered. Sometimes I feel I've done a bad thing. The lights are going out, the sun sets in the east, the trees cry when the leaves fall and none of them are the beautiful bright colour that excites me in autumn. The last thing I want is the sunset lifted, the conversation extinguished, the eyes rolled behind turned backs, the eyelashes fluttering in front of my face in the pattern of some morse code I never learnt. The same code that the starlight spells out. The same one that is tapped out by cutlery at my family's dinner table. And when the digits on the clock read 4.00 and it's not the afternoon, the birds are starting to chatter, and I'm too afraid of my thoughts to stay alone with them in the dark and my pillow. A pillow is no desirable bedfellow. It brings no comfort. It just leaves prints on my cheek, still feels heavy with tears it caught, it's dented from the place I have hidden my face. Apprehension is not sudden anymore. Fight or flight is not a fight or a flight. 
I have a crooked back, a crooked personality. I can't nod slowly, my head is buoyant in a sea of self-doubt, and God knows where my brains are. That worries me too because where is God in all this? Wings whistling over the skylines and the river, the weary water. Is there such a thing as understanding beyond thought? Where do these questions come from? They are just fooling with me, but violently, and when I embrace them I rattle like a train track, a can of spray paint. When will I carry my height, when will I measure up to my weight? When will I not be an embarrassment? Step one, find a way to stop quivering. The occasional and inexplicable seizures concern me, but not as much as they possibly should. I should be afraid that my neurons and synapses are revolting against me, twisted up and rearranging of their own accord. Maybe I don't think of that because, of all my component parts, my brain has been the most privileged. Given the best treatment. Hasn't it? Well, it did stop and speak to me for that stretch of horrific months. The most malevolent voices that sounded like me but omniscient, omnipotent, and mocking, echoing. The voices of my family that came from nowhere, always mocking. Wasn't that my brain rebelling too? Let's not think about the convulsions. Let's just try to stop the quivering. Then perhaps my heart will follow, put an end to its kicking. Then will my shoulders drop, will the frenetic pace of my life slow down to that of a conveyor belt, or a postman's trolley? Patience is a virtue I never learnt, not through anyone's fault but my inability to pick up certain things, like hitting a tennis ball, like holding back tears, like living without concerns I should not have had until I'd grown into the right age to be troubled by them. But it's only impatience with myself that I am talking about. With others, the standards are very different. Multiplied, not double as far as standards go. I don't listen much to myself, in part because I don't like what my mind tells me and in part because I seem to have the tendency to go against any well-directed intuitions. But I listen to others. I cannot even in this prose put into words the value I believe lies in the act of listening. Which, of course, is no act. It's what makes my world turn, really. It gives meaning. The minds of others. Perhaps that is what led me down the path of psychology in both my academic and personal life, in terms of what I study and read, and the company I keep, and the way things work outside of any learning arena.

Mind on repeat

I find a retreat

to no place that's neat

but can make it complete.

Chicago

I distintly remember hearing this on a car journey when my sister was playing with a beanie baby shaped as a frog.  I think this cover is quite lovely. I hope you enjoy it.

This poem is a magic roundabout without the magic

Rapidly the crows started circling under clouds,
the winter dropped it’s hemlines,
wind chimes started hanging bones and teeth
where feathers were now too fickle.
I whisper to you from a distance
who whispers to me from just below.
You went missing from my dreams.
I couldn’t recognise their forms, their frenetic
and frenzy, their motion and melancholy,
I drew the world in shades of cry, you cut me out
and walked away. The black and white figures
floating like paper planes or glued on snowflakes,
origami flowers, ornamental place settings.
You were always somehow both the paving stones
beneath my shoes and the endlessness of sky
rolled above my head, a canopy sprinkled with stars
blown from your knuckles like snow.
This is not a morning song because the sun isn’t going to rise
on this land anymore, it’s seen enough of daylight
and there’s nothing you can do about it.
This is called growing up. This is called a learning curve.
A wake up call. A character building exercise
that requires some demolition before you begin.
No one can tell you if the darkness has come to stay
or if there is an exit route. Is there anybody there,
treading the waves in this night-time sea.
I hear your voice, I hear the stars coughing
quietly at the back of heaven, I hear the lampshades sigh,
the picture frames, the paperweights, the rain gutters.
Were you up there with the birds, like you hoped you
someday might be, although I hope this doesn’t mean
that you are dead. There’s a finality to being dead,
everyone just accepting the empty space that holds
your shape, the vacuum you once breathed in,
trying to move on and trying to forget the presence
of that loss, trying to forget it ever happened
or you ever happened- that you never died,
so never lived. Nothing else quite has that same
brutal symmetry that is maddeningly unequal
on one side. Dark and light. You can’t have one without
the other, yet light is filled with shadows,
and war and peace. War is a permanent state of
losing when you are supposed to be winning but
with so much losing all the time, you accept some
victory wherever you can, and then peace becomes
an arbitrary thing, a concept, a Utopia, a fairytale,
and war both real life and the stuff of fiction,
both their problem and on your doorstep.
It won’t be war or darkness that kills us.
It will be the forgetting of things, letting them
drift away and not being able to remember
them being with you still. Parts of yourself
start getting chiseled away, you are whittled
down to slimmer sets of variables, the situation
tightening around you, the doors closing, more
dead ends, more walled up corridors,
and this time, only one escape, no trap doors,
to loopholes. Hands you used to hold, you forget
who they ever belonged to. Words you used to
speak sounding now just like silence.
Wishes you used to make greying the glow
of wishing entirely until you are left with
just bones, an empty bottle, a melted candle
and a broken fountain. Those little games
you used to play with yourself, those superstitions
and fantasies, the make believe, the Peter Pan,
they become cumbersome and painfully false,
the skin they are in hardening to cold plastic.
You are already an overexposed and underexposed
and wrongly exposed photograph and you
haven’t even grown up that far yet, you still
have further the go, nobody to show you the way.
No wonder I got lost. And I have never been good
at orientation. So I found a place for my head
in the sand, and listened to the sound of the sea
in shells, the glimmer of fish, the sea monkeys
we released into the Wiltshire stream. People
want to fill the world with silly love songs
and goldfish and miniature castles. Four seconds,
flash and it’s gone, it’s a whole new world.
The sand got in my eyes, in that dust bowl of
papery scratchy anxiety, attrition against my skin,
dry and eating away at the edges of me,
until I start to collapse on myself. I should have
worked on making my skin thicker, or growing
a stronger backbone. I brace myself with wishbones
and wish that you were here, or I was anywhere
with a star to point me in one way and the moon
to change the tide, for planets to align and the poets
to smile on my fortune, write me a perfect sonnet.
Where are you now? With a dagger and a pack of
sandwiches and sardonic smile, flint stone eyes,
shadows on your heels. Where did the time go,
is it under my pillow, and if I slept right through it
how am I or was I ever supposed to know?
The clocks hold hands, the faces slip just slightly
out of position, the hammer on the nail one more time,
the forest fire that used to be contained in an ashtray?
I hear you, are you out there somewhere
swimming. Quiet now. Was it you I heard, or me?