Anniversary poem year 2

From across the hall, my sister sees
a man unknown looking at me
in my sweatpants and baggy T
surely it's not as it seems
for a man like you to look twice at me
two years have gone by
and still surprised am I
that an insignificant clumsy girl
became the woman in your world

I was back.

I was back at school, fourteen years old with hot sweaty hands trembling beneath the table strangling a biro feverishly. Wishing...just wishing, over and over again, to be anywhere else but here. So many eyes watching me, making me feel sick to the core. My face burning red as I tried and failed to say something, anything. Stand up for yourself! Someone was screaming in my head, a voice I recognised but I was frozen with humiliation feeling myself shrinking smaller and smaller like Alice with the mushrooms. I hate this. I hate you all. I want to go home. I want to home. I never should have come. I want to go home. I wanted my hair down, to cover my face, to hide away. They were laughing at me and memories were flashing like club lights, being pushed and pulled and taunted one way then the other, stabbed with words after hurtful words. Uncertain, uncomfortable, lost in this sea of swirling misery. Why are you listening to this? This is bullshit! The voice wasn't shutting up trying to drone out the voices around me, I realised who it was speaking inside my head....it was me. My voice, grown up me, the me that I am now. I'm not fourteen anymore. I'm not a dog. I'm not pathetic. I'm not small or invisible. I don't want to be invisible. Pull yourself together

After I left I felt like I could breathe again, and the cool night air was blissful. My head was hurting a little and my own voice was stern, I was angry with myself.
"What the hell was that?"
"Grace?"
"You completely lost yourself back there"
"What was I supposed to do? argue, let loose and storm out?"
"If it was anyone else talking to you that way you would have done"
"This is different, it's real life now"
"That's bullshit. You let yourself down there."
"I don't have a choice right now. This is the best I've got"
I was almost at the taxi rank and the glaring white lights were comforting.
"There's always a choice. You didn't have to take that just now. You let them make you feel stupid and you're not stupid."
"I just clammed up."
"I know. But you're not a kid anymore, no ones smashing dictionaries into the back of your head or stealing your stuff"
"I'm losing my mind here. I hate this"
"Finish the books. It'll turn out alright."
"It's going to take me years."
"Well that's all we've got. Look it doesn't matter what happens here, we've been through hard times we can go through them again. Just don't let tonight happen again, do you understand?"
"Yes."
"Say it, say what you should have said back there"
"I am awesome. I will succeed"
"You are awesome. One day they'll realise who you are, and they'll find it hard to believe they knew you."
"I don't care if they forget."
"They'll remember. Because...?"
"Because we are awesome, and no one will make us feel insignificant"
I sat shivering violently in the little booth waiting for my taxi, the security camera glared down at us both but only caught me on the film. Though honestly for the conversations in my head there might as well have been her sat there in the seat next to me. When the driver pulled up I got in and proceeded to tell him about my awful evening and the C***s I'd spent it with. He was nice. Backed me up 100% the way a friendly stranger does. I had a consistent headache for the next 3 days and I knew what it was, it was those bad feelings hammering away at my confidence, my dreams struggling to force their way back into sunlight, and Grace helping me tread my way through the debris, picking up a crumpled piece of paper here and there.
Finish the books. That's all we have for an escape plan.

Losers and end of the world

Maybe I've watched too many episodes of The Walking Dead, and the end of the world scenario plays over in my mind too often, but I'm just not interested. In their conversation I mean, how has it come to this? After years of discussing literature, psychology, the arts and science, the world and religion and serious issues and why we're here and basically 'cool stuff', to suddenly being surrounded by people whose main topics for stimulating conversation are:
Getting drunk
Being drunk
Getting laid
The Football
Meet the Kardashians

I've never been the most socially inept human being, at times I'm very nearly invisible but I've learnt to be more sociable over the years and forced myself from the shell. This however, this is excruciating. I sat there, wishing a hole would swallow me up, I was meeting eyes but not really looking at them, and eventually that slow-motion movie moment happened when the lips are moving but the sound is almost muted and your own thoughts take over, I was thinking: I don't give a shit about you or anything that's coming out of your mouth.
I wanted to walk out, but that would be 1. weird and socially unacceptable, and 2. rude and jeopardise the current situation. I sat there thinking about the end of the world...again, and if it happened as I think it will happen how fucked these people would be. How utterly pointless and trivial their lives are.
ok, ok, I don't pretend that I would be some kick-ass survivor if shit went down, and I don't exactly have a fulfilled charitable life that people will remember when I'm gone, but at least I'd go down fighting. and I have a more substantial life than these losers. losers that's the word. LOSER.
You think there's something wrong with me? For reading books and learning crafts and developing skills. You think discussions about science and a love of the discovery channel makes me a freak...it's like being back at school. I'm not the loser in this equation. I am learning such small irregular details of life since being an adult, they are few and far between, seemingly useless and yet they are in my belief the most important facts I will take with me until death, I will list them now...

1. Disappointment and disrespect is going to hit you in the face most of the time
2. Nobody really gets it, or gives a shit about you, except you.
3. What happened before doesn't mean shit, it's what's happening now that counts
4. If there's only one person who can make you tolerate each day then that one person is precious and you wont find another one, so keep that one alive and with you.
5. Washing machine, cooker, hot water bottle, food, a good pair of boots and a stapler are really the only fundamental things I will ever truly be unable to live without (again).
6. Friends aren't people you see all the time, or have lengthy chats with, they're the people who remember you.
7. Sex is epic and a necessary part of a happy healthy life
8. No one appreciates your time, because they're too selfish with their own
9. Everyone thinks that they might be the one the win the big time on the lottery, regardless of whether or not they actually play it.
10. The few people in this world I'll ever actually like spending time with I think I've already met.

Writer Poem

Writer is another word for liar
don't you realise that?
I can spin a tale like straw into gold
I can write characters like mad men in hats
I can tarnish your reputation, with my written word
Or bring you fame if you prefer
I embellish, I mould, I make life my own
I can leave you lost deep in a wardrobe.
We're all liars here, we are Gods in our right
in every word you read throughout your life
You think you'll reshape me to fit your world
But one day my own story will be retold
they'll remember me, they'll forget you
I'll be the champion that much is true
Because writers can be liars,
we're good at that you see
I'll lie to you until the day I'm free
I'll always be a writer
You can't change me

You watching me. poem

You watch me
I see you watching me
though you think I haven't noticed
You cannot tell, because I do not show
to what I am devoted
You'll never know, you don't know me
stop trying to deceive yourself
you can't read me because I'm not a book
that sits on your shelf untouched.

You can't see what I don't want you to,
I hide what I choose to hide
and one day I will walk away from you
and leave this prison behind.

March

It's been a while, I suppose not only because my time is very nearly exhausted, but because when I write on here it makes it true, it makes it concrete and I have to face it. When I write my thoughts onto this page they no longer can be turned over in my mind with a label that says: uncertain. On here it's certain, I can't lie to myself when I write.

I'm not only lost, although lost describes this feeling of hopelessness very well, I'm angry. So angry it's past the point of rage and shouting, it's reached that point of quiet near acceptance. It's the bitter and twisted sort of anger. I'm angry at the way life keeps testing me, and when I think it can only get better in the next stage it doesn't, it stays the same, or it feels worse. I'm haunted, that's the word, haunted by a thousand ghosts rattling their chains every night and every day, ghosts of dreams and hopes that were once substantial figures and are now fading into mist but their terrible cries linger on. I'm haunted by the knowledge that I'm not supposed to be here. If I didn't know better I'd say I was a lost time traveller who's machine has been stolen. Or I'm a soul that hasn't moved on, but has been left behind after the angel took the others. I'm not supposed to be here, I know it inside and it's ruining everything else.

I can't talk about this to anyone, not really. It's easier to explain with a pen than with my voice but there's no one I can really talk to about this.
Not even Jones.
Maybe it's because he's older or he has a more logically wired brain, maybe it's just that he's experienced enough to know some things wont change, and as they say "That's just life, get used to it"
Well I can't get used to it. I won't! Inside of me is the 5 year old who wanted to write stories and who spent the next 16 years being certain, absolutely certain that things were going to change. I've been pumped with too much expectation, too much hope to just accept this that is now. I sound naïve, I sound like a little girl who hasn't yet realised you can't grow up to be a princess. I don't care. Because there are some people in this world who won't accept the norm, they wont lie down and let life do to them as it will. I am one of those people. I wont be unhappy most of the time, the least we can hope for in this life is happiness and health. My health is shot to pieces...every day my arthritis aches and burns. I wont let my happiness suffer the same way.

I have to believe that there's more to life than this. There's got to be more than this mundane miserable routine.

I'm a writer. One of my lecturers said to me in his office before I left university:
 "Don't forget you're a writer, because in the real world it's easy to forget that. Write everyday, force yourself to remember you live to write. Otherwise, you'll go mad"

I'm a writer. I'll write myself out of this. I will. I'll always be a writer