I have a bad habit, and a good imagination. My brain likes to wonder what I would do in horrendous situations, so every so often I find myself imprisoned for a crime I didn’t commit, or one that I shouldn’t be imprisoned for, or I’m being tortured by underground fundies. The things that I intend to do in my life are going to gain me some enemies, and they’re the kind of people that I wouldn’t want as my friends, but that no-one would want as their enemies. These things all whirr around in my head some nights as I lie in bed, and they make me feel sickly inside.

At three o’clock last night, I turned on the light because I’d heard something, and I spotted a big black ugly spider in the corner. Yes, apparently, I can hear spiders. The elusive little bugger kept running to places where I could’t quite get him, and for half an hour I chased after it, waited for it, stood staring at it, until it vanished into my heap of film equipment. Pissed off, I put my pillows at the opposite end of the bed (so that my head was as far from the scene of spider as possible) and tried to get to sleep. A few minutes later, the dawn chorus started - the blue tits that live outside my window have just had little blue tits and their singing is the most tuneless screaming you could imagine - and I wondered if this would be my first sleepless night.

Later, I realised that yesterday had been May 28th: exactly one year since I finished school; one year since I had my first vodka shot; one year since I got drunk for the first time. And in that year, a lot has happened.

In January, I fell in love. This comes first because it is the most important thing I will ever be able to say I’ve done. The sweetest, prettiest, funniest, loveliest most wonderfullest girl in the world loves me! It brought tears to my eyes to think about it, I’m so fucking happy.

I love you Katie.

A few days ago I discovered a chord that was new to me. It instantly became my favourite chord. It’s utterly amazing that something so simple, those six notes played together, can be something so beautiful, and it reminded me that there is so much potential in absolutely everything; in the most insignificant of things. You have no excuse. I have no excuse.

Last October, the first box set of the Complete Peanuts collection came out. This may seem unimportant, and perhaps it is. But I love Peanuts, because it’s funny because it’s real. Charlie Brown and Linus and Snoopy and Schroeder and 5: they’re all me. Charles Schulz drew Peanuts for 50 years, the last half of the 20th century. He died hours before the final strip, announcing his retirement, was printed. His biographer said, “His life entwined to the very end with his art. As soon as he ceased to be a cartoonist, he ceased to be.”

Everyone should be this way.

I got to sleep at about five o’clock. When I turned on my computer to write this down, it wouldn’t let me online. Maybe I’m not supposed to be writing this. Maybe I’m supposed to be out living the next year. But I’m here, writing, because this is what I do; I tell people what I think.

A lot has happened to me this last year, and most of it is too uninteresting or too impossible to articulate for me to write it down.

Today is May 29th. It’s a year since all of this began.

What’s going to happen this next year?

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