I write this post at the risk of being found out.

I feel like I’m back in school again, like I’m still a gangly teenager with no self-confidence and a tendency to blurt remarks that sounded graceful and witty and brilliant in my mind and somehow got mashed in my throat to emerge and cavort through the air like grizzlies on skates until they inevitably hit the person they were so unceremoniously (yet with such good intention) hurled at. I am, as I said on Twitter, crushing like a big goof. I had forgotten this sensation. It is silly and delightful and awful and fun and hilarious and terrifying and all-fucking-consuming. I lose sleep over it and when I finally crash I sleep more soundly than I can otherwise recall. Food tastes sweet on my tongue and bitter in my stomach. I am an addict, hooked on a freely- and widely- available drug, with sweeping, colourful highs and bizarre, existentialist lows. I am, as evidenced here, hopelessly melodramatic.

I am an addict, hooked on a freely- and widely- available drug, with sweeping, colourful highs and bizarre, existentialist lows.

I am a hypocrite, for wanting something I have learned to live better without (but I am also human, and - I think - just going through the motions). I’m confused and certain, determined and digressive by turns.

There are three ways to make a crush go away. The first is to act on it (which is accompanied by the risk of hideous, soul-shredding failure); the second is to continue crushing and inevitably embarrassing yourself until you pass the point of No-Redemption; and the third is to wait (which doesn’t always make a difference, and may simply lead to the second).

Place your bets, folks.

Many years ago, my sister bought me a glass paperweight with the word “Tomorrow” engraved on it. Its purpose, I think, was to keep ready all your papers for the next day’s work, but I always treated it as a statement (of intent? Hope? Mystery?) and stood it up somewhere where it would get attention. I remember asking her to hold it by the edges so that it wouldn’t get fingerprints all over it, in response to which she maliciously did the opposite. But if that paperweight represents tomorrow, then what I really want more than anything is for her, and all of you, to have your fingerprints all over it. xx