twenty four
I am as I am the year I turned nine:
my tummy hurts and my cat died a few months ago and shit’s been pretty weird since.
I was with Angel when she died, sitting on the sofa watching some film about a deer that gets shot.
Not animated, so not Bambi.
I just googled it. The Yearling. 1946.
Thinking about it, actually, I’m not even sure if the deer gets shot at all.
I googled “the yearling shot,” and it’s just telling me where the film was shot. According to the plot on the Wikipedia page, though, I was half right. A dog is shot. Sorry for spoiling that for you. There are also Forresters in this film, and a whole lot of death. That’s such a coincidence it could be scripted. Everything happening to me lately has felt a little Truman, so that tracks.
Weird how from the sight of an old film poster on Google Images, I can feel the click of the VHS box opening, the texture of that plasticky case, that smell.
At 98, we didn’t have a TV, so we’d project the VHS onto a bumpy brick wall that we’d painted white. I didn’t paint it. Not sure if Mum and Dad did or if it was Mary (who was in the house before us) or maybe whoever else passed through the house before that. The wall worked just fine for me. The sound of music felt real. God bless Julie Andrews.
Mum was sitting at the table. The way the house was structured, I could look left from the sofa, and I would be looking down about five steps into the kitchen, right at that place in the corner closest to the stairs where she would sit at her laptop. I think she was writing her book at the time. Dad was in his office, which was really just the far side of the living room, split by a curtain.
I was being real quiet because it was a school night and I really should have been in bed, but it seemed like everyone had forgotten about that fact. That might be a lie, but that’s what my brain is telling me. I don’t know. They were creatives. It’s all a little foggy from the incense smoke.
But Angel was making bad noises, and that was worse than being noticed; only nobody was taking me seriously, or maybe they were, but it just felt that way because she kept making the noises, and they didn’t make it stop. Only she did stop making the bad noises, then, and then we buried her in the garden the next day. She was my first, and she had the softest black fur and was a mother and alive, alive, alive. I can’t remember the colour of her eyes.
When the council eventually seized all the houses on the street and kicked us out, I was so worried about her. I wanted to ask Mum and Dad to unbury her, but I was a weird kid, and at 11 I was trying to be a little bit less weird because I was essentially almost an adult, so I don’t think I pressed the matter. There were other things going on anyway.
The Thameslink service going South on the route from Elephant and Castle to Loughborough Junction passes over the house, and you can see into the garden. It’s on the left. We used to share a garden with Andy next door at 96, and I would go in and bother him all the time. He baked sourdough bread, which is very trendy now, but I couldn’t stand the stuff and didn’t understand why my parents liked it. I didn’t let it sour my judgement of Andy too much. He smoked amber leaf, so I kind of had to like him. It’s like a rule, or something. He had an allotment up past Brockwell Park and made pizzas and talked to me when Jean (the anarchist from 102, a few doors down) was busy (probably doing anarchist stuff).
They- the people who build things- have separated our garden in two now. There’s a brick wall right about where I think Angel would be.
The flat we live in now is falling apart like 98 was, only Mum and Dad don’t have to get up onto the roof every winter to staple plastic across the holes. We can call up Lambeth and get people with ladders and heavy boots to do that for us. My window frame is falling out of the wall a little bit and is covered in black mould, but it’s got a nice view.
This year I was in a work meeting, looking out into the garden as Mum and Dad buried our cat right at the back on the right by the fence under some flowers. Blue ones. Can’t remember the name now. Not sure if I ever knew it. I’ll call them bluebells and move on. Best not to dwell. He had green eyes.
Lost a couple things on the way to twenty-four; I’ve been wearing the same pair of jeans for a year straight: they’re getting holes and things are changing. The change is changing. The change is falling out of my holy pockets and scattering about the streets around me, but I’ve got to keep moving. Most of the time it makes a god-awful noise. But I’ve got to keep moving so the change stays and I keep going.
I am a little lost and a little strange, and I still don’t like the feeling of the seams of my socks and don’t really know how to tell if someone wants to be my friend or not. I haven’t been called wise for my age in quite some time. I think I’m far more immature. About the same as I was when I was 8, maybe, then. No- I was getting called an old soul long before even then.
It doesn’t matter. I used to be X when I was X and before X happened. It doesn’t matter.
I’m here. It’s a real gripe I have:
with the grass and how it always ends up looking greener.
I’m trying very hard to accept that this grass is dying because the climate is dying. But that just means I need to move someplace where the rain falls more often and wait out the next couple of years, watch the world end with wetter lungs from a window with a damper view. I have the same desire to run. A different way now. Or maybe exactly the same way, always, anyways.
I am the same person I have always been, even though I am entirely different- and thank god for that. And thank god next year there will be me and there will be someone else I get the chance to meet- maybe for the first time or maybe again. Maybe again. It’s always again. It’s always me, again, whoever that is.