The Naked Truth

The sun outside the closed blinds making its presence felt, the sheen of sweat on his smooth back and everywhere our bodies touch, the noise from the dryer downstairs. My fingertips trace shapes through sweat until my hands lock round his arms and my nails dig in. I have four evenly-spaced bruises on one side of my back, and four more on the other side somewhere between my shoulder and my chest: these ones are angrier and more constant, as though they are renewed every day, but I never felt them. When we fuck I think I can feel everything that he experiences as well as I feel everything that I do. Sometimes I have no sense of who I am, only what I am. Afterwards he sleeps, and I go downstairs and smoke a cigarette, trying to get back inside my own head.

Oh look! An article called The Naked Truth! About a subject dear to my nether parts! An article about pubic hair (the lack of) trotting out the usual clichés! Goodness, what a not-surprise. Oh The Guardian, how you disappoint me. This must have been an easy one, “Write an article about shaved pubes. You’ll find all the paragraphs you need in that box over theremarked “Women have no autonomy/Men are stupid animals”, and a few extra phrases in the BLAME IT ALL ON PORN drawer”.

You may have thought that how you styled your pubic hair was your own business, but evidently not. Pube-shaving is apparently an epidemic, with women slavishly denuding their front bottoms in order to pander to the vile desires of their men-folk, whose tiny lizard brains have been scrambled by too much porn and pedophilic fantasies. So that’s nice. There can’t possibly be any more prosaic and not so interestingly perverted explanation, could there? After all, we all know that it looks horrible, feels horrible, and takes away the thrill of getting hair stuck in your teeth when indulging in oral sex, which we all know is also a Bad Thing.

I don’t really understand the frothing at the mouth of the anti-pube brigade, unless it’s really the frothing of the anti-men or anti-porn brigade, desperately looking around for something else to bolster up their sometimes spurious arguments. Personally I don’t have a huge amount of interest in anyone else’s hair anywhere on their bodies, and find it hard to understand why my own tonsorial choices should have motives attributed to them.

I find it hard to believe that I’m in the minority of The Shaven who aren’t in thrall to the desires of their porn-enthralled lords and masters. Given that I shave off all visible body-hair apart from that on my head every day, and live alone, I find it hard to believe I’m doing it primarily for any man. Given also that none of the men I’ve had sex with has ever asked me to do it, I’m even less convinced. I must be influenced by porn all by my perverted little self, then… except that I’d done it when all the porn I’d seen featured women with bountiful bushes (yes, children, that WAS a long time ago) – and I don’t actually look at porn much, so I’m not terrible aware of what the latest trends are.

In my naïveté, I thought I did it because a) I was exposed to far too much art of a child (The Naked Maja notwithstanding (shocking! A painting of a naked woman with pubic hair! Er… barely discernible pubic hair, but a few visible strands none the less. What an excellent choice of illustration for a pro-pube rant), most of which is female-hair free); b) I am absolute rubbish at keeping my bikini line straight, and early pube-removal was actually as a result of trying to even up the sides, failing, and concluding that it was easier to take the whole lot off; c) it looks pretty, it feels nice and it makes the whole area more sensitive, d) far from being “uncomfortable, time-consuming, irritating, expensive, troubling, humiliating” it takes about two minutes in the bath, while I’m presumably also demonstrating my servility and submissiveness by shaving my legs and armpits and e) it has been my luck to mainly have sex with men who are as enamoured of my pussy as I am, and who generally appear to appreciate being able to see it.

I have gone on at length about how sick I am by the British press’s obsession with the craven stupidity of women and the brutish imbecility of men, and this article is just more of the same, with added vitriol. In media world (unlike the real world as experienced by most intelligent rational beings) men are addled by porn and women only want to please them; women are incapable of autonomous thought and shave/wax/pluck their pubic hair for men, who don’t (they don’t? Really? You mean some of the men I’ve fucked were born with shaved balls? Weird). Men also, in an imaginative twist on the old all-men-are-potential-rapists trope, are latent pedophiles according to this article (or rather, pubeless-preferring men are latent pedophiles, because the sole sign of a post-pubertal woman is pubic hair. What, you thought grown women might also be distinguished from children by hips and breasts, not to mention other body-hair?) This must be because men look at porn and think: “Ooh, no hair! She looks like a prebuscent girl. I must get myself some of that”. They don’t look at porn and think: ”Ooh, giant tits!” No, wait… I’m getting confused here. Or maybe it’s not me that’s getting confused. Maybe women (and men) in porn are shaved so that porn-viewers can see the action. Maybe some men think they’d like to see the action too. Maybe all this has nothing to do with underage sex. Maybe in the case of this and similar articles trying to throw porn and everything else a little unrepressed into the BAD basket, giant plastic breasts are the elephant in the room.

This article isn’t really about how women are oppressed by the baser sex, and how everything women do to their bodies is an expression of their servility. The premise of the article is fear of change, of pleasure, and, ironically, of autonomy. Our bodies are a part of us, like our minds, where we have free reign over our individuality. We can choose to adorn or denude our bodies, and choose our cultural influences. We get to decide how we wish to please ourselves or our lovers. Now there’s a much scarier notion than hair.

I lay beside a lover when he was sleeping, and thought about waking him up. And then I lay closer to him, and thought, “No, this is money in the bank.”

And it has been. These are the bits you remember, just as much as the passion and all the rest.

I collect the keycard from the concierge and take myself upstairs. There’s a bath run, but it’s too hot. I half-empty it out and run cold in, and then go back into the bedroom to strip myself out of my traveling clothes and lay the others out on the bed, wondering how I’m going to get the really ridiculously sheer and ludicrously expensive stockings on without putting a fingernail through them. I stand in front of the mirror and clean my makeup off, and then straighten up and look at myself. Or rather, I don’t look at me, myself: I look at the body in the mirror, half-critically, and half-forgivingly, because after all, it’s the one I’ve got, and if I’m inclined to be too critical then there doesn’t seem to be much point in dressing it up in fancy stockings and taking it downstairs (and sometimes I think that the reason I stare at it at all is that I think that one day I won’t have this body, and maybe I should remember it, and be grateful).

Even with the cold water, the bath is far too hot, so I wash fast, and denude myself of all visible body hair, then rub lotion into my skin and wrap myself in a towel and contemplate the stockings again, and the fiendishly difficult catch on the garter belt on the back of my left leg. I get the stockings on without ripping them, and then have to peel them off again and back up to make sure the seams are straight. Then knickers, bra, shoes that make me want to sit down again, fast, or failing that, lie on my back with my feet in the air, and lastly a dress, not my usual black; I’m dressing to be noticed tonight. I put on my face, and I’m ready to go.

I put the keycard in my bag and shut the door behind me. It probably took about twenty minutes max, from the elevator up to the elevator down, but it seems as though it was twenty minutes of flat-out effort. I wonder if it shows, if that’s part of the charm, the effort we put in to allure when presumably we were, in ourselves, just as alluring travel-stained and tired. It doesn’t really matter, I think, as my feet remind me why I rarely wear these shoes, it’s part of the ritual – immaterial in the end if it’s for someone else’s benefit or mine; I turn up tired and end up ready

Friday night after work I’ll do a planes trains and automobiles thing, and then Saturday I’ll do the whole thing again, after which I’ll meet an old friend for late lunch or a drink or something, and then go to another friend’s birthday party. This is WAY too much socialising in 24 hours for me, but I will have to be brave. I think I can do it (the following week I plan a lot more socialising, but I’ll be on holiday, and not within public-transport reach of my nice empty apartment, which will be calling to me with its siren song at approximately Saturday lunchtime, which is when I’ll have to be girding my loins for two more social engagements with people I’m extremely fond of).

All this is mind-boggling enough, but it’s the packing that is doing my head in. If I was a bit more normal, I’d just fling everything I need into a suitcase, and I’d be fine. But I can’t stand traveling on public transport with suitcases, so I will just have a large bag which does not conveniently roll along the floor, and which will therefore give me backache. The fact that I am an idiot will not alleviate the backache, particularly as I will be a person with backache tottering along in high heels. A suitcase would, of course, accommodate clothes to go to work in, to travel in, to get fucked in, to have late lunch in, and to party in; a largeish bag can probably deal with one change of clothes and one of unsuitable shoes.

Sometimes I’m grateful that dealing with my own weird neuroses is the most stress I have to deal with.

Adversity strips love down to its bare bones. I’m not talking about the kind of adversity that tests it, but more the kind that brings it sharply into focus. It makes me realize how my world has narrowed in the past few weeks, and how imperative it becomes to slough off the unnecessary, and how overwhelmingly obvious it is what (and who) is worth holding onto.

Sometimes it strikes me that my love/sexlife is a triumph of optimism over realism (and in everything else I pride myself in being a realist). “Live in the now!” my best friend burbles. “It’ll all work out in the end,” I mutter, sometimes through clenched teeth. “It’s been almost ten years,” my old love says, and I don’t say I have fallen off that bandwagon of faith more times than I can count, because almost ten years is a long time, and there are other old loves who have kept faith with me that long (and less long), and who still make my life a better place.

Right now, in this now, I sit at my desk with a cat draped across my lap and look at the remnants of Black Cherry nailpolish on my toe, still clinging on from the end of the summer. The not-now, the future, stretches before me luxuriously with its possible plans and its plane-ticketed definite plans and its maybes. Adversity is better kept in the unknown future to be dealt with in the now when there’s no other choice, but love is better savoured past, present and future.

I love my bedroom. I love its off-centre quasi-vaulted ceiling and its deep violet walls and its floor-to-waist height window. I love its sparseness and bareness: a couple of little bookshelves, a battered old desks (full of secret things) as bedside tables and a wide, high iron bed. I love how it’s the perfect tranquil place to be alone, and the perfect backdrop for wild sex; I love how the bed dominates the room,
calling me to rest when I’m alone, and suggesting that someone grabs onto the metal bars when I’m not.

I’m more inward than outward looking. I favour sunless rooms and curtained windows; what other people get from views, I get from the changing colours of my walls. I retreat inside my room even when I’m in other buildings. I like the spaces between things, the way stuff is defined by what is around it. When I learnt to paint I was taught always to check my work in a mirror: mirrors show you the bits your eye glides over too easily. There’s a mirror to one side of my bed, and so when I open my eyes in the morning the first thing I see is myself held securely in the room’s embrace. Sometimes other things are reflected in it – crumpled heaps of clothing and moving bodies. Sometimes all I see are dust-bunnies, chasing themselves under the bed.

Bedrooms are revealing, and can be almost oppressively intimate. My daughter objects to her boyfriend refusing anything remotely flowery in their bedroom, and she points out that he was perfectly happy to snuggle up under cabbage roses when he lived here with her. It’s different, I say: this is their room, that was hers. In her room, the girlishness was an invitation, in their room it would lessen his place in it; in her room he was inside the citadel. If a bedroom doesn’t reveal enough it takes away from that sense of invitation, and if it reveals too much it’s a passion-killer (my bedroom disguises my slovenly nature: it is the only room in the house that is invariably tidy, partly because although I can live in chaos, I can’t sleep in it).

I love the secret nature of my bedroom. I love its peacefulness when I wake in the morning, and the passion-fueled memories it holds. But at the moment, the bed seems too big for me alone.

The summer was so endless that now work seems like a rude interruption. I had grown accustomed to ten hours sleep a night and a nap in the afternoon, and now I survive on seven and no nap, keeling over into unconsciousness absurdly early in the evening. At work my every waking moment seems to be occupied, and I feel that other, summer life slipping away. And I want it back.

Because this summer was one of the worst in living memory, I didn’t spend it in a whiney low-blood-pressured energyless heap on the floor, but in happy wild bursts of creativity. Back at work, my creativity is focused on work, and all sucked out of me by the time I get home.

I’m not really complaining: it could all be a lot worse, and the work+creativity thing makes me happy, but I could do with lazy mornings waking up next to a hard cock, and hourless days wandering around with a paintbrush again.

My best friend says she’s worked out what she is, she’s an adventurer.  The next day, when she’s driving me to the station before I embark on the uncharacteristically supremely romantic gesture of a five-hour round trip with a chaste cup of coffee in the middle of it, I tell her I was thinking about what she said (I thought about it in the bath, which is where I have all my best thoughts).  She says that after she told me, my reaction (my non-reaction) made her go home and write in her notebook that if she was going to have any more revelations about being an adventurer she should keep them to herself.  My non-reaction, though, wasn’t because I thought she was nuts, it was because I thought she was right:  yes, that’s absolutely right – now on to the next thing.  She does have this unquenchable conviction that life is an adventure, and the next exciting thing is waiting round the corner.  It can make her exhausting to be with, but I feed off her energy as she feeds off my peace.

Lying in the bath, what I was thinking was that the term adventurer has somehow more negative connotations than I know she meant it to, it has suggestions of opportunism that don’t apply in this case.  She said that she was always looking for  fellow adventurer and never found one, and I thought that what I was looking for/invariable find is cerebral types with an ingrained streak of rebelliousness – and then I thought no, that’s not it.  It’s adventurers that I unerringly head towards, but the difference is that I don’t venture until I’m slammed in the face with it (and then I’ll make the most of it: my rallying cry when faced with seemingly hopeless adversity was always: “It’s an adventure!” but it was less a reveling in the circumstances and more an invincible belief in my ability to survive and come out the other end with a good story to tell: nothing like a good face-slamming to up the narrative value).  Because I tend to stand around looking sideways waiting for life to wander into me, I admire those who run into it headlong, and I value those who grab hold of me and make me run into it too.

I suppose that although I was never a scuba-diving. Parachuting, white-water rafting adventurer like she is, I was once more of an adventurer, even if what I was seeking out was nihilism, and now what I seek is a happier temporary oblivion.  My adventures gave me cracks in my heart and soul, not my bones, and the thrill was less of one and more of a growing dread, in the end.  That’s what I’ve learnt to avoid, or at least to avoid heedlessly: I weigh up the options more carefully now before I expose myself to bruises on my inner skin.  I like myself for my ability to learn from my mistakes, even if I bemoan my tendency to have to learn the hard way, and am sometimes perplexed by the lessons that haven’t  yet sunk in.  Perhaps it’s just that fellow feeling I search out: the adventurers who have learnt some things the hard way, but who haven’t stopped believing that it is still all an adventure.

I’m painting you a picture.  An actual, on-canvas one I mean, not one that depends on your imagination interpreting my words. I’m not entirely sure why I’m doing it, or where you’ll hang it, but that’s the least important part of the equation.

It’s just a series of coloured lines, unexceptional looking, if a little garish; you’d get much the same effect from a sheet of wrapping paper (except that the lines would be straighter: I can’t draw a straight line to save my life, far less paint one). It’s just every line of colour means something , and I painted them all with love.

Somehow, the summer is working out better than I expected.  Partly this is because the temperature dropped dramatically, and while everyone else was moaning about the worst July in living memory, I wandered round happily saying, “Oh, NOW I get it!  Summer’s great, isn’t it?” and, having run out of furniture to paint, pulled out my oil paints.  It’s been a very long time since I painted: I keep forgetting to be kind to myself, and spend quite a lot of time in despair, and an inordinate amount of time every morning scraping off all the paint I applied the day before.  But there’s a moment, when I’m applying the next layer, and forgetting to remember that I wished I could work out what I’m doing, when I’m perfectly happy.  And because I think that much of life is made up of tiny moments of isolated perfect happiness, that is enough.

Everything else seems tempered by a rather lost yearning, but I’d still rather have that than not feel.

I don’t react well to summer.  The heat first poleaxes, and then deranges me.  Right now, I’m in the deranged stage.  Last summer I painted my whole apartment in heat so severe that the paint was drying on the brush faster than I could get it on the walls.  This summer I lay around on my sofa for a week or so staring sweatily at my living room, and came to the conclusion it looked “transient”.  I’m still not entirely sure what my soup-like brain meant by that, or why I felt this was so disturbing, given my fondness for rescuing furniture from tips, and my penchant for using outdoor furniture inside: it seems hard for it NOT to seem transient.   My solution was to buy more bookcases, and paint anything that would stand still long enough, and now my living room is a library with a sofa in it, which seems to me pretty much ideal – and as usual, the hotter it got, the more paint I applied.

That’s it for the summer now, really – I can’t muster up any enthusiasm for anything that can’t be painted.  Or at least not until I go away.

“Those years were mainly shit, but there was some good stuff, and most of that was you.”  I find it hard to reply at first, because I’m so stunned at how selective his memory is.  Finally I remind him that he was actually pretty horrible to me. “ I TOLD you I’d been to rehab, “ he says, but he apologises, quite formally and in a way that makes me think he has forgotten the particulars.

Later I decide, just as formally, to forgive him.  It occurs to me that my memory is also selective: I remember the years when he was one of the people I loved most in the world, but dimly, through a haze of bitterness: I mainly remember the last part, when he was trying to destroy me; I pile up and pick over incidents scattered through those years, and choose to forget my part in them.  I don’t make excuses for him, but it’s too easy to remember myself as an innocent victim, and to forget the slow and steady emotional papercuts I inflicted too.  It crosses my mind that I would think that someone who refused to forgive me for what I did in my drink-and-drug-addled extended adolescence an idiot, and it’s not as though I, too, have not had to ask forgiveness, and been grateful to receive it.

From him I learned to watch my back, and to recognize an abusive relationship a mile off.  I should have learnt that a serious drug habit and amorality have to co-exist, but that was a lesson I made other people learn.  But it’s over.  The past is the past, and some people have to learn lessons the hard way, and I’m tired of picking it all over.

The thing about him, and all these boys from my past, is that if you get half-way to redemption, you remember the bits you learnt from – the bad bits.  You forget, until the past comes looking for you again, that somewhere in there you were loveable, that the things you effortfully forgive yourself for are the things others effortlessly forget.  I review the past in my head, and tot up all the bad I did, and think that I’m better now, but who is to say that in twenty years time I won’t be standing in judgment on this present me, who is hardly a picture of untarnished goodness, paragon though I tend to think I am?  And maybe in the future I’ll dismiss this present me in favour of the future me, so much older and wiser (again), and forget that it was still always me in there.   We are more than our deeds.

I hold to this, and decide to see him again, and although my memory has tried not to hold on to the good that I used to see in him, I let myself build up the good I see now.

I hate the summer. I hate the heat, I hate the clothes, and I hate the amount of feet on display. It’s quite possible I’d feel differently if the heat didn’t make me want to throw up/pass out, if I went brown, and if I didn’t have an anti-fetish about toes, but as it is, I hate the summer and complain relentlessly about it all the time that I am relishing holidays and not spending an hour in the morning trying to warm up enough to take off my fifteen layers of clothes in order to get into a hot bath.

Mainly I hate the clothes, and mainly this is because I live in the land of people who go a lovely toasty brown as soon as the sun appears, and therefore I do not appear interestingly pale, but rather sadly underdone. If I had lovely brown legs, I’d happily wear little summer dresses, and if I didn’t hate feet I’d happily wear strappy little sandals, and not complain at all, or sit around in a haze of heat irritation looking critically at other people’s clothing choices.

Things I’d say to other people about their clothing choices
Anyone wearing low-cut jeans: Girls, I know you looked at yourself in the mirror before coming out and thought you looked really cute showing off a pretty curvy waist and a nice brown tummy between your t-shirt and your jeans, and you do – from the front you look very cute. But have you seen yourself from the back? The miniscule little bit of body fat you have has all been shoved up over your waistband, and your bottom looks as though it’s been put in a sandwich toaster. I’m not quite sure that’s the look you were going for.

Anyone wearing harem pants: WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU? Never has such a horrible garment been invented. You couldn’t possibly have bought those because you thought they looked good, so you must have been sucked in by the hype, which is all lies. If I read another word from some deranged fashion writer claiming that they are comfortable and flattering to all body types, I will scream. How comfortable can something be that makes you walk as though you’d just shat yourself? And the horrible truth about them is that they are unflattering to everyone, across the board: they make tall slender girls look as though they are tall not-slender girls, and anyone else – particularly anyone else with hips or a tummy (who seem irresistibly drawn to them) – look as though they have more hips and tummy than they started out with.

Anyone wearing weird blouson-type tops: Why? Really, why? If you have a waist, it’s lost in the billows, and if you don’t have one I’m afraid it’s billowing out over the daft tight bit at the bottom of your top (which is sitting in a particularly hideous way at the top of your bottom).

Things other people would say to me about my clothing choices (and sometimes do)
Aren’t visible bra straps so at least a decade ago? Oh, shut up. Until it stops being hot enough to wear strappy little tops, and until bra manufacturers and strappy little top manufacturers manage to align their strap positioning, I’m going to be flashing a plethora of straps. And anyway, this isn’t just a summer thing: I have such weedy narrow shoulders that things are always falling off them, and my bra straps are always on display at some point. Interestingly, this works as a perfectly good reason to buy expensive underwear (better visible-strap quality).

Leggings? Why? Really, why? OK, look, I really tried to resist the leggings-lure. I swore that I’d so overdone leggings in the 80s that nothing would induce me back into them. But then I wobbled, and finally I fell back into their soft, stretchy embrace again. Plus, in the part of my mind which revises my fashion-rules to suit myself, you can wear leggings with a little summer dress in a way that you can’t wear stockings with it: this works even if you’re wearing cropped leggings that show roughly the same amount of pale leg-skin as would be showing if you just wore the dress (OK, strictly speaking, probably none of this works, but it does in my heat-frazzled mind, quite possibly in the same way that other people look at themselves in harem pants and think “Comfortable AND flattering! Result!”). By the same reasoning, you can wear leggings and a top, and if people think you are wearing a ridiculously short dress with nothing more than a pair of tights, you can just roll your eyes and say “But they’re LEGGINGS” which are practically trousers, even though they look exactly like tights (my favourite piece of clothing is a pair of glorified leggings which masquerade as trousers (they have pockets and a zip), allowing me to pretend that I’m perfectly respectably dressed whilst still basically saying: Check out my long skinny legs and pert little ass). You may well mock leggings, people, but they are a godsend for people who don’t tan and who are vain about their legs. Granted, they are kind of the anti-sex (although apparently not as much as my much-loved wooly tights), but they can be yanked down to your knees pretty quickly.

If something is too tight to wear underwear with it, don’t you think that maybe it’s just TOO TIGHT? No. (I can’t answer at any more length because then I might stop remembering to hold my tummy in).

Don’t be silly, of course your legs aren’t too white to wear dresses! … Oh. Right. Leggings – good choice. And I was wearing fake tan!

You know, there’s a fine line between “quirky and original” and “odd”. I know. This IS quirky and original.

“I got my period.”

“That’s not entirely a surprise,” he says.

“What do you mean? I think it’s a couple of days early.”

“Well, you do get kind of… rampant before your period. And you were kind of…manic.”

What does he mean? I think. Surely I’m always pretty enthusiastic?

Oh.

“You mean when I said “Let’s have a nap,” and then got pissed off with you because you fell asleep instead of feeling me up?”

There’s a telling pause. I think he did point out, after I’d prodded him awake indignantly (both indignant by the time I’d woken him up) that it had, after all, been me who had suggested sleep, and also that we had been fucking for four hours more or less non-stop before that.

Worse was still to come, though. A couple of months later, I stand in the doorway and look at him.

“OK, you know when I said, “I know you’re having a major life crisis and aren’t really thinking about orgasms, but that doesn’t necessarily apply to me, too?” (He obliged).

“Yes?”

“I just want you to know that I’m not completely insensitive. I just got my period.”

He graciously accepts hormones as an excuse for complete insensitivity. I make a mental note to try to remember not to act like a sex-starved bitch next time I’m premenstrual, and put it in the same place I put the mental note I’d made previously.

I still don’t get the point of exercise, which is disappointing because you’d have thought that after plugging away faithfully(ish) for over a year, I’d be a bit more enthusiastic. Well, I’m not. It still a chore and a drag, and I only really do it so that I can smugly say that I have done it.

Granted, there are some advantages. It’s great at building up your stamina for sex, which is often useful (“I seem to have been administering this blowjob for a very long time in a rather awkward position… my lips have gone numb, but hey! my inner thighs are holding up, my back is fine, and there’s no problem with my neck… if it wasn’t for my morbid fear of dislocating my jaw again, I could carry on forever! Oh, thank God…”) and while I would punch anyone in the balls who suggested that I wasn’t fully flexible and the bendiest thing ever before I started doing bendy stuff with my clothes ON, I’ve noticed a marked tendency not to feel as though my joints are all facing the wrong way the next day (although obviously if you foolishly point this out to anyone, they will then double their efforts to pretzel you further, in the hopes that you will be staggering about the next day bandy-legged). And there are the muscles and general tonedness, which is quite nice, but I didn’t feel massively untoned beforehand. Even the thrill of having stomach muscles for the first time in my life is wearing off now.

I STILL don’t get that feelgood feeling about exercise – mainly I get the feelbad about putting my body through such torture. The only good thing is that I like my body more in the morning when I’ve exercised the day before, but even then I sometimes get confused and like it before I remember that I didn’t yoga (there’s nothing much going on in my brain in the morning until after coffee). Also, I can’t escape the feeling that I’d like my body all the time if it would just melt off a kilo without me having to give up roast potatoes. I STILL want a cigarette break halfway through, and I’m STILL only really motivated by competitiveness: when my best friend injured her thigh playing soccer and couldn’t train for a month, I felt it would be unfair to carry on without her, and then I was still sympathy-unexercising by the time she’d injured her ankle.

Now of course, a thought has occurred: maybe all that stuff about endorphins is rubbish? Maybe “endorphins” is just another word for smug? Oh, NOW I get it!

Half-way through the morning, I start thinking of old slights. It’s not my habit to bear grudges, or to brood on other people’s sins of omission, so when I do I do it with a vengeance. Last night for some reason it was the prospect of anything happening to my daughter that tormented me. I’d write it off as premenstrual except that I doubt it. It wasn’t until I found myself going out for coffee with my best friend, and realised we haven’t quite got a grip on the notion of being on holiday that it all started to make sense.

The summer stretches ahead full of possibility and potential – helped by the fact that although it’s hot it isn’t the debilitating heat that makes me want to lie in a bath of icecubes until it’s over – and I keep thinking I should have got started on it already. But the more I think about it, the more I think I need to just decompress first, and let it all go for a few days.

a love letter in the mail.

I used to be far better at carving out time to write: now I write at a snail’s pace and forget which notebook I wrote it in before I manage to write it here. I had mainly written the post below when I read Marianne’s post about how people see us, and I think they are related.

We show a face to the world, and whether it is all of our face or only an aspect of it, how it is interpreted is dependent on other people’s willingness to see it. I think I see all of the people I love best, but I’m observer by nature: I watch out for the half-seen glimpses. I’m sure I’m as guilty as any one else of projecting my own image of someone else onto people I’m less interested in, though: I accept my impression of them, and don’t look further. I think that my loved ones are more talented and interesting than everyone else because I have been willing to let them reveal themselves: there has been something in them to attract me to them enough that I have wanted to look below the surface. By the same token, there has been something in me that has made them let me reveal myself (and maybe, with lovers, that’s what they actively look for: they look to find something that will let them justify taking a risk in return for a contained emotional and sexual freedom). Whether they are friends or lovers, I love them for seeing me.