Today I got up hideously late because Dad didn’t wake me up. I heard him sneak down the stairs really early but I think he was too scared to wake me up, because I am a bit of a monster in the mornings.
I went in to Wetherspoons to discuss our Ethics project and eat skanky food and then Amy picked me up and brought me back. Before that though I went into the phone shop to see if they could buy out my contract, and talked to the girl that works in there.
I noticed today the mantelpiece still has a toy car I made on top of it and the draining board has the same knife holder. So strange.
Anyway I’m going back to town on Wednesday to see if they can give me a better phone, but I’ll definitely make sure that I look a little bit hot this time. When the girl asked what she could help me with I pointed at the LG viewty and went “I want that” like a complete retard. She said that she might be able to give me a better one, and that she would look into it before Wednesday. Ace right? I’ve made it my aim to get a date out of her while I’m still near to Truro because I really want to go to Qdos this week. Amy laughed at me when I told her and said she loved how she’s watched me grow from a “sort of gay” something or other to an “absolute terror”. I had to remind her that actually I’m quite the opposite of a terror, I’m bloody lovely and I’m trying to protect myself from yet more heartbreak by trying to be less sensitive than I have been.
Tuesday, 4 November 2008
Night time ponderings
I’m at home tonight. Not in my Falmouth home, and not in My Constantine one; I’m sitting in bed in the first, the original. My Stithians home.
I’m moving back. Moving back to the house that I spent my first seven years in. My first blissful, simple, and yet tortured seven years.
I left this house for the first time twelve years ago. During those years I have returned for days, weeks, sometimes even months at a time, but this will be the longest have stayed here since.
I’ve always been so sentimental about my first home. I used to beg my parents not to sell it; even though I hated staying here. I used to feel so attached to it I couldn’t bare the thought of someone else living here. I used to cry every time I stayed, from memories and familiarity, and yet I loved the house itself.
Even though it is completely different from what it used to be, I still associate so much with the scruffy, small, smelly little cottage. There is junk in the living room and in the Conservatory. The kitchen has a different layout and the bathroom has no door, and the room that we all slept in when I was a baby is full of things, instead of the simple floor of mattresses it used to contain. The airing cupboard where we used to keep our clothes has just dad’s in now, and the slope to the attic we used to climb on has unnameable boxes covering it.
The eleven narrow, rickety wooden stairs with the metal banister Dad made, that I once fell down and used to dream about flying from top to bottom in one graceful swoop.
The room that Laurence and I moved into has a bed and a massage couch in it, as well as some plants. The windows are the same ones Dad made when he moved in here over twenty-five years ago, and the curtains I remember as the ones Mum made when I was a toddler. The same crack in the class and the same fireplace, but no bookshelf, and no light.
I used to be scared of the fireplace, and the draught that came down from the chimney. My fear would be magnified by Dad’s late night readings of the Hobbit, even though it was our favourite. There are stickers on the door that I put on it when I was five, and yet the corner where my bed used to be is taken up by a mini greenhouse, and this bed is by the window.
The whole room still shudders with heavy footsteps, because of the broken beam in the living room’s ceiling, but it doesn’t scare me anymore, not like it used to.
I’ll hear Dad’s snoring in a while, and his gasps as he stops breathing from the sleep apnoea. I’ll hear him grinding his teeth and I’ll ignore it like I used to, and feel strange that I can’t go and snuggle up to him like I did when I was little.
The only radiator in the house, in this room, no longer works and it is cold in here. I made a hot water bottle (the one I have since I was six, when I lived here first) with the copper kettle on the Raeburn; No electric kettle, no toaster, no cooker. Dad makes his breakfast on a tiny barbecue in the conservatory.
The fireplace doesn’t contain the old stove with the backburner and the fireguard. There is a bigger fire, it’s taller, but the granite mantelpiece is the same, as is the marble it sits on.
And yet despite all this; despite the absence of phone and internet, the lack of hot water, the inability to pop the kettle on for a quick cup of tea, I still feel so much more at home than I have done for the last few months. It takes me back so a simpler and more innocent time, a time without the politics of friendship, the annoyance of bills and the confusion of love.
I think I could be happy again here.
I’m moving back. Moving back to the house that I spent my first seven years in. My first blissful, simple, and yet tortured seven years.
I left this house for the first time twelve years ago. During those years I have returned for days, weeks, sometimes even months at a time, but this will be the longest have stayed here since.
I’ve always been so sentimental about my first home. I used to beg my parents not to sell it; even though I hated staying here. I used to feel so attached to it I couldn’t bare the thought of someone else living here. I used to cry every time I stayed, from memories and familiarity, and yet I loved the house itself.
Even though it is completely different from what it used to be, I still associate so much with the scruffy, small, smelly little cottage. There is junk in the living room and in the Conservatory. The kitchen has a different layout and the bathroom has no door, and the room that we all slept in when I was a baby is full of things, instead of the simple floor of mattresses it used to contain. The airing cupboard where we used to keep our clothes has just dad’s in now, and the slope to the attic we used to climb on has unnameable boxes covering it.
The eleven narrow, rickety wooden stairs with the metal banister Dad made, that I once fell down and used to dream about flying from top to bottom in one graceful swoop.
The room that Laurence and I moved into has a bed and a massage couch in it, as well as some plants. The windows are the same ones Dad made when he moved in here over twenty-five years ago, and the curtains I remember as the ones Mum made when I was a toddler. The same crack in the class and the same fireplace, but no bookshelf, and no light.
I used to be scared of the fireplace, and the draught that came down from the chimney. My fear would be magnified by Dad’s late night readings of the Hobbit, even though it was our favourite. There are stickers on the door that I put on it when I was five, and yet the corner where my bed used to be is taken up by a mini greenhouse, and this bed is by the window.
The whole room still shudders with heavy footsteps, because of the broken beam in the living room’s ceiling, but it doesn’t scare me anymore, not like it used to.
I’ll hear Dad’s snoring in a while, and his gasps as he stops breathing from the sleep apnoea. I’ll hear him grinding his teeth and I’ll ignore it like I used to, and feel strange that I can’t go and snuggle up to him like I did when I was little.
The only radiator in the house, in this room, no longer works and it is cold in here. I made a hot water bottle (the one I have since I was six, when I lived here first) with the copper kettle on the Raeburn; No electric kettle, no toaster, no cooker. Dad makes his breakfast on a tiny barbecue in the conservatory.
The fireplace doesn’t contain the old stove with the backburner and the fireguard. There is a bigger fire, it’s taller, but the granite mantelpiece is the same, as is the marble it sits on.
And yet despite all this; despite the absence of phone and internet, the lack of hot water, the inability to pop the kettle on for a quick cup of tea, I still feel so much more at home than I have done for the last few months. It takes me back so a simpler and more innocent time, a time without the politics of friendship, the annoyance of bills and the confusion of love.
I think I could be happy again here.
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