I am singing now while Rome burns
"All of us take pride and pleasure in the fact that we are unique, but I'm afraid that when all is said and done the police are right: it all comes down to fingerprints."

Is there a word that expressively means “a desperate longing to be thirteen and a half again, in the same place and with the same people as the first time around, feeling the same mix of fear/hope/overwhelming love because you’re certain that’s the last time you were properly happy” because I’d really like to know that word. It seems like something the German or the Spanish language would have, or something similar, but English is too formal and businesslike to know of the feeling. It’s not nostalgia, exactly; it’s what happens when you’re already nostalgic and then the weather gets cold and all the people you love aren’t in the same city as you, not even in the same country.

There was a simple, unrushed happiness to that year, the time from one July to the next, the days all languorous and melting into each other as we yearned for them to go quicker. We wanted the sophistication and the maturity that we alluded to to become reality, we wanted to grow up and face the world. We yearned for the future when we should have been enjoying those brilliant twelve months that we were given, like a reward for something we were yet to accomplish. After that, things got blurry, murky, there were suddenly too many layers and the brief moments of joy we shared were always tinged with an urgency and a sadness that we had wasted the last little morsel of our childhoods. 

In any case, I miss it today. 

It’s half embarrassing that I’m this old and I still have a real aversion to cleaning my room. I’m a little proud though that I’ve retained the magnificent air of childhood petulance in how I stamp my foot and the decidedly rebellious huff that forces its way out of me at the very mention of tidying anything. I almost take pleasure in standing in the doorway, hands on my hips, surveying what could easily be a bombsite with apprehension but with grim determination that I am no longer a child and this is something that has to be done. The whole ordeal is one big nostalgia trip, a few hours that I can scowl and roll my eyes and indulge in all the passive agressive teenage habits that I’ve taught myself to outgrow, meanwhile secretly enjoying the whole thing. The discovering of old notes scribbled on corners of assignment criteria sheets and shoved down behind the desk and embarrassing doodles of cartoon hearts timestamped by the initials surrounding them; shimmying my shoulders madly to whichever jazz playlist I’ve put on and hurrying up and down the hallway with armfuls of dirty clothes I’d forgotten under the bed before I missed the next song; finally finding where every bobbypin has disappeared to in the last year. Last week, I found four USBs, half a bottle of tequila, and a single solitary blueberry vodka Cruiser from 2010. There was a sheet of notepad paper crumpled in between two boxes that had a three dot point outline of my entire friendship with someone written on one side and it made me sad and happy in a way nothing else really can.

Every time I find something that I thought I’d lost, it’s like coming home from school to find a present on my bed that I hadn’t expected my mother to buy and my heart swells a little as I remember the story behind each thing, each note and each ticket stub and each television quote I had thought applied so intrinsically to me that I’d framed it and then left it to collect dust with the others under the bed. Cleaning my room is like time travelling, visiting each past incarnation of myself and laughing at how her loves and passions had faded like she swore they never would. Like being every version of myself at the same time and feeling full and warm and knowing that the next time I was forced to tidy up, I would sit in the same place and feel the same way about the girl I am now. 

And without a doubt, that last swipe of wet cloth on the desk that clears up the last of the dust is just about the most gratifying feeling in the world. But so is standing in the doorway again and seeing everything in its place, a mound of paper and dried up glue sticks by my feet, and saying goodbye to the girls that  haunt the dust. The room feels a little emptier without them, those ghosts of myself, but soon it’ll be filled with new ones, full to bursting, and I close the door on their absence. 

She found that, more and more, her mind wandered away from what it was meant to be doing and strolled back to the well-worn corner where she kept him. It’s a vice that she’d lost the habit of steeling herself against, a fresh scab she hadn’t taught herself to ignore. She could avoid it, as long as her hands were busy with something else. It became a game: put on the headphones and figure out the rhythm of every song, tap it out, four fingers against thumb or all five against her thigh as she walked, and thoughts of him would stay away. In the shower was the worst, the hardest, with the water playing out a tune on her skin and her hands with nothing to do. It made her think about things that never happened, never had a chance to.

She never got to see where he lived, his small town prison cell, and that’s the thing that gets her. How can she possibly know him if she’s never seen him at home? Standing shin-deep in the ocean, the lavender dawn rising around the two of them. She can’t possibly understand his soul without understanding where it grew into the thing she knows now. She never got to meet his mother or his friends or see his CD collection, and everyone knows that you can’t understand a person without first going through their music, seeing which cases are broken, which disks are the most scratched, the most loved. So she never really knew him, and now she never will.

It’s taken a long time but my official stance is that yes, you can love more than one person. You can split your love in half or even into thirds, but being in love with more than three people at a time seems less like love and more like fondness cut four ways. Of course, there’s always that nagging sensation that all the other people you love are just versions, copies of the first one you shaved a little piece of your heart off for, the one that you just can’t let go of. In which case, it’s not okay. It’s the opposite direction to okay. But then again, it’s not like you can do anything about it. 

On the wall of a warehouse, the girl wrote the story of how she saw you again. Taking a bus to the industrial district, she skipped all of her afternoon classes and inside a building half falling apart, she took a marker and wrote on the dirty grey panel of whatever it is they use to make walls. It’s an old building where they used to make soap or store soap, but they hollowed it out and left the shell. It smelled like bread because of the yeast factory a street away that makes the whole neighbourhood smell like a bakery on a Saturday morning. She breathed it in and wrote. It’s not all straight and it’s not all even, but it’s there, the whole story, the whole poisonous thing.

She wrote on the peeling expanse of forgotten wall how something had tried ripping itself out of her gut the whole time she was on the train, devouring all the horrible distance that had slipped between you, and she wrote of your eyes like supernovas bursting and forgiving her for all the things she didn’t want to admit to, and she wrote how the cold cold cold wind had stolen all the feeling from her feet so she started running and then she started screaming at you, right in the street, because how dare you smile at her like you remember, you asshole, you villain, you dark treacherous thing, She wasn’t asking for your forgiveness, she never had. She had asked for you not to leave her. She had asked for you to stay and love her and you did the opposite. 

She started out standing on a milk crate and wrote her way down until she was sitting on the cracked yellow plastic, the pen running out but words still forcing themselves out. She wrote about pressing your heads together and your lips together and how she tasted salt on your cheek and it broke her, just a little, and she wrote about the awful way you held her hard and brutish because there wasn’t even an illusion of gentleness left to aspire to, and when the marker dried up she threw it to the ground and kept going in a different colour until half the wall was covered. 

She filled up the hollow building with words and words and words until it was a kingdom, and then she sat on her milk crate throne with her head held high. One day someone will come, whether in six weeks or six months or six years, and they will see the palace she built for the two of you, the savage lovers with their matching hearts, wolves inside their chests. They will know, even if they don’t understand, and when they tear it down to build something else, there will still be one person who knows, even if it’s not the right person, even if it’s not you. 

Tips on how to achieve happiness

Do not go to London to see a man you haven’t seen in two years because when you fall back in love with him, it will hurt when you have to leave again.

Do not spend the night drinking bottles of stolen champagne and vodka given to you by a Polish ex-con who keeps talking about what might or might not have been his pimp days with a little too much nostalgia.

Do not, when your heart is racing furiously from the cold and the alcohol, grab your man’s hand - because yes, he is yours, at least for those 30 hours - with the kind of grip that could crush the life out of someone because you are suddenly and inexplicably scared that this is a dream and if you don’t touch him, he’ll disappear.

Do not say the words “I used to be so in love with you” when he returns the grip and nearly breaks your fingers, because he will hear it for what it is: “I still love you and I need to know if you love me.”

Do not let him press his mouth to yours and do not let him touch the side of your face and do not let him in to touch your tongue with his and do not kiss him back with an urgency that you thought you’d lost the last time you were with him.

Do not, once the people have dispersed and the music has stopped, lie down with him and tell him every single thing you were too scared to before and do not listen to the things he says in return and whatever you do, do not fall asleep with your face held tightly against his chest where you can just feel the slightest thump of his heart as it beats in time with yours.

And if you have done all of those things, if you have told him he made you believe in souls and he laughed and asked you why, if you have felt the skin stretched beautifully tight across his shoulderblades as he moves above you and wondered if his body was constructed to fit yours, do not get in a taxi and drive away. Do not go back to the station and do not get on your train and do not cry silently as the Dutch woman next to you pretends not to notice. Stay with him. Just stay.

There is an old kind of magic in winter, in the whole season, but you never feel it quite as much as you feel it on the first day of snow. There’s nothing quite like stepping outside in the morning to find snow falling, tumbling out of the sky for you. For the minute that you stand on the doorstep and stare out at the white white white blanket that’s been thrown over the world, the horror of what it’s covering falls away. There’s no more war or famine or natural disasters. Instead, the world is suddenly a kingdom of hope, of joy and folly and intentions that are never anything other than pure. Of course, it all comes back after that minute when you get into your car and have to drive at a snail’s pace and it pisses you off because you’re going to be late, but your heart’s not in it. You can’t help but feel that you’ve glimpsed some other version of the world, some alternate reality where people are never cruel to each other and fossil fuels never run out and nobody ever talks loudly in the cinema. That’s where your heart stays, just for the day, in the minute that the sky cracked open just for you and no one else.