I must admit, I felt a kick in my stomach as I saw the first few miles clock up. Aborting my plans never was going to be easy, but eventually, sat in the passenger seat (as I had been all summer, it felt), I realised this termination had been coming a long time, and was for the best. And so:

- Feeling it all go as every second passes makes the feeling more vivid.
- Literal journeys as metaphorical ones.
- Seeing your life in boxes laid out before you.
- Making a house a home.
- Haunting the places you used to for the first time in a long time.
- Meeting the person you wanted to see the most, when you thought you'd see them the least.
- Not remembering going to sleep, but loving waking up.

I'm going to do this more often, the walk home from work has been cold and dark and beautiful, rather than tense and worrying and anxious. It's like living in a film, the unconscious cinematography and mis-en-scene being re-interpreted by their soundtrack. Perfect interaction of stage and actor, art and audience.

Even the couples exhaling like they're smoking cigarettes between their kisses make me smile where I would have simmered and seethed, they're beautiful not because of what they might look like, but because of what they are.

Today I wrote a thousand words as a bird, flying the nest for the first time. Cautious, but ready to launch into the unknown. Yet I found I simply couldn't write the one final crucial word that meant the most of all. I stepped outside myself. Looked. What are you afraid of?

I am afraid of showing how I feel, which is ridiculous, because the whole point is to show how I feel. So today, standing outside myself, I took my own hands and I wrote. I folded. I sealed, and I posted.

Four letters, one word, a whole new way to live.

I listened to them on the way home, cast against a pink sky. The Christmas lights are on now, blue and white and gold, and the reds, oranges and greens of traffic lights punctuated my journey. Colours everywhere, and they were the perfect soundtrack for showing me that the world can simply be a wonderful, beautiful place. As they always have been. And, I like to think, as it always has been.

I see them again tonight. Last time I saw them, two weeks or so ago, I made my way through a storm to where they were playing, and when they finished and I left and went outside into the real world again, it took a while to realise the storm had gone away. There's no storm tonight, not even a hint of one, and so whilst last time I had needed the shelter and a place to gather myself, tonight I'm going not because I need respite and warmth, but because I want to celebrate the fact that all the things I tried to find, I did, two weeks ago, and now I can find beauty in whatever I choose, because it is a choice and I know this again for the first time in a while.

I fell asleep with her photo in my hands the other night. The only thing that stopped me taking in everything about her, over and over again, was how I eventually couldn't keep my eyes open. And even then I didn't stop seeing her face. She's got me good, and I love it, because this time it's not difficult, and it's not an effort, and (you know what? I'm going to say it in all its simplistic glory) maybe she genuinely likes me too.


Backtrack


I'm the happiest I've been in months. In years. Ever. A song of impossible joy is all I can hear, and confetti is all I can see, and I put my clapping hands in the air as high as they can go and I smile, not because I've been told to, or because I think it's what I should do, but because it feels right.


Everything I needed to lose, I left in that hall. This is a new start. Watch me.