Whenever you're ready...

Hit the ground running...

The world is a wide place where he stumbles like a child learning to walk. It's a bright mosaic where I learn how to see, where my little blurry eyes strive greedily to take in as much light and love and colour and detail as they can. The world is a coaxing whisper when the wind lips the trees, when the sea licks the shore, when animals burrow into earth and people look up at the sympathetic stars. The world is an admonishing roar when gales chase rainclouds over the plains and whip up ocean waves, when people crowd into cities or intrude into dazzling jungles.

… and the story as it plays out in my mind is that I became a writer when I started to realise that I wasn't loved and that maybe I never would be. I was nineteen and epic stories were snaking out of me because I felt badly treated, or I was newly aware that I'd colluded in my self-annihilation and the love I had sought up until then was a lie. I became a writer when I learned that I was a person and not just a figure inside another person's libidinal imagination - I am still not entirely that, though, a person; still part of my brain is lobotomised by the fantasy of glory and worthiness in libidinal abjection and I have to somehow live with that.

Under the sheets of my bed...

I have found that time was like rain, glittering as it fell, changing the world, but something that could also be taken for granted. Until you loved another. Then time became gold in a miser's hands, every bright year counted out carefully, infinitely precious, and each one slipping through your fingers. Because people don't know how warm you are and how warm they are with you, not until they're cold. People think a bonfire is something they can build anywhere. It's not. It takes wood, an open space, ideally stars in the sky. They can't fabricate that. They don't know how warm you are until they're cold. They don't know you're a star until you're not there.