if i’m a broken record, write it in the dust babe.

I learnt how to soften my belly this year. I’ve filled up three paperback journals with boys' names, and I learnt how to keep my belly soft. I wrote somewhere - maybe in March - how there are all these ways that you get your edges, and I think I could probably piece enough together now. On Sunday I went for a walk with my ex-boyfriend and I told him my big news; how I’ve learnt how to be in the bath, I can stay for 45 minutes! I don’t even need a book. And that was news because I always found baths so boring and so hot - and what I have found now, as someone who can stay in the bath - is that the key is to make it cooler than you think, so there; my greatest learning as a gift to you.

And I’m fed up of the dark like we are, and I’m not sleeping at night because I’ve been ready for bed since 4pm, so when it comes to 10, I am tired but my body wont stop vibrating. So I try all the ways: a pillow between my thighs sometimes, a hand holding my forehead (mine), two pillows close behind my back like someone else is there (they’re not). And eventually I sleep until an hour before the light comes back and I watch it grow from behind the house. Silver first, usually. A year ago there were eight magpies in the tree next to my bed, eight, and since then I say, magpies are my spirit animal and since then I see one when I need to remember something. Yeah, I know, they are one of the UK’s most common birds, but yeah, they’re for me.

I don’t want to measure my life by whether I am single or not single, but it’s been two years  now. And the first year, honestly, it’s just about not dying. The first year is just managing the blood loss around a broken heart. My blood loss, my heart. But then after the milestone of one year (New Year’s Day, very handy actually for moments like this, very handy indeed). So the first year is all mess and survival and telling everyone ‘oh I’ve just broken up with someone’. But after one year, that can’t really be your line anymore, so after one year, you just present differently. So now here I walk around the streets very much as a single person, who being in a relationship becomes more and more elusive because I’ve got so big. And I’m about to be 30 so I know all these things now! I know all the games and the dances and the ways I am deeply flawed and what it’s like to be one of seven million faces on Hinge.

I said to my friend yesterday how much people in relationships love telling you how important it is to be single before you are with someone else. They love saying it based on the one month they had being alone before they fell into the next one. The one month where they slept with too many people and then decided that wasn’t very fun and had two weeks of making their own dinner and connecting with friends. Got it. I’m not jaded, I actually walk around most days the least jaded, happy to smile at anyone who comes my way and ready to listen to everything you have to say. But, I am a tiny bit jaded.

Before these two years I hardly cried at all. Mostly only in arguments or at the cinema - sometimes at the end of yoga. But now my mum texts to ask how my day was and I say oh yeah, really good and really interesting, but I did cry for two hours. And she says ‘hope you’re ok after the crying, but that’s just a normal day for you’. And I laugh, and we all laugh. I bring it up because I think it’s the same as the belly thing. My body is more like a lovely animal, and sometimes I listen to her - and sometimes I don’t - and I gun for a second cup of coffee. Pour it onto the grass halfway through. One and a half would probably be perfect.

Rob said to me at the end of last year, honey, 2020, big one, strap yourself in. So I did! And I know, what a year, we’re rubbing our eyes, stamping our feet, making bad decisions, but I kind of love it the most out of all the years. I got to exist the most I ever have! I felt the most! Imagine. I learnt to relax my belly and eat pastries 5 days a week and nothing bad happened, except around midday when the sugar and caffeine crash happens. Otherwise, nothing bad.

We went on a family holiday this year with all of us in the middle of the summer, which now feels like a huge dream that happened sometime before and after and in the middle of the chaos. And I was the best behaved I’ve ever been (except when I went running with no phone and a questionable paper map, got lost in the forest for three hours and was rescued on a roadside by Dan and Alex far from home). But otherwise, I was the most present I’ve been able to be and I genuinely enjoyed playing with all the children, realised I love them, like loads, went to bed early by myself and read quietly before falling asleep. And after that I thought, oh interesting, maybe I will experience children mostly through my sisters and love them so much and that motherhood isn’t my path. That’s ok. I felt. I will be close to Romy.

But then a few weeks later I got pregnant and didn’t have the baby, I won’t have that baby, and I’ll be sad about that forever, and now I know round the back of life. And now I know it’s something I want. And is there anything more scary than knowing what you want? Fuck me there’s a cliff to fall off from knowing what you want.

So I march around now, and I said yesterday to Cindy and Issy, it’s so hard knowing so much what I want all the time and being so ready and finding that there is no one to meet me here. And often it’s brilliant. Often I revel in the mess and the experience and I go round to see Anna and Will and we drink too much and I tell them about my mishaps and wild adventures and we love it. But then I’m in the bath again and I imagine what it would be like if someone loved me enough to wash my hair.

It’s a really shameful thing to be a single person who admits they want someone to love them. And quickly I will be told how many people love me. And they do. I don’t doubt how loveable I am - or how my friends and my family love me, and like really like having me there actually, enjoy me. But then for all the ways I am brilliant alone and for all the hills I have ran to the top of and felt invincible, for all the cold water and walking the streets in the dark listening to loud music and feeling it all; for all of that there is longing for a hand to reach for yours at a dinner with friends when you’re in the middle of talking to someone else. For all of that there is the hand squeeze.

It’s hard to write that paragraph and also firmly believe that in many ways I have been the happiest I have ever been. Happy is the wrong word. I have been the most myself I have ever been and I get more that way every day. But then, that’s the whole thing I’m saying, the more yourself you get, the bigger space you occupy, the more intense you are. For two years, men I’ve been with have told me how intense I am. That’s basically the nutshell. And everytime I’m like what are you talking about? And then every time I tell Beth something I said or show her a video I made and she’s like yeah mate umm intense.

Anyway, Holly said once that my intensity was my beauty, so, there is that.