Journaling to Z

Z I will catch you. Z I will do what Mr Ramsay couldn’t. Z you are my birthright. Z you will be mine and then we’ll start again at A like a tropical storm naming system.

This is some of a journal. It was the fourteenth I have completed and the first I have reordered.

I started it at 12:03pm on Thursday 2^nd of April in Paddington Station, London.

I finished it at 5:53pm on Wednesday the 13^th of May at my desk in Debar Maalo, Skopje.

I wrote in it every day, multiple times.

This is a self-indulgent exercise. Feel free to skim the text and enjoy the photos.

A man standing in the aisle next to me says he feels sick from the heat and he’s going deathly pale and already smells of brewing vomits. Algernon Charles Swinburne has a story about Proserpine. All I really wanted was to be held. All men are the same in the way that all people are different. And by sipping the bittersweet negroni through a green and white straw I am sipping the flag itself I’m ingesting the emblem of Italy. And you can call me an alcoholic, or bad with money, but it takes intent to build a life in a city this big. Artemis II is up there and she’s going to send back a new photo of earth. A person in Asturias and a person in Devon both noticed the same type of flower spontaneously on Maundy Thursday. At Dalston Kingsland now and the air smells of honeycomb and it’s an overwhelming fact of London that I feel my past undercurrents everywhere because this road this pub this station is charged up with the significance of sharing it in the past with other people and I’m so aware of being with someone new innocuously while they tread a memory of fonder times and fonder company that I am not privy to.

Before I opened my eyes this morning I thought about the next chapter and the dialogue I have to write. Ben (forlorn) is on the sofa looking at his laptop. Better to exorcise someone else’s shame into pity than to take it on. Better to hum on a hillock and feel everything while mother stomps into the distance and fret fret frets. Between the sourdough I put little hunks of butter. Beyond the meadow, he asked me my favourite type of rock and if I’ve ever swum in a river. Bitch you can’t ignore me for a month. Blend it into a green paste. Books don’t make money. By the bitter end I was drunk enough to believe I spoke fluent Spanish.

Call me Ishmael because Luton Airport Parkway is the New Bedford, Nantucket and I am off to slay a whale! Calves taught on the plywood floor through which Russian curses stream from the flat below. Charlie made green goddess salad. Come on now, let’s stop talking about anti-Semitism or some guy’s lack of erection in an Arthur Miller play and let’s go back to talking about corvids as there are so many on Blackheath. Could stay in that sensory education for a long time.

Devon is so cold. Django the taxi driver said jump in for free but he was not a predator and he unlocked the car when it looked like I might cry but as I waited for the bus he did drive back and forth along the canyon yelling “hey lady, hey lady, bus is still not here.” DO NOT EVER DRINK LAMBRUSCO AGAIN WHAT A PERVERTED DRINK. Dom Perignon was drunk in a Polish family’s Airbnb and there was a woman’s bag that looked like a clockface on the pub courtyard’s floor and Will looked at it longingly and said God I’d love that bag I’d even let her keep her belongings if she let me steal the bag. Drunk drivers often get out unscathed because their bodies hit the airbag with such little resistance.

Each of us dug into frozen empty pits for any words to say. Every time I sneeze I spew out a helluva lot of blood but thems the consequence of an only half faulty womb and annually adapting pollens. Every Tuesday night I type up the bestsellers list rub my nose in the bestsellers list which I happen to not be in. Everyone is getting up and down a lot to pee, drink, depart, anything to pretend they’re not waiting. Everyone is hiding from me in plain sight behind their bedroom doors.

‘Febrile’ (adjective) means marked by or caused by fever. Feeling very soft-wounded-animal sorry for myself today no wonder. Fourteen months is how long she’s taking off work, an unmoored ceramicist on sabbatical across Canada and Colombia, and she said don’t blame yourself for the drinking and the feeling because sometimes your body demands a lowliness and you’ll be wide-eyed, alert, alone, when you get to Eastern Europe so just appreciate Eastern London for now.

Gaggles of glamorous Spaniards at the party, an Aperol jelly in the shape of a koi fish, a guy in a white Hawaiian shirt who asked “What’s Polo like to live with?” while Will and Jack drank Campari until 4 am and did unacceptable accents. Gemma said “that’s so sweet” and I wondered if she meant us going to the Palladio together or us going because she went first. God my life is full of light and love. Got heat rash on my chest during the 15 minutes I was awaiting Macedonian law enforcement. Greg had spicy vinegar from Shepherd’s Bush market.

Have stewed up rhubarb with brown sugar and mixed it into frozen grapes and pomegranate seeds which is nice the pink the red the green three colours three textures lots of crystally nutrients like a big cosmic soup. He is gone. He is risen. He likes photographing construction sites. He likes the likes the sound of his own voice and everyone else hates it. He read the book one handed and stroked me with the other. He said “isn’t it just crazy how when you have a big feeling it’s there and it’s just come from somewhere and could be anything, just a big feeling in nature or between people you know and when you feel it you know” and it was ungenerous of me to laugh because I do know and very few people can verbalise it better even in a first language. He was in fact boarding the plane at that moment. He’s not home yet and I feel more and more insular. His hair and fingernails were long, the latter weirdly groomed, but he got off in time to vomit on the platform. His heartbeat is very fast and variable. How many people know what I look like when I sleep and what kind of intimacy is that? Hyperbolic paraboloid. Hysterical humorous happy hangover shared with sedentary salty saturated laughter served with prosecco and fried cheese toasties shall we list the egg dishes of every district in Britain we should but we won’t know a single one.

I am a life parasite. I am a woman of leisure and letters. I am carrion. I am fundamentally bad. I am here to see. I am 24 now and 24 years is a macrocosm of one day. I am on the roof! I ate a slice of oily meat burek in the main square by the river and it felt like when I ate mango sticky rice sheepishly in Bangkok - the same weird cross over period of arriving in a new city but not yet assimilating. I can see snowy mountains from my desk. I could tell that ruined her day and I felt complicit. I don’t need it that bad, not as much as the idea of it. I felt her exact feelings. I got into bed and I called Em and Emma who were together, I love those women. I had a canned cocktail at Paddington that didn’t purge my lingering atmosphere of vomit and baby faeces. I have so much time to be idle and in that void my morals have sunk to my workload. I kept saying “I’ll go in a minute” because I thought the moment needed slitting but he said “please don’t I want you to stay” with no guards and no chinks and that was lucky because I wasn’t going anywhere. I lie on the couch in the living room lit only by the small red light. I measured aeroplane trails with my finger span. I said “engineer those buildings man.” I sat at the kitchen table and caught up with Ben. I saw a convoy of police helicopters. I saw the TikTok famous Pilates instructor getting on a lime bike and I said “hey it’s you” then he said “do you want to be in my vlog, you’d fit right in in LA” but then we both got shy. I thought about Simon last night and remembered sitting with him on the cold South Kensington steps last summer in our matching uniforms and what he said about how addictive it is to make a first impression and how it feels more fulfilling to meet people and ‘win them over’ and move on than to stay and I always thought that was an acceptable human thrill but now it seems immoral. I want to be apart. I will endeavour to never rush again. I will really miss living here. I wonder if that was a common thought around the world this afternoon. I’ll see you when I see you. I’ll get there when I arrive. I’m not sure if we were flirting but I felt like I was on a first date with an aspirational version of myself I truly thought she’s me but better in every way. I’m standing in front of Ophelia now and the frame does bend in at the upper corners like it does in Charlie’s replica maybe to mimic mediaeval art. I’m writing to pass the time. Impressions folding in and in on themselves. It is a kind of intimacy that I am eating bread you bought as we both travel home. It is two slices of floury white sourdough. It is very satisfying to my narrative mind to enjoy marmalade sandwiches - well one and just the flesh not the crust - in Paddington Station. It was unspreadable but the hunks of butter are more satisfying. It was the boat race today. It’s good to be. It’s a bit like something else. It’s in that area of Soho that has been an unavoidable theme of late. It’s like we’ve been living parallel waiting to bump. It’s now 4:00 PM and I’m back at Highbury and Islington Overground where I left you in the lower margins.

Just a pending splat-the-rat-no-bueno-day.

Kanye’s back in stadiums dancing on set designed moons. Kittens through the window of a warehouse flat. Knelt by her bed. Kosovo, you sing to me.

Legs splayed around suitcase. Life is so beautifully receptive to being structurally engineered.

Mars is in Aries. Maybe all I want is affection and to be admired by someone I admire. Maybe I should visit her. Maybe it’s yesterday’s wine. Maybe it’s hormones. Maybe it’s pleasurable but I’ve been on the roof terrace for over an hour doing close to nothing thinking about the choices I’ve made in life that mean I’m sitting in a roof garden on a Wednesday earning money whilst being ostensibly unemployed. Maybe this journal is becoming supremely dull and precise, but the longer you write about a moment, the more it becomes a moment. Maybe she’ll remember this forever and it’ll shape her whole life. Maybe that’s why being mute is called being dumb. Maybe you need some certainties and structures in place to permit freedom. Maybe I’m the evil. Moby Dick’s plot is deeply rooted in the Quaker belief that within all of us there is a pure spirit wrestling with a personal soul. Moments aren’t whittled they’re structurally engineered. Mrs Eccles was at the party not drinking but smoking out the window and eating a banana as she manned the DJ booth. My name’s Eliza-baby and I have just been born. My pinkie fingers on both hands have deep swelling where cold is stuck in the joints.

Negronis for dinner endlessly. Newly qualified lawyers celebrated by taking illegal substances in Ben’s dingy corner room. No point trying to impress. Note the wind flow circulating around the moment and whether the moment can retain its integrity. Now we’re in the kitchen with Gemma.

Obviously my bad habits look more unpalatable laid out. Of course you may. Oh, thank you. On top of that I spread Gemma’s Tiptree marmalade. One of the fountains by Споменик на 9-те мина is decorated with lions and pregnant women and as I was pondering it I felt creeping on the back of my neck so I knew someone was watching me with an evil eye and it was tracing down in tinkly fingertips so I had to smack it like a bug and toss the energy away as I walked off so they wouldn’t follow me to my flat and kill me. Overwhelming brain. Ow ow owee owee oww.

Period is all painful and wet like roadkill in the cold and is swathed in toilet paper over and over and over to not get its blood on the communal bathroom. Polo pointed out one of the many photo shoot images which was a black and white hand fondling a Leonard Cohen vinyl and it really made me laugh. Polo was eight seconds ahead of me on the stairs which is the amount of time it takes for both doors to swing closed. Praying that my black suitcase is still in the luggage rack when we arrive mainly because of the half metre rhubarb stems and ziplocked bags of wild garlic but also because of my earthly possessions. Proserpine is in book five of The Metamorphosis. Proserpine’s painting was what I had hoped, was as I hoped, I only wish there had been a gallery chair before her to properly take in her humped neck and haunting look it’s like she’s trying to avoid your eyes her own firmly downcast and when I was alone in the gallery with her on a second pass I turned to see the world from the same stance except she is still there alone in the dark gallery and I am now in Trisha’s where everything is green-orange like the light shining through my negroni. ‘Purple prose’ is an overly ornate, flowery, or melodramatic writing style.

Question self-imposed binaries made by piling focus on one thing.

Ready I am. Resonances of poetry and the spirit world. Rosetti’s painting of Proserpine.

Scarcity + mystery breeds desire. Scarcity breeds desire, I know that already. Scared to take up verbal and interpersonal space so distilling myself here instead. Screamed at her. Sex in the brain last longer. Sex is entirely in the brain. Shame bred in childhood that still affects me. Shame clings shame clings shame clings. She disclaimed twice that she feels behind but she seems very ahead to me. She has anecdotes exhibiting psychosis. She said, “I don’t see why not, I would have got a good slap.” She’s in the Tate Britain. She’s not through with men yet. She’s ethereally beautiful. She’s very pretty, very delicate, very very intelligent and was more at ease than me. Should have done English with a foreign language at university. Should have read more philosophy. Should have got a training contract at a city law firm. Shouldn’t have slept in Ottilie’s bedroom without her permission that time in 2021. Sirens used to be bird women as well as fish women and birds make more sense singing wise but men would rather crash their ships for tits + scales. Sitting in the centre of Christopher Wren’s Greenwich symmetry. Sleepy but content after the roast I could barely bring myself to talk. Someone in this carriage is wearing his cologne. Sometimes even when there’s no one else there she humiliates me. Soon I will have a shower in my new apartment in Skopje and I will drink North Macedonian water until all the water in my body is North Macedonian and the traces of the last few months will slowly be washed away. Spawning is in the air. Spoken like a true alcoholic. Stewed into a pink mulch.

Talked about messages in bottles. That’s a pretty cut and dry binary granted context. The coarse minerality of polenta in a brown paper bag. The cool thing about Isabel Allende is that she writes spiritual magical realism whilst looking like a Desperate Housewives cast member. The disintegration of pink stems popped from the ground with 1 dislocating schmuck. The girl who desperately wanted to get away is now at peace but the girl who actually is away on her own in a foreign country just realised that bird shit from this bench in Skopje park is drying onto her arm and her bag. The lightness of being all your selves at once. The Italian woman lost at chess to the Italian man. The newborn baby just shat in its mums lap and she said, “Charles that is seriously bad timing.” The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood were a seven man collective based on the Nazarene movement, a German Romantic group that sought to revive spirituality and art. The purple green. The question of what makes something funny has arisen twice in 12 hours. The sag of the broken slats have made my bed into a coffin. The smell of a smart man’s body through his nice jumper. The sun is so melty to be in up here so mind numbing. The sun is now gone so I should make good on my promise. The thin lines in this notebook make me want to record vigilantly. The top of one of my fingernails is on the desk and it’s neat so it must be from a ring finger and it’s painted purple which means it must be about a month old because I last painted my nails this colour when I sat at the kitchen table with Zoe. The woman to the right of me has a single serve trifle pot. Then he went down to the canals. There is a big brick wall that is the side of a house. There is a glowing crucifix on the mountain outside my window and there are kitsch mosques along the motorway. There is a little purple flower whose petals fold from a perfect pentagon. There is a shame clamp around my tongue and a shame pit in my belly and a shame cord around my arousal and all of it’s a parachute tide up in its own strings. There is a sonnet about Proserpine by Rosetti. There was olive oil between the avocado and the toast. These are the things I have seen Eliza, these are the things I have seen/ and the waiting and collating of teeth for updating/ and the drills that whir beyond Hackney Wick’s blur/ and the mouthwash that tasted of tar/ and the views of the queues of the fighting sport blues/ under the awning of The Copper Kettle – Polo telling me about his trip to the dentist written in the style of Hilaire Belloc’s poem Tarantella. These French friends called Guillame and Melody just came over and he told me I look beautiful in the sunset and went in for a hug but she seemed nice and they invited me out with them and I said maybe I’ll see you there but on his way off the balcony he said “bit of a cliche though ha” and I bet that was about me which is so fair. They asked and it was nice to tell even though it’s not mine to tell. They both noted how agonisingly I took apart my Caesar salad. This afternoon I went into the flat where Ben and Gemma said “we’re talking about fourth wall breaks in ancient Greece” and I replied classic you guys without thinking and then realised I don’t yet know them like that. This is how an avocado tree grows. To have an externalised soul. Turns out I am not insane for feeling ugly, having a bigger appetite, having acne, and wanting to be dead. Turns out that if you wait long enough, the bin lady will bring the bin trolley to you. Twenty-Four hour CCTV recording is in operation at this station. Two ships would crash if they were focused on the tone of their own foghorns.

Unpredictable ice queen behaviour won’t work with this one.

Vodno cross is quite the view but the communist telecommunications tower next to it is an even better view and that makes me feel uneasy about believing in God. Vesna tried to pass the time in Skopje police station by asking what I do for work and when I said I work in publishing she said “I LOVE Tolstoy” and I said “No way! I love Tolstoy!” as if we were bonding over an up and coming band. Victoria Park where he got an iced coffee and I got a Mr Whippy.

Walking up Greenwich hill interlinked. Waymo to the corner, Venmo for the Waymo, Monzo for the Venmo. We find each other’s basic interests uninteresting. We hunted them down the length of the village. Wearing a blue jumper with Isabel Allende’s book under his arm. Well I just baited and baited her until she felt understandably utterly worthless and snapped so I snapped back and felt no release from anger just more hardening ensuring that it’ll occur again. What’s a piece of cheese on a pork escalope between people who have plans to reconvene in Kosovo? What’s the etymology of noodle? When I finally put my tea down and my arms around his neck it was such a nice relief. Where is Gibraltar and why is everyone talking about it? Who does she remind me of? Will AI alter how we experience the placebo effect?

X-ray vision is hurting me with all of life insisting on being seen and me only having the faculties to see it askew.

You can in no way tell that Em spent last Tuesday crawling to call 999 with blood coming out of her mouth and ears.

Z. Z I will catch you. Z I will do what Mr Ramsay couldn’t. Z you are my birthright. Z you will be mine and then we’ll start again at A like a tropical storm naming system.

During this journal’s 41 days, 5 hours, and 50 minutes I read a lot of lipograms and a lot of gimmicky short stories written with language rules. I also reread To The Lighthouse where Woolf says this:

“His splendid mind had no sort of difficulty in running over those letters one by one, firmly and accurately, until it had reached, say, the letter Q. He reached Q. Very few people in the whole of England ever reach Q… Z is only reached once by one man in a generation. Still, if he could reach R it would be something. Here at least was Q. He dug his heels in at Q.”

As I read that quote I looked up and saw that my flat mate Greg had a notebook with Y6 stuck to the front in tape. I asked him what that meant. He said he catalogues his notebooks by letter but didn’t like the idea of reaching Z so started adding numbers onto Y.

I wondered how I felt about reaching Z. When I finished this journal on Wednesday I typed it up and alphabetised the sentences. The post is about a tenth of my alphabetised material. Big chunks have been omitted but nothing has been changed.

I liked taking temporality out of a diary. As with all my ideas, I’ve since learnt that this has been done before. Sheila Heti has a book called Alphabetical Diaries which orders 14 years of notes in the same way. Alphabetical grouping makes the themes you always come back to apparent. I imagine this is far more insightful across 14 years than across 41 days. Heti’s book is published as fiction in the USA but non-fiction in the UK as if its factualness is confused by alphabetisation.