Ciara had spent the last half-hour scratching at the fake snow still caked on the inside of the window with the edge of her thumbnail. It was April now—Christmas had been and gone. She remembered some pact she and her flatmate had made to keep the snow there until they moved out that summer, which had mostly only resulted from laziness. It had become part of their home now, as much as the scuffed faux leather couch or the table with one leg a little shorter than the rest.

8:46 am  •  19 April 2012

Part 1 | Part 2

9:14 am  •  9 March 2012

Fourteen hours to go. Fourteen hours, and not a single word written.

The cursor blinks on and off at me, taunting me, just daring me to write something. I’d take it up on that dare if I even knew where to begin.

I thought I was giving myself a fair deal when I took the editor up on her offer. She asked me to write what I know, and I set myself the rather pompous task of documenting life as a singleton in the big city. Sort of a Sex in the City for someone without a sex life, if you will. It was supposed to be a cynical, sarcastic take on what life really consists of for us single folk in the twenty-first century. It was supposed to be the piece that finally got me noticed.

Let me put things into perspective: it’s 7 p.m. and not only have I not written anything, but I also promised my friends I’d come out with them tonight. If we’re meeting at 9:30, that gives me two-and-a-half hours to pound out a piece so brilliant I’ll be scouted by a bigger publication and swooped right out from under the nose of my editor.

Well, maybe I should give myself two hours—I have to get my glad rags on, after all.

It occurs to me at some point, as I find myself still sitting there with a blank document open in front of me, that I could just leave it until I come back from my night out. Do what I did in my college days… Let the alcohol in my bloodstream do the talking and wake up at six the next morning with a dry mouth and an article all magically typed-up. As promptly as the thought pops into my head, it’s gone again; I know that when I wander home after a night on the town I’ll be in no mood to sit at my computer with the glare of the screen boring into my booze-addled eyes. I decide instead that I just won’t bother to go out, that I’ll call my friends and tell them I’m just too snowed-under by work to meet them.

Suddenly it hits me: this is what it’s like to be single in the city. Setting unrealistic deadlines for yourself, taking on tasks that you have no hope of completing if you don’t want your social life to completely tank—and then realising that your social life is a bit shit to begin with, anyway. I’m sitting here moaning about this article I have to write before I leave, when the truth is I’ve not made the slightest effort to get ready to go out, either. The truth is, I don’t want to go out. I’d rather stay in and stare listlessly at the screen of my laptop for hours than go out and spend quality time with real, breathing people.

I start to write. I write about how earlier in the week I was set up on a blind date with a guy who was supposedly so gorgeous it was a wonder he was single, and how I cancelled on that date in the last minute because frankly the thought of glamming myself up for hours only to go meet this ‘gorgeous’ man and be struck by a sudden feeling of inadequacy terrified me. I write about the little moment I shared with the barista at Starbucks when our eyes met across the counter, about how that tiny instant of interaction with an attractive human being left me so cotton-mouthed I could barely say ‘Thank you’.

And then I write about tonight, and how I seriously considered using work as an excuse not to go out and let my hair down. I weave in a couple of hilarious anecdotes (some of them true) for good measure, and by 9:03 I have a full-fledged piece ready to print out and slap down on my editor’s desk in the morning.

With the document saved and backed-up on a flash drive—my work has an annoying habit of getting accidentally deleted between completion and going into work the next day—I close the lid of my laptop and begin the process of getting ready for the night.

I still don’t want to go out, but that’s of little consequence—I never want to go through the ordeal of queueing up outside a club in the cold only to get inside and be mauled by strange men, but it’s on the nights that I suck it up and resolve to enjoy myself that I actually wind up having a good time.

Twenty-three minutes later I’m ready and probably going to be late, but I don’t care. I make sure my flash drive is hidden in a safe place—you really don’t know how often circumstances conspire against me when it comes to these things—and head out the door.

Out on the street, I’m hit by the terrible feeling that tonight is going to be awful. Knowing me, that usually means it’s going to be a good one.

12:09 pm  •  9 February 2012

It’s just comforting to look at this url and remember what the name meant. I was going to pick something stupid and hipster like ‘duchatnoir’ for a new LiveJournal blog to start up a writing project and naturally since all the best names are taken, it was unavailable. I recall that Holly was sitting on my bed by me at the time, purring like a powerhouse without me ever touching her. It was incredibly obvious at that moment which name I should pick. Of course, I know next to nothing about French and I got my genders wrong, but… I’ve fixed that. It has to be perfect.

My cat was always happy. She was always pleased to see us when we came home, and even though she was wary of strangers because we didn’t have them around that often, she usually warmed to them soon enough. All it took was a little pat on the head to get her purring.

My mum used to do this thing when I was at university—she’d get me on the phone and she’d bring Holly over and make me talk to her. I thought it was stupid because hell, why would my cat miss me? She’s got someone there to love her and she’s got a constant supply of kitty kibble to keep her distracted. But when I’d talk to her, I could hear her purring over the line. My mum used to swear she wasn’t petting her, that Holly was just purring in response to the sound of my voice… Maybe that wasn’t true, maybe my mum was just trying to make me feel missed and loved but even if it wasn’t true, it sounded like something Holly would do.

She was always happy. I’ll forever have memories of her noisy purr, of the way she’d scratch at the door for me to get up in the morning, of the way she’d want me to cuddle her when I put her food down before she would eat it.

I want to be like that. I want my life to be simpler; I want to be positive and happy all the damn time just because I can. So from this moment forth I’m going to do everything in my power to be the best person I can be. I’m going to be nice and happy and helpful and I’m going to see life as a gift, as an opportunity to spread joy.

I don’t know how I’m going to deal with waking up each morning without the sound of her scratching outside my door and I don’t know when I’m going to stop hearing the cat flap opening and wondering if she’ll come through it, but I do know this: she was loved and she loved me, and if she saw the end coming she certainly didn’t let it show no matter how much pain she might have been in.

If you think this is an excessive eulogy for a cat, you obviously never met Holly. Just seeing how happy she was all the time would never fail to make you smile.

This is the legacy of the happy cat; l’héritage de la chatte heureuse.

11:16 am  •  29 January 2012

I woke up a couple of nights later with a dry mouth, a light head and a knot in the pit of my stomach. If I’d been having a bad dream, I couldn’t remember it now that I was awake and I really had no desire to try to recall it. With most bad dreams, that sense of unease tends to go away by itself as you rationalise that it was just that—a dream. That night, however, I couldn’t seem to shake the feeling.

3:36 am  •  20 January 2012

You never really reach a point where you realise you’re over someone. There’s no light bulb illumination, no eureka moment; they just cease to be a part of your everyday thoughts and that’s that. If you were to notice that you’d stopped thinking about them, technically you’d be thinking about them again—and it’s hard to get them out of your head after that, isn’t it?

10:41 pm  •  26 December 2011

I always feel guilty when I meet people with scars. Real scars—the kind of scars that could only have come from fights, or fires, or tragic accidents. I feel guilty because I think they must have suffered so much to wind up with such livid marks on their skin, yet they live their lives fully and happily, without dwelling on the things they’ve been through.

I feel guilty because my own scars seem weak in comparison—seem pathetic and self-indulgent. When I look at these people and the scars they bear, when I think of how brave or stupid they must have been to go through such misadventure and come out the other side alive and whole, my own scars seem like a reminder of how feeble I was, of how feeble I still am.

This guilt burdens me like a weight on my shoulders, but there’s a voice that seeks to dispel that guilt—a voice reminding me that I made it through those dark days that left me scarred, reminding me that I’m only here now because I am brave (and maybe a little stupid, too).

My scars are not a symbol of my weakness; they’re a memento of the trials I faced and overcame. The scars I bear—written both openly on my skin and inside my heart where no one else may see—are as much a part of me as my blue eyes or my freckled flesh.

They are a mark of distinction, a medal of honour; they are what make me who I am today.

4:00 pm  •  23 December 2011

We live in an age where the pixel is mightier than the sword; so much can be achieved with a blog post or a Twitter update, so many people can be reached with the use of a computer and an internet connection. At the tips of our fingers is a whole world of information—literally. We can speak to people that live thousands of miles away, we can watch what’s going on at the opposite end of the globe as it happens.

As easy as it is to use our computers to seek this information and connect with people in foreign lands, however, it’s entirely too easy to lose it all. The days of hard copies—of photographs that you can touch with your hands, of that rich papery smell as you crack open a book—are numbered and it feels like we’ll be doing away with tangible copies of the things we love all too soon, all in the name of convenience and instant gratification.

We feel like our information, our pictures, our documents are all safe because they’re kept in a realm where they can’t suffer water damage, or get destroyed in a fire. We think these things are safe because they can be copied and pasted at will as many times as we like, but what happens when something goes wrong? What happens when something that should be foolproof ultimately fails?

I lost a lot today. My NaNoWriMo novel (looks like my third attempt wasn’t the charm after all), the short stories I’ve been working on, the novel I started years ago and decided recently to revamp. I lost these things through my own stupidity and through the belief that they would be fine because I had another copy elsewhere. As it turned out, I didn’t have another copy. With a simple shift+delete, weeks of work was gone.

It could have been worse. I could have lost everything; I could have lost all my novels and the personal writing I’ve stored up over the years. I could have lost so much more than I did, so I suppose I’m lucky in a way.

What rattles me the most about this, though, is the reminder that complete erasure is just a few mouse-clicks and shortcut keys away. In the digital age, even ending a friendship is as simple as sending an email; they always warn you that what you say on the internet is forever there for everyone to see, but at the same time it’s so fucking easy to slip away, to lose everything, to vanish with a melodramatic Twitter update that people probably won’t even pay attention to when it pops up on their timeline.

If I severed my internet connection right now, a vast chunk of my life would go with it. That scares me. It scares me that something can be there one minute and gone the next.

I don’t know where to go from here. I don’t know whether to try to rewrite everything I lost or give up on it; I don’t know whether to print off all the writing I do have backed up in a paranoid frenzy or carry on as I have been, saving imaginary copies on the internet.

I narrowly avoided complete disaster today, but I lost enough to put things into perspective. I don’t want everything that matters to me to simply cease to exist with the click of a button.

I don’t want to slip away.

10:21 pm  •  22 November 2011

Tara woke up a little after sunrise that morning as she had every morning that week…

10:17 pm  •  16 November 2011

I started writing this series of short stories last year; a variety of circumstances both mundane and melodramatic culminated in my failing to update as frequently as I would have liked. Today I’m glad to share the final part at long last.

There are only seven parts—it’s not very long by any means, so it won’t take you as long to read as it took me to write.

You’ll find all the segments here, in chronological order:

First Night | Second Night | Third Night | Fourth Night | Fifth Night | Sixth Night | Home

12:41 pm  •  13 November 2011