just before church and there's angles in the sky, they're the people who've shaped your life.

i will miss social and having a year book, freshers week, advanced higher exams, the things that make up one of most exciting years of your life. 

sometimes i wish i could have all those things, but i think i want them purely for the purpose of having a reason to fit in, a topic to discuss; to moan about prefect incompentance and worry over failing bio and laughing at the winner of "most likely to end up in prison."

i imagine being called mummy (if damages reverse) and i realise i won't have a last year of school to tell of, nor a first year of uni at this rate.

i want only the best for those friends moving on, but am i jealous them? 

sometimes.

but to say always would be a lie. there are times when i realise i owe this past year a lot. i know private school friend's going to oxford and cambridge, other who have been hurt and abused. i know fifteen year old's from the worst estates who've been stabbed, they're memories as fragmented as their scarred backs. i know people who take drugs for "fun" and those who take them to forget. i can see now how everyone is human; that the middle aged lady opposite me in combined assessment was still an alcoholic because of a health system that ignores her rather than by her own making. i can stand up to people, i can scream and shout. not yet very loudly but that will come i believe. before i was sheltered, i went to a middle-class school where neither poles of society were defined. we sat in the middle, most of the people i grew up with still do.

there are connections upon connections all tangled in my head. like the friend who committed suicide who left behind someone so fragile i'm scared to let her go. ki, pinkfluff needs you. why'd you have to go?

or the ones who text: "how are you?"; "love you sweetheart"; "i made myself sick"; "dr is a knob"; "i was going to take an overdose"; "we're moving to the place where IT happened"; "take care of yourself"; "how are you really?".

i can't cope with your problems but i love you all so i do. here, i am needed.

yes, i wish i had a social, to go for one evening and feeling like a seventeen year old should. 

but without this last year, i would still be the anorexic girl. granted, i am that too even now but at least i don't feel quite as paper thin. i don't cry myself to sleep anymore, i take that as a positive.

i'm not saying i know people or understand them, to be perfectly honest people as a collective scare me half to death and i haven't the foggiest how to talk to them. but if you spend sixth year not ina school but an acute psychiatric ward with psychosis and depresion, personality disorders and anorexia, self-harm and bipolar you kinda get to know a little more about humanity i think.

not a lot but enough to suffice the losses you created around yourself in your madness.

i might not have a final dance or last day of school but i'm not quite as naive as i once was.

and would i change it?

no. i've met some of the most interesting people you'd know.

x xx

why does it always end with a section, chair rest and a nasogastric feeding tube?

"You begin to forget what it means to live. You forget things. You forget that you used to feel all right. You forget what it means to feel all right because you feel like shit all the time, and you can't remember what it was like before. People take the feeling of full for granted. They take for granted the feeling of steadiness, of hands that do not shake, heads that do not ache, throats not raw with bile and small rips of fingernails forced to haste to the gag spot. Stomachs that do not begin to wake up in the night, calves and thighs knotting in muscles that are beginning to eat away at themselves. they may or may not be awakened at night by their own inexplicable sobs." - marya hornbacher

i'm walking a tight rope again.

x xx

stop counting time and lives and numbers and passing people. the universe already has its place.

dearest irrational quinn,

do you think we're all trying to save somebody?

if you think about it, late at night in the midst of sleepless dreams, you see that we all kind of are: there is the boy you secretly love who smokes weed inbetween classes in order to forget; there is your mother working too hard for too little in return, much the same as your father is also doing; there is your little brother or big sister who don't fit in at school or who's boyfriend is quite good enough for them; there is your best friend who's hell bent on perfect grades or loosing weight or athletics.

in the end you're there, seruptisiously trying to edge your way into all there lives. often without even realising it and hopefully, if your any good, without them noticing at all.

you are the girl who persaudes the boy to come in the park instead of hiding behind smoke clouds. you are the girl who has the fire on, the dinner made, a fresh bar of salted almond chocolate on the table for your parents when they come in. you are the girl who's got the listening ears, the kind smile, the rubbish jokes and warm hugs for everyone.

everyone but herself.

and it's such a cliche. but it's true, we're all trying to save each other but sometimes we aren't very good at saving ourselves.

stare down the barrel of your gun, flick the light switch up, look in the mirror and stop being the hypocrite you are. start saving yourself cause everyone else is done picking up your pieces.

sincerely and with love, rational quinn

x xx