DAYLIGHT FADING

ten | for the tiniest moment it's all not true

Nevertheless, I feel safer having locked up the house, so I retreat back to my bedroom. I manage to hold myself together for long enough to put on a vinyl softly in the background before I just collapse.

I don’t understand why I’m crying, not least the huge jerking sobs that wrack my body. I try to tell myself that I don’t deserve to be crying these tears, that I’m made my bed and now I have to lie in it, even if it’s full of nails, but I can’t stop the flow of tears.

When you’re a child and people tell you that growing up is hard, you don’t understand. Of course you don’t understand – you’re too full of innocence and without pain to comprehend the horrors that await you later in life. Then you reach adolescence and the pain starts, the feeling angry for no reason, the way everything begins to go wrong even though you’ve done nothing to deserve it.

They say life’s not fair, and you think ‘no, it fucking well isn’t’. And still they say, it gets harder. But now you think ‘how can it get harder?’ You’re so sure that you have taken all that you can possibly take and then someone else come along and dumps more shit on you and you discover you’re far stronger than you believed you could be.

Those who believe in God say that He only gives us as much as we can bear, the most we can possibly take.

But this, I think, might be my breaking point.

If it’s not, I fear God has mistaken me for Atlas.

After crying myself to sleep the previous night, I wake up feel raw and hollow. I used to be able to ring people – well, one person – when I felt like this, but I well and truly fucked that up.

Instead, I put my plan into action, dialling Gigi. If I can’t feel okay, I may as well do things to distract myself from remembering that I’m not alright. You heal by doing, not by waiting.

She picks up on the third ring, the buzzing before her “hello?” telling me that she’s at work.

“Gigi,” I can almost hear the faint smile at the other end of the line, “I need to talk about an appointment.”

She laughs down the phone, “another one?”

“Do I ever go for half-measures?” I’m going to end up being the tattoo lady. Perhaps I’ll look ugly and the ink will be all disfigured when I’m old, but I can’t see myself getting old so I guess I’ll just cross that bridge when I get to it.

“When abouts?” I’m pulling a bit of a risk booking this close to the actual time I want a tat, especially because it’s a Saturday, but if you never try you never know.

“Any chance of a Saturday, about twelve?” the only reason I’m chancing it is for all of its cleanliness and excellent work, Pulse is one of a great many tattoo parlours in London.

“We had a pull out this weekend, some guy decided he didn’t want to tattoo the whole of his back after all,” the smile in her voice tells me that she will be telling a couple of people ‘I told you so’.

“That’s good. I’ll be bringing a friend, if that’s okay? I’ll make sure she’s got ID,” I know the policy. I also know that Jez is seventeen, hence the call I will be making after this one.

“Yeah, sure, I’ll put you in. Small job or a big one?” even though Gigi will stencil me in for the whole time, she’ll want to split the time up for each tattoo so that she knows she’s not going to run over into someone else’s time.

“I’m just two lines of lyrics on my side. She’s definitely having a lyric on a forearm, but I’m not sure about whether she’s going to get anything else,” Gigi mumbles a little on the other end of the line, probably complaining that I’ve messed up her OCD schedule.