a small part of something larger
2003-04-18 || 7:21 p.m.

I�m a freak. I always have been. Ever since I can remember. I�ve watched pictures in my head rather than join in. It�s not even that its easier, it�s just the way it is. I�ve always been aware of myself, aware of my likes and dislikes, aware of the space I occupy, the way I am. I�ve always been self-sufficient and yet craving love and attention too. I don�t know what I�d do if I got that love and attention because I�ve never had it, but being me sort of precludes that type of thing. No-one wants to love a freak. Not really. What I remember most when I was really small was that everything seemed large and dark. That's probably very typical. My parents� furniture was hand-me-down furniture and probably dated from the 1930�s, dark wood, and the maisonette dated from the 1930�s too. I remember creeping into my mum�s bedroom to play with the things on the dressing table and creeping out again before she caught me. I remember playing dolls with my friend and rolling cigarettes. I remember smoking my first cigarette at six and very nearly burning my friends shed down when we lit a match and set fire to a poster. Her parents were very rich. We took the cigarettes out of a container on their coffee table. But that�s not want I want to write about. I want to write about all the strange things that have always been in my head. The word �copita� and how I called my first teddy bear that name. My memories of dying before and my absolute belief at the time that it was me, somehow and that I remembered exactly how it felt. I remembered the sentence that kept going through my head: �it doesn�t hurt to be shot, oh I wish I�d have known earlier, I wouldn�t have worried so much�. How stupid it was. It went through my head so many times. I wasn�t even in my body anymore yet still I didn�t seem to realise that it didn�t hurt because I was dead. I remembered being that person and yet not being them all at the same time. I felt nothing about myself as I died. Nothing at all. And I thought everyone remembered these things and I thought that everyone chose not to talk about them too. I thought everyone could read other people�s thoughts too but I can only remember one instance of it happening now. Penny took me to the cinema. I remember turning to her and saying �I hope you�ve got your umbrella because its raining outside�. She ignored me I think. Until we got outside. Where indeed it was raining. The story has become sort of family folklore � yet another example of my weirdness but all I remember is skipping home trying to get the raindrops into my mouth and wondering why I couldn�t.

I remember being eight and we were going on holiday to Spain and my mum said to me �if you dream the plane is going to crash, I�m not getting on it�. But I didn�t and she did. But everyone accepted that I knew these things. My mum said to me I was a witch in a past life but I knew that I wasn�t. It was a nice thought and it went really well with my long black hair but it was fiction. I never was a witch. But I seemed able to have this normal life that co-existed with this weird one. I did normal middle class stuff. Went to brownies, worked for the badges, worked hard at school, went to parties, had lots of friends, did ballet, joined guides when I got older, went camping with the guides, went camping with the church but still I was haunted. Haunted by things just out of my reach. Scared at night. Scared of the dreams of fire and the thought that someone was lost. Scared for years and years that I would never find them, scared later that I had made it all up and I would never find something that didn�t exist.

I always wanted to wear black. I remember being three and asking for my clothes to be black. My mum said no, she told me children didn�t wear black, it wasn�t nice. So I coloured all my colouring books in black. Black and red. Over and over and over again. Page after page after page. It drove my mum mad. She shouted at me to stay in the lines but that wasn�t the point. I wasn�t doing neat colouring, somehow the black and red were significant but I don�t know how. And I listened to music constantly. One of the first toys I got was a red Chad Valley battery operated record player and a selection of singles. I played them over and over again. A year or so later I got one of those box record players second hand and my dad started buying me records. I read the Bible too. The King James version. I never realised this was odd. I didn�t really understand it but the pages felt nice to turn. Really thin but with so many words on. And I dreamed. I dreamed all the time, when I was awake and when I was asleep. And I looked forward to going to bed because I could dream and dream and dream. And everyone said I was such a quiet child and I hated that. I thought it was an insult. But maybe it was just that I always hated myself.

And even as a child I wrote some of my dreams down because they seemed so odd. Like the one I had when I was about ten and I dreamt I was in the playground with my friends and we had a circle of paper flowers joined together and we were all holding them and then suddenly we began to drown. And I did drown. And it scared me because I thought you were not meant to dream that you actually died. When I was 19 I dreamt I had a heart attack and I dreamt I was a ghost, I was walking around trying to communicate with people but they couldn�t hear me.

And then there were the dreams with the different quality. The dreams that I was sure were not dreams but had to come at night because there was no other place for them to remind me. And when I woke up from those dreams I would feel like I have never felt before or since. So, so desolate. So, so unhappy. Such a deep longing that words fail. And that strange dream when I was just a ball of pure light and I thought that we are all just balls of light and within the light I still carried a consciousness and I moved at such a speed and I knew where I was going even thought I didn�t know at all.

And so I read to try to understand my dreams. I read loads of different type of things but none of them fitted. Sometimes they seemed similar but sometimes they just seemed like a pile of crap. And I felt less and less sure. And every now and again I wanted to be normal but it would only ever be play acting, but its just so lonely here and there�s a place for a freak on the fringes, just so long as you know your boundaries and live by the recognised freak rules: that you are an amusing, interesting thing but on their terms not yours.

And on days like this my mind feels almost squashed flat, like there�s only a tiny part that is actually me and its so hard to function because I look at myself and I just don�t know who I am at all and I feel like I used to all those years ago: I feel like I�m sitting in the top of my head just waiting to be set free.