Yours is Mine.

I sort of want to own my own house. I finally see the appeal. I could paint the walls ice-cream colours and get wafer-ish carpets... just in one room though. You aren't allowed to paint rentals. Well, maybe the shit ones that don't have regular inspections. Not that we have ever really had one, except for that one time our third and no-longer housemate insisted we all be present and impeccably behaved. He whipped the two of us, and the property, into shape it has not been since and then proceeded to drink to excess the night before and come home mere minutes before the inspection was to commence (about midday)- still drunk and in possession of an ugly woman's belt.

I told someone about my ice-cream daydream once, and their face kind of scrunched up in an erotic fusion of "that is so you" and contained affection. He lunged at me with similar sentiments and it was nice to have something I wanted so validated.

Renting is a bitch, really.

You move out when you're twenty, thinking that Grant Street will be a fucking oyster of a whale of a merry maritime. Well, it was for a long time. Then the dynamics shift. Soon you want to push the boundaries. Soon you want to smoke an entire packet of cigarettes (25s) from the comfort of your own loungeroom-based armchair, or paint a hallway mural (5x5 metres) of you and all your bestest friends enjoying a seaside picnic. But, you can't. So you lounge in a daybed and try to remember to stub your cig out somewhere more discrete this time, and note all the broken glass peeking up at you through the crunchy dead leaves of the crunchy dead tree you didn't realise had joined the ranks of the deceased until your landlord pointed this out to you. You don't know a thing about maintaining a garden. Why didn't you rent one of those monstrous Italian concrete palaces guarded by lions and... harp seals, as big as Wellington and twice as intimidating? They might even keep the mosquitos away. Grant Street seems to double as a mosquito breeding habitat.

We could charge and use our newly-acquired Puppy School Skills to teach them fancy tricks. A Mosquito Circus, it seems less stupid than a Flea Circus somehow.

This place bores you now.

It's predictable and I want to live in lots of places. I spend so much (of my precious) time dissing domesticity and here I am, ripely twenty-one and sitting at my kitchen table with a cup of tea in a chiffon dress, conciously trying to make my prose prettier. I hope my cheeks are rosy today. I hope the landlord leaves soon. But he won't, so until then I have to pretend my darling cat doesn't usually jump in through the window howling for attention and thundering around as though she owns the place. "Bad Dolly! You live outside." Last night I tried to wash some dishes and, rather than attempt to clean two baking dishes (drunken chicken experiment & slightly more sober pasta bake experiment), I threw them in the wheelie bin. Thud. Somebody had actually put the bin out that Thursday morning so it was an empty, rotting cavity waiting to be stuffed with more awful smelling things. I am quite sure the dishes smashed when they hit the bottom. Satisfying. Thud.

I wish destruction wasn't so seductive lately. I've fallen in love with physical manifestations of how I feel. The quiver of my hand when I hand someone I shouldn't love something I shouldn't really give them. A tender inflammation on my neck. I mark so easily that everything that happens to me seems more wretched than it really was. Scars, the faint white ones that are visible only in certain light. He made me his more than any real partner could have, and for this I resent him. Falseness and reality don't merge well, no matter how I try to breed them.

Sheba Hart, Notes on a Scandal's deviant of a heroine, said something like, "What is love, but a mutual pact of delusion?" How true this is when you're not loved back, and how you don't care when you are. Why is delusion okay some times, and not at others? I loathe black and white thinking. I forget often though, to explore the greyness. Which is faintly ironic, because I live in slate shadows.

Where am I, now? Where were we? Oh, my house. Our house. Anything that enters this place is for the taking. There's no privacy, but thankfully I don't require any. I don't even have a doorknob, and in my old room some latch didn't catch so that door wouldn't close either.