Easter Weekend

When I turn away from my book I can see my boyfriend's knees and the back of his laptop while he writes some law crap. Reminder to self I had the happiest day yesterday doing nothing except waking up, cooking three square meals for my perennially malnourished partner, and reading in the sun(indoors, with my head and book poking out of the duvet). It was 5 degrees Celsius outside. Springtime weather in London this year is pretty much a joke or a total nightmare, depending on your attitudes in life.

In the last 48 hours I have read half of Cloud Atlas which is admittedly a good novel but I just cannot say I love it. When did I stop falling in love with every single book I read? When I turned 18 I read the Great Gatsby and spent the next nine months reading nothing but Fitzgerald. There were other books in between but I didn't bring them with me on flights or in bathtubs. I suppose I had a change of heart when I started reading philosophy and gave myself away to Aristotle and Marx.

Piles(literally, piles!!!) of novels sit on my bedside floor slowly becoming furniture. Book recommendations from my friends have pooled in an unending iPhone memo I am ashamed to revisit. But if I do not love books how can I be my mothers daughter?? This year I will swallow novels until I learn to feel again.

Dayang

With girls you never really know, but when I first hung out with her I already kind of knew in my heart it was something pretty special. Nothing magical happened while we ate fried chicken, but it was a moment of comfort knowing that it was still possible to find a girlfriend out here by myself, while my dearest were not so near i.e. overseas where it still feels like pieces of me are stranded (if you read this and know I'm talking about you, i miss you a lot) while I have stupidly washed up on the shore alone a little bit too soon.

So I have been trying to help with a broken heart and it's been a bit weird, our 4 language conversations go in all directions and sometimes it's hard to know if I even really understand what we are saying to each other. But at the end of the day, when it comes to boys, all the girls I love are pretty much the same as me: a little crazy, too impatient, prone to crying, more feelings than body mass to hold it all in........... I am going to be sad this July when she goes

S

I took my turtle out of the tank to change its water and felt guilty for not spending time with it but it's so hard spending time with a turtle.

When I picked it up it drew its little arms and head into its shell. When I held it up in front of my face it just sucked its face in even further. I get it, it's not really a comfortable situation for it. But there's no way I can see it on its own familiar terms because it is in my house and lives in a tank I've been cleaning weekly for the last 8 months or something. I just hope that it knows that I love it, not that I really love it in a big way but I want to take care of it, feed its little body and give it a home.

Honestly I didn't really like turtles ever. My sisters and I had turtles when we were younger and my dad brought us to a reservoir to release it when it looked like we had gotten bored of it. I don't remember being particularly upset about it.

So when I ended up with this turtle I didn't ask for I didn't really know what to do. When my dad saw it he remarked that I should just set it free but well, I couldn't do that so I put it in the tank and kind of stared at it for a while and tried to figure out what it would like to.

I put a bunch of rocks in the tank for it to climb around on, so that it can move around and climb and swim and basically keep an active lifestyle. After a couple of days I threw in a couple of colourful glass pieces so that it had a little bit of sparkly fun stuff to look at. Then a few days went by and I threw in a ball of amethyst which was pretty indulgent and also was a gift from my mother but I didn't mind because turtle seemed to like pushing it around. It made a lot of noise but it was good knowing things were moving around in the tank, and when I took the ball out for a while it was my mother who said the turtle seems to miss playing with its purple crystal ball.

Any way what I do when I clean the tank is I let the turtle run around the shower area and it always does the same thing, it runs into the corner nearest to the window and keeps running up against the tiled walls making scratching sounds with its amphibian legs. It looks stupid, but it makes me feel quite sad.

I really don't know what to do with the turtle, sometimes I wonder what's the point of keeping it in the tank and I wonder if it would be happier swimming in the reservoir. I don't really think it's safe, and I think it would miss the food and the amethyst ball, but everybody should have a chance to experience it for themselves, isn't it? Even if I wanted to keep it here that wouldn't make it right. But at the same time it's not my place or my responsibility to throw it back into "the wild". The turtle landed on my doorstep when I didn't ask for it and I can't ask for it to leave either. That's what happened and this is what is happening and that's why I know what is going to happen. Turtle and me, we're only going to be apart when one of us is dead.

The days are long but the weeks are short, and the months pass in a blink. It's almost as though I've spent all my time trying not to think.

I like this poem

a is for apple
b is for bear
c is for children who hardly care