Autumn

I'm loving the autumn, keep turning around as if I can feel the year snapping at my heels taking leaf shaped bites. Is it October already? The Christmas cards have already been in the shops for a month so it must be. Where has everything gone? I'm deep into organisational mode, organising the collection, sorting through my posessions and making charity shop, recycling, and bin piles. I took a screwdriver to the futon and made it into sticks, felt as if I was singlehandedly taking down Ikea one latt at a time. I don't know why I kept that futon so long, years of hoovering round it, rearranging my office with it in, yet no one had so much as sat on it for years. I'm amazed at the amount of things we have that we look at and never really see. Everything must go. The things, and the ghosts of people I've held onto the memory of, including myself. And it feels great, looking round each room with an eye on what do I actually like, what do I need? Amazing how much stuff we have that we don't care that much about, keep it because we acquired it, or paid £20 for it years ago, so are you going to let the memory of that long gone £20 force you to keep you imprisoned by rooms so full that they can't be enjoyed? It's amazing how we hoard, as if for a rainy day, as if those scratched and scuffed Tupperware boxes will save us from something some day. I'll think I'm done chucking things when a pocket of the house presents itself, and I have to start over again. At the moment clothes can't go though, that's a bigger job, and something I have to do when I know what size I am, and can, more to the point, actually see myself as it.

I'm deeply in a solitary phase, a leave me alone, while I plod through all these poems some more. Last week I spent 4 days on one poem, editing it, changing the line breaks. It had been a shape poem on a piece of A4 very nicely, till I remembered books are A5 and I had to spend every day playing around with it to make it fit. I tried editing it . I scrapped lines. But there were lines I had to add. I saved over a dozen versions. I still wasn't happy. I'm cross that I still wasn't able to keep the original shape on A5, so there's even more to do. This is when the autism kicked in and wouldn't leave. After days like that it feels good to pull a box of something out from somewhere and throw it away. This week I aim to get rid of a sofa, after I sort that poem I'll need the satisfaction of seeing something big go.

I've been thinking about people I know, and people I haven't seen in years, and will never speak to again. It's sad to me, all the people we shed and have to be shed by on the journey of becoming whatever we become. People who loved us, and then wonder what they ever saw there, make us wonder if we will ever be equals, good enough. I remembered an ex boyfriend, and how it all ended when he asked me to return 52p I had loaned for busfare. I think it was the last time I lost my temper, I virtually threw it at him. I'd spent four days cleaning and painting his flat for him, since he was busy at work and never liked to get his hands dirty, and at some point in that time had borrowed 52p busfare into town so that I could get to a cash machine. A few days passed, he didn't ask for the cash back, I spent the money on food for both of us, a bottle of wine, that sort of thing. Then he asked me one day, have you got that 52p? I hadn't minded helping with the painting, you help friends right? That's what we do, then I realised maybe it isn't what we do, but only what I was doing. That was the last time I thought a certain way about him, some box I didn't want to look in had been opened. 4 years, that's how it ended, with a stack of copper, like rain that can be piled up. It's that easy -how your perspective can change, how you see someone, how our hearts and heads move on, and we are filled with disappointment. Easy as 52p.