Naomi

This week I went to Clapham to see my auntie for the first time since starting uni. It’s only five miles from London, but it takes an hour to get there on public transport. I’d like to go there more often. I’d like to go to her house and just lie down and not speak and just look at the knickknacks that fill every wall and every corner and let Ruby the cat sit on me and I wouldn’t have to say or do anything. I could just exist. I wish I could just happily lie there in my auntie’s presence and know that we are connected through flesh and blood, a connection that can’t be denied.

Brushing my teeth the other day, I thought about all of the conversations I’ve ever had with people, about people. Not gossiping, but really trying to figure out why people act as they do. To find some common factor in my experience with a certain person and someone else’s, and deciding that this must be a permanent part of that person’s personality. Does every person deserve to be thusly figured out? I used to think I was the only person with so many “flaws,” but now I realise that a lot of people do. How deluded I was, and how self-centred, to imagine that I bore all of the problems of the world.

We are forgiving. We find faults in one another and we forgive them—but only to a certain extent. I sobbed in the hallway on Friday night, stressed by my brother’s drunkenness, with Jay on my left and Erica on my right, and I said “fuck you” to the boy directly as he was leaving our flat, because I was giving up trying. No more trying.

As I finished brushing my teeth I wondered about the ways in which people might discuss and find fault in me. They are totally within their right to. I thought of the ways in which I am not a great person and how I am aware and how being aware is the first step. I made a note of how I should really visit my auntie more. ♦