Or blow me a kiss, and that's lucky too

I can't get enough of the work of artist Silverlimit, on deviantart.com. Check out his gallery here

The moon is a slice of cheese as white as love outside my window, against a sky as dark as a broken promise. Above the rooftops opposite the Loft is a single yellow star snuffed out in moments by the fingers of clouds, only to reappear a moment later, as hope does just at the moment you begin to feel the darkness will never break again.

My face hovers in the glass, lit by my laptop and appearing as a ghost. This is how I feel today, as if I am hardly here at all. I am verified in the reflections I catch in other people's eyes.

Eeyore days and long, sleepless nights are punctuated for me by the sound of my neighbour's all night bass line, which roars into the night as she sleeps peacefully through it. I am sleeping in the living room again. The bedroom is so cold that being in it at night makes me feel like a Charles Dicken's pauper, or a Clarendon Road Irregular separated from her merry gang.

I am sleeping badly: fitful, packed with anxious dreams and memories that run over my heart when I wake as nails on a blackboard. During the day I have endless energy but only for work. I temp, and write, and organise and write. I write for clients, for the blog, for others and, for the first time since I was a child, I write easily and fluently for myself. My diary knows me again and my notebook is crammed with outlines for stories waiting to be written. Who knows, maybe I'll even finish something......

I have not been so conscious of solitude since my childhood, a time when I wore myself like protection - unlike now, as I wear myself like a hand-me-down. I would love to feel as I did then again, complete, self-enclosed, whole. It's just a matter of practice, though, to return to that sense of myself I think, learning to hear then to trust my own voice. Practice, mixed with belief and perhaps a sprinkle of magic, faith, or whatever we're calling it nowadays. And I'm getting lots of that. Like Garbo: more often than not, I want to be alone, though it never sounds as good when I say it.

The moments I like myself best though, are, as ever, in the company of others - one among many reasons why I will always make a lousy hermit. These moments are unpredictable, unplanned, they take me by surprise: discussing with Lynda (the beauty of whom I cannot begin to describe here, and which shines so much brighter because she has no idea it's there - oops, she does now!) the impact of watching Duckula as a child on her decision to become a vegetarian in later life, or gossiping with the Chief, or guessing cryptic clues with my friend Steve as though I'm some kind of crossword autist (I sometimes arrive at the right answer, but don't know how I got there).

I spend this time alone to learn myself again, but it will always be others who teach me to love what I find. Tonight's music comes fromTerra Naomi. Like House, I never get enough of Vicodin. The song, obviously.



I still miss you Kate x