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one morning she woke up, and her life slid out in front of her like a silk gown. one morning she felt like a sock, moulded to fit something living and real and protect it but empty and pointless without it. there was no meaning to anything anymore. veronica twisted and coiled on her bed in her cold room feeling like a naked model on a circular revolving stage. the absense of anyone visible left her feeling like a hundred million silent eyes watched from every corner. head arched backwards like a koi carp, veronica lit a cigarette, because she thought that was what the eyes would want to see: girl so dishevelled, so disaffected, so ennui and chic.
the dinner had been a mistake. not that it's a dinner when it's at a restaurant that brings you a plastic bib with your lobster and sugar sachets with your coffee, but to all intents and purposes it was an evening meal. same difference she supposed. the transition into adulthood in the kessler family was marked with an event, a party or a meal. veronica's eighteenth birthday had been such an occasion. her parents and siblings had presided over a table laden with pots of relish, paper napkins, casual insults, rude questions. for a table that sat seven it seemed like six against one. one of veronica's elder sisters, diana, had spilt her plastic goblet of corky red wine across the tablecloth and the stain had spread like fire down veronica's white dress. the event, though minor, was representative of the whole evening.
veronica looked up at the clock; nine eighteen a.m. since moving into her university halls she had rarely slept through a whole night because of the surrounding post-adolescent cacaphony of dull bass, testosterone roars and general drunken howling. but last night she had lain straight down on her bed and soundly slept for ten hours. surely not to happen again, but pleasant. the sticky wine stain on veronica's dress peeled from the duvet while she twisted again to accustom her eyes to the hesitant morning sunshine. like shirley temple as a child, the world apppeared to be hidden behind a fine sheet of gauze that blurred the edges of everything. whether it was the skyline pulsing gently or veronica's head, she didn't know.

self q & a: does my life suck or rule?

kate, i see you're up at three in the morning on the internet in bed again. are you happy about this or ashamed?

well, i am both starving hungry and ashamed of myself for not being able to have regular sleeping patterns (becoming a bat person) and also defiantly proud of myself for doing exactly what i want when i want no mum i don't want to etc. etc.

ok... well, in general how is your quality of life?

there's nothing i enjoy more than spontaneity, and that to me means a complete lack of structure. some days i will eat nothing except toast and cheap olives. somedays i will buy myself a chinese meal for two because i can. fluctuating my sleep cycles and staying up past my sleepy period at ten at night to at least three in the morning are really what keep my life spicy.

do you actually try and take any care of yourself?

i had some fizzy vitamin c today

do you do anything with your time except be a worthless bum?

i start uni again on the 19th which i am looking forward to because i get my best friend back, but i also get the other forty odd arseholes on my course, most of whom hate me anyway. and there's reading and stuff. and i'll probs be working at hmv again because let's face it, it's an on again off again love hate relationship.

do you have any friends?

pass

will you be pleased to finally have something to do when the 19th comes?

probably for about a week then i'll want to go straight back to waking up at two and watching jersey shore all day and eating ready meals

you're pathetic

i know

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home. home again. home, always humid and sweaty, home, always with glassy slick pavements and coursing throughout with a heartbeat of people. the train spat sunny out onto a station platform so familiar he slipped right out of it like a sleepwalker on a terrain of their own creation. the city drew him into its current, letting him pulse gently around the corners and down the steets in the great heartbeat. home was so silent and so warn after the weekend in the other city. sunny let the unfamiliarity run out of his skin with his sweat in the summer ooze, and let his muscles unclench for the first time in two days.
conrad had been cheated on and dumped again. the latest perpetrator had also been the latest 'one'. she was half-dutch and snapped her gum against her teeth so loudly you would think it hurt.

'you were only together for two months con, let it go.'
'imagine the most beautiful thing you can.'
'what.'
'do it, imagine something so beautiful that it's... perfection.'
'fucks sakes.'
sunny had imagined a young deer careering through a pine forest. he didn't know why because he didn't spend any time thinking about what he thought was beautiful, and the first thing he thought of was nature. behind his eyelids the deer's pelt glistened and the sun caught on it's dewy antlers. haunches rose and fell in sync as it pounded through the deathly still green.
'are you doing it?'
'...'
'are you?'
'.. yes.'
'what is it?'
the desperation in conrad's voice had broken sunny away from his creation, and he turned to conrad no longer prostrate in grief on his bed, but twisted towards sunny in agonising anticipation. his face was contorted hysterically and veins surged violet purple in his temples.
'it's a deer or something. i don't know. i think i saw it on dad's nature programme.'
'ok...'
conrad had sighed all of the air out of his body like it hurt him to speak.
'now imagine the deer looking around, for a stream to play in. it hears something. it's heartbeat quickens. the inertia drains from it's legs. it starts, ready to take flight, to run. and then an arrow hits it right in the eye, through to the brain. it's dead. and it'll rot on the floor, and never see another sunrise, or feel deer happiness again.'
imaginary deer felled, sunny had let his head rest backwards onto conrad's bed. conrad's infatuations were fast, intense and painful, like grease spatters from a frying pan. his emotional hyperbole varied from girl to girl, and depending on the quality of the girl. marlene with the cherry hair had been a car crash where the drivers hit each other head on and burst through the windshield, realising only in their last seconds who the other was and kissing each other into death in the air. susan holly, never just susan, was a luscious garden of poisonous blooms. petra with the ceramic horse collection and mysterious counselling books was every christmas you had as a kid, except every single present you ever open was a knife to the stomach.
the metaphors were due in part to conrad being a sensitive poet with a chest willingly left open so that his heart could be reached in seconds, and also to his undertaking of a degree in drama and performance art. every heartbreak was immortalised in monologue form, complete with accompanying tears and wretched hollow beats upon the chest, and performed to a workshop of fellow amateur dramatists.
'con this has happened too many times now. when are you going to get to be the heart breaker?' sunny had thought that mocking might be the only antidote to the affliction of grandiose emotional spiel.
'sunny, it's not in my nature to turn away from love. i open myself fully to it; i turn towards the sun like a blossom. i let the warmth kiss my petal face, and equally i let the rain dampen it.'
'and you let bees eat your face.'
'sun, don't be stupid, come on.'
'and if she's the sun and you're the flower then you're different species. and that's like beastiality.'
'beastiality is between a human and an animal!'
'you would know.'
'look, you just don't understand yet. you've never been in love, little sun. one day soon you'll be stung by love and you'll feel just like i did, before...'
'wait, i'm a bee? i thought if i was in love i was a flower? wait, why would a bee sting a flower?
'i genuinely don't know why i bother.'