imprint

[helenic]

The other thing that happened last Thursday was that week five began, and we are officially halfway through term. New texts and new lecturers. I was careful to pay attention during Tacitus: Annals IV - Patterson is one of the shy professors, worlds of genius in his head but he talks too fast and with a stutter. If you miss a moment you've lost sense of everything. Towards the end though I gave up on listening, drew a star on the inside of my wrist and printed it over my lecture notes until the ink faded to the colour of my veins. Translucent galaxies. It's better than fingerpainting because the skin is so sensitive; you can feel every line of the pen on your bones.

Iain asked me the other day if I'd ever want a tattoo and I would, but I don't know what. I'm forever writing on my hands and knuckles and wrists and if I got one it would probably be there, or the back of my neck or shoulderblade, somewhere hollow and discreet. And maybe it would be a word, like luminescent or étoile or cascade, but maybe it wouldn't. I'm not sure I could enjoy something that always stayed the same. I think I'll stick to biro, for the moment.

Today I bought clementines and bananas, hot cross buns, crumpets, thick white bread and honey and organic greek-style yoghurt. The bananas had already bruised when I got home; their skin is even more sensitive than mine. These days I bruise like petals. I have one on my hipbone that I don't remember getting, just a smudge of pale lilac, like a fingerprint. I love that being touched can leave marks like that - a lasting trace of it, a reminder that I'm his. I nearly bought him flame-coloured roses at the checkout in sainsburys, but they would only have lasted a day.