trivialities

[helenic]

In other news, although this house is still dark and cold and unfamiliar it feels more like home than it ever did when I lived here. I think it's because I'm getting on so well with my parents these days - I actually feel, for the short times I'm here, that I'm living with friends. It's a big, square Edwardian house, badly lit and decorated with thin carpets and dowdy wallpaper in uninviting shades of beige and faded teal which we can't afford to replace. We moved here from a beautiful country vicarage, all polished pine floors and wide rooms with an open fire and two acres of land, in which I was extremely happy in a childlike, escapist way - before the thing with Laura got complicated and before depression set in. That all happened here, and the feel of the place has never quite recovered.

Still, since I got back from Cambridge yesterday afternoon I've been making my room actually feel like my own, starting with the books. I have about eight hundred, filling a floor-to-ceiling bookcase two deep, and I know them all - well enough to notice within minutes that four were missing, and I could name each one. My mother was reading one (the Earthsea quartet) and the others had found their way onto various other bookshelves. (Mine are only a tenth of the total in the house; my father has a roomful of theological books alone.) As soon as the books were ordered, and my new classical acquisitions given a place, it had become mine; but I've been busying myself with trivialities like CDs and clothes and posters, putting up fairylights and postcards and making an impromptu sofa out of an old clothes trunk, a tiger-print throw and some cushions. It's becoming a place I'd like to come back to.

All there is to do now is unearth my boxes of folders and writing from the attic, where I stashed it all before going to London last summer. It'll be painful but I want to revisit it, let it be part of me. I may never have her again but I'll still have everything we created, all of it, in my head at least if not in words.

Comments

[afterglow.livejournal.com]

so I'm wandering around LJ, like a typical kathi girl thing to do, and who do i find? HELEN! (i picked a random lj on nicoles list and there you were! woo!)

so, if you don't mind, the kathi found you all on her own, and i added you. (hugs) I missed you.

[libellum.livejournal.com]

yay! well you've been a bit of a slippery fish yourself, miss. I went away for a couple of months and I'd completely lost track of you.

good to see you again, babe :) xxx