Butterfly

Today it all starts again. The clock resets.

Last night - suffering from severe jetlag and general confusion regarding what country I was in, what bed I was in, what time it was, and why I was considering driving to MacDonalds at 4am because I was goddamn starving - I decided to draw a graph. Things always make more sense in graphs. You take something vague, insubstantial and ephemeral, and you turn it into hard facts: transform random events into sequential patterns with links between them. You can argue with notions, but you can't argue with graphs.

So, perky as a brass button and wide awake at 4am, I opted against a BigMac and, instead, I drew a graph of my love life. I drew a time line, starting at seven years old (a blue eyed, blonde curtained lovely who used to compete with me in Maths - and lose - called Tom) and ending at twenty eight (a dark, curly haired Japanese boy called The Boy and many other names I'm not adding here). In between these two, I drew dots and lines for every substantial encounter I've had: a dot for each boy, and a line for how long they lasted. Included in these lines I added dotted lines for the bit before we got together, where I was thinking about them, and dotted lines for the bit after we broke up, where I was also thinking about them. I also - because I'm a total geek - colour coded each of the boys according to seriousness of relationship, how I felt about them, what the impact was, whether the word 'love' was ever used, and added arrows for decisions I had made accordingly.

And then, as an experiment, I got a different colour pen, and I shaded in the patches where I was particularly creative: when, for instance, I'd written a lot of chapters in a short amount of time, or written any strong short stories.

When I'd finished colouring and dotting and drawing, I stepped back and I held the graph up to my face. And then I gasped loudly and put it down again.

I'm not going to tell you how many dots and lines there were: I'm a nice girl, and that's my business. What's important is that there was no space in between. At all. Before the dotted lines of one had run out, dotted lines for another had started. True, none of the actual relationships (and I use this term, on occasion, loosely) overlapped, but the dotted lines before and after? The bits where somebody was in my head, snuffling around in the debris of my heart and mind? They overlapped. They always overlapped. And the only two occasions where the dotted lines were longer - weaker, perhaps, and fading away - that was where my creativity was. In the two bits where my thoughts were only vaguely attached to anyone, and waning rather than waxing. That was where I wrote and wrote well.

Worse, the decisions I had thought I was making for myself were almost always a reaction for or against one of the lines on my graph. Life choices - choosing jobs, cities, courses, Universities - were made, if I looked far enough inside myself, because of something happening at the time with somebody else: moving either with or away from them. Life decisions being made for me, rather than by me.

"You," my best friend said to me in London last week, "are like a romantic butterfly. You flitter from flower to flower, doing your best to love each and every single one of them, and then you flitter off again."
"Doesn't that just mean I'm a hussy?"
"Oh no. Not at all. It's not about anything seedy. It's about love. You feed off it: off the beauty, and the excitement, and the emotion. And then you fly off and land straight on the next one."
"It's not always very beautiful, though," I pointed out. "In fact, it's very often not beautiful at all."
"Well obviously. Butterflies tend to just land on the flower next to them, don't they."

Each of the lines on my graph, I've loved in my own way, because there are few people in the world you can't love if you try hard enough. There are always things to love in a person, and qualities to admire, and weaknesses to defend, vulnerabilities to protect: things that can make you care about them, and hurt when they hurt or when they leave or you have to. But in always loving, and always flittering, and always landing, I've not given myself any time at all to see how far I can fly, or what I can do when I'm not. I've not worked out what to do when I'm not flying away from or towards another flower.

I can't argue with a graph, and this graph has finally given me hard evidence of what I suspected: that if I don't know who I am, it's because I've never let myself find out, and if I don't know how high I can fly, it's because I'm always trying so bloody hard to land.

At 4pm this afternoon I woke up - still craving a MacDonalds and jetlagged to hell - and I felt free. For the first time since I can remember, I felt alone, rather than lonely. I still don't know what I'm doing, but I know - finally - that it's for me to find out: that I have all the time, and the space, and the freedom, to do just that. Me, and my hopes and my dreams. Me, and my writing. Me, and my creativity. Me, and the power I have to get exactly what it is I want, when I want it.

And that feels - oh God - it feels amazing.

At some stage - when I want to - I'll find another flower. But, by then, I'll be strong enough, and wise enough, and ready enough, to find the perfect flower - the one I want to stay on - and fly to it, rather than simply landing on the one next to me.

And I'll have chosen my life, rather than letting it choose me.