Hanging

"I like your art," my friend said yesterday when she popped around to see if I was still alive (I was, but - after previous email - I was hitting things and swearing rather violently). "But I`ll tell you something: I`m so not bringing my teddy bear round for a visit."
"Fair enough," I said, and went back to working out what in my house really needed breaking.

I don`t have a death wish, contrary to popular belief: and I don`t hold any particularly vindictive feelings towards toys either. Frankly, if I had a death wish, I probably wouldn`t draw pictures all about it: I`d like to think I would be a little more subtle, and draw a little less attention to it. Because if I had a death wish, I`d want to get on with it as quietly and as efficiently as possible: not allude to it wherever possible in ink and pencil and little phone stickers I bought from a shop in Fukuoka.

So I don`t have a death wish. I do, however, have a slight fascination with hanging, for a number of different reasons, of varying importance. Which I am going to clarify, mainly to put my mum`s mind at rest and stop her visiting. ("Holly," she said. "If you keep hanging things in pictures I`m flying out there and I`m not going to come back until you`ve stopped.")

First of all, it`s aesthetically pleasing. That straight line is pleasant; I enjoy drawing it. It gives height to a composition, and a certain geometric pleasantness, and that`s all there is to say about it.

Second of all, it`s a nice way of getting rid of a bit of anger without actually harming anyone. Hey cute teddy in my head, you can say: come here and attach yourself to this here rope and dangle for eternity. And - afterwards - you immediately feel a little bit better, and nobody had to hurt for it (although my teddy, Malachi, does edge away on the bed whenever I get cross now; I`ve seen him do it).

Third of all, it means something. For instance, in the picture of the teddy, it`s inspired by the Japanese quote: to get something, you must first give up something. If you want adulthood, you must first give up the things that you loved as a child. In the picture of the Blythe doll, it`s about the irony of Good Luck (Ganbatte in Japanese): the doll is hanging from a tree of four leaf clovers.

Fourth of all, when you kill something it means that you can start again; from the death of one thing becomes the start of something new. I kill things in my art so that I can rise again from them. Even if it`s only ever a tiny, momentary kind of rebirth.

But fifth of all, and absolutely most importantly, it`s because I`m fascinated by the throat and neck as a sort of metaphorically physical link between brain and heart. It feels like where - if anywhere - the two collide; it`s where the emotions travel up to your mouth and brain; where the thoughts travel down to your feelings. (Or, in my case, don`t.) It`s the most vulnerable, sensitive part of the body, and it`s both the lovers` part - the part that is kissed and slept next to, nestled together - and the part used traditionally (in literature and outside of it) to kill; a slit, or a rope, or a stranglehold. And if the heart is the metaphorical representation of the emotions of love, and the head is the metaphorical representation of the reasoning of love, then the neck has to be the metaphorical representation of where the two collide.

So I hang things. My heart and my mind are always warring - always communicating, always fighting, always at odds - and most of my unhappiness comes from their unanimous hatred of each other; from my mind`s inability to understand for a single second the way my heart feels, or from my heart`s inability to listen for a minute to what my mind says. They never agree, and so - when I`m stuck between the two arguing sides, both constantly trying to make me listen to them, both tearing me apart between them - hanging something seems like the best way to make it stop. To take away the lovers` part of me - or of the unfortunate toy - and cut off the source that causes the mind such pain, and the source that gives the heart so much confusion. And the rope becomes simply a symbol; a way of finally taking control of the two, and suspending them both in the air: separated and - for the first time - permanently joined together.

So it`s not a morbid wish at all, mum, and it`s nothing for you to worry about. In fact, it`s the opposite. I kill off the pain caused by the fight between heart and mind so that I can start again; I let go of one thing so that I can grab hold of another. And even if I struggle to do that properly in every day life, at least I can still do it metaphorically in my drawings.

"I want one," my friend said just before she left last night, "even if they`re a bit creepy. But can you kill off something else other than a teddy bear, perhaps? I like teddy bears."
"Sure," I said, ripping up bits of paper for no reason and remembering the animals He loves best. "How about a badger or a duck?"
"Works for me," my friend said. "Give them a nice, merry send-off."

So I will. And then, perhaps, my teddy bear will sit next to me on the bed tonight with a little less sadness on his little face.

And perhaps - afterwards - I will sit next to him with just a little less sadness on mine.

Response

Bloody blogs.

I got a response, which must have been what I secretly wanted, even though I thought I had blocked Him in every way possible. And sometimes, frankly, being right is far more painful than being wrong ever could be.

With an eloquence that I can only ever try and match, he simply said:

Love is torture, women are poisonous.

And I don't love her either.

Be good.

S.

Succinct, to the point, brutal, honest; slightly like an extremely painful modern poem, in fact, and better than most of the things I write. I'm not sure what I'm supposed to be 'good' about, but it's nice that he's looking out for my moral welfare.

It doesn't make me love him less, obviously - or it wouldn't be love - but it's going to make never ever talking about him again in public a hell of a lot easier.

I might be a fool, and I might well be poisonous, but I think I'll be a poisonous fool in private from now on.

Healing

I scared I'm healing in the wrong direction.

Not the pneumonia. That's healing as physical illnesses usually heal: in a direction that makes it all better again. My pathetic immune system has kicked in, finally, and I'm healing as I should. Until the illness is gone.

What I have realised in the last few days is not healing as it should, however, is my heart, or whatever the metaphorical organ is that holds together and splits apart my emotions. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that it's healing completely the wrong way, and I'm not sure what to do about it. And - frankly - it is terrifying me.

I have never been heartbroken before, so I made some assumptions about what would happen when I was. They were sensible assumptions; assumptions based on logic, and based on books, and based on heart-bruisings which I thought were probably quite similar. The assumption was this: when something breaks - a foot, a leg, a nose, a heart - it hurts. And it continues to hurt until it's fixed, and then it stops hurting and you can use it as you used it before. And the healing process - the fusing together of bone cells or muscle cells - is steady, and regular, and in the right direction: a direction that leads you first to forgive, and then to forget, and then to start again.

It's not working like that at all.

My heart is mending the wrong way. It's fusing together in a different shape, all jumbled up, and - instead of making me forget him - it's making me love him all over again. It's as if the hurt (still there; oh definitely still there) is easing away, little by little, and the hate is mending, and the anger is leaving: and all time is doing is making me forget the reasons why I never wanted to see him again, and reminding me of all the reasons why I fell in love with him in the first place.

It wasn't supposed to be like this. I was supposed to love him less every day: not more. I was supposed to feel less for him every day: not more. And yes; the immediate pain and the immediate missing has gone entirely. I no longer feel any desire to tell him how my day was, or to text him when I wake up in the morning, or to tell him I love him before I go to sleep. He is no longer the person I think of when something good happens, or something bad. I no longer plan things around him, or wonder how loudly he would laugh at something I could tell him, or what he would say about my kittens. Those strings tying me to him - those little, daily, habitual, strings that made him part of my day, and part of my every action - are cut, and my days are free without him; my habits, my jokes, those first few waking thoughts, are free without him.

But the deeper part of me is not. As I forgive and let go of the pain, and the hurt, and how utterly and completely he broke me apart, so the man I fell in love with comes back to me. During that six months - the six months while he loved me and someone else and I fought so hard to make it just me and failed so horribly - we both fell apart, little by little, both apart and together, and by the end that was all we were to each other: tiny pieces of what we had been. And so I assumed that those pieces would be easy to blow away: they were so light and so dead and so, so dry.

And they have blown away - the pieces of that wreckage - except that where I thought there would be nothing left, I was wrong. Underneath all the burnt bits, and all the dead bits, and all the dusty bits - underneath the black bits caused by the pain - the love is still there, as pink as it was at the beginning, and every day it gets clearer and firmer and brighter again. It becomes as it was in the beginning. And I love him - him: not us, not our relationship, but him - all over again.

I love his laugh, and I love the way his nose wrinkles, and I love the curls on his neck and the way he bounces up and down on his heels when he's excited. I love the way his eyes open wide when he's nervous and the way he grinds his teeth when he's asleep and the scars on his hand from a time he told nobody but me about. I love the lines on his face when he's tired, and the way they disappear when he's not. I love him - not his love for me, not my love for us - and that is not going away: it is becoming stronger. And time is not being kind. It is making me hurt more, but in a different kind of way: a pain that becomes fresh again just as my feelings do.

There is nothing I can do. He is gone. He doesn't feel the same way at all - he loves her, now, not me (and never did, he says), and fighting to get that love didn't work then and it won't work now. And, even if he did feel anything for me, I am not healed enough to be able to let anyone close again, and I won't be for a long, long time. Until I can believe again that my love is worth keeping, and it won't always be thrown away or given to another girl instead. Until I can believe somebody when they tell me they love me, and not ask them why or for how long.

But I'm scared - terrified - that when I told him, all those times, that I loved him and would always love him: I was right. I'm scared that when I told him he would always be a part of me, I just didn't know how big that part would be, nor how permanent. I'm scared that when I said - half asleep, with my chin on his shoulder - that he was the love of my life: I meant it. And I'm scared that the love will not go away: that it will get stronger, and it will stick in me, and it will be there when time has erased everything else and everyone else, and that nobody will ever replace him or the way that I feel now.

And, mostly, I'm scared that I am healing, always healing, but only ever in the wrong direction.

Violence threatened

I'm being threatened.

"I'm coming to Japan," my mum announced when she found out that I had pneumonia.
"No, you're not," I said.
"I am, I'm coming."
"Mum, you just had surgery. You are not allowed to fly."
This made mum even angrier. She thought about it for a few minutes.
"If it wasn't for this stupid hand," she said - gesticulating with it, in case I was wondering which one it was - "I would be on the first plane. My daughter needs me."
"She doesn't, mum," I told her, reverting to third person as well in case it helped. "She needs a cuddle but by the time you get here your daughter will be perfectly healthy again."
Mum looked even angrier, as if she couldn't believe I would have the audacity to get better without her.
"You had better count yourself lucky that I'm on doctor's orders, that's all I'm saying," she said menacingly. "Because I swear to God if you get any sicker - any sicker at all - then I am on the first plane out there and the doctors are just going to have to come and drag me off, kicking and screaming. Do you hear me? If my daughter is sick, then the doctors can take a flying leap if they think they're keeping me away from her." And then, looking violently maternal, she went to make a cup of tea while dad took over.
"Your mum's making all sorts of noises about flying out to Japan," he told me immediately, as if that hadn't already been made abundantly clear.
"She's not allowed. She's not allowed, is she dad?"
"No, she's not allowed. Thank God for surgery, eh?" And we both laughed. "Get better quick," dad said, "or she will fly out, and nobody wants that to happen, right?"
And we both laughed again. Mum's going to hit Japan with full force at some stage next year - along with the rest of my family - and it's going to take the twelve months between then and now to prepare her for Japan, and - more importantly - Japan for her.
"Just don't go and die on us, alright?" dad said casually, and then wandered off and left me to stare at an empty wall in Welwyn Garden City for three minutes while I listened to them arguing over who was going to do the washing up (mum only has one hand, so she won).

The truth is: nobody is as fierce as a mother with a sick daughter. And nobody in the world is more of a mother than mine is.

Kittens

Let it be known that I believe in fate: especially the kind you really have to force into being.

If I like you, I will follow you. I will work out where you live, and when you try and crouch behind bushes I will make kissy noises at you until curiosity makes you come closer to investigate. I will be there in the morning, and I will be there in the evening, and I will be there at night even when the mosquitos are after me. I will kneel on the floor and stay there for hours, making cute faces to make you love me. I will tell you how beautiful you are, and how clever you are, and how bouncy you are, and I will tell you and tell you and tell you until your head is full of me. And, if I really, really like you, I will have a blade of grass in one hand and a bowl of milk in the other: one of which I will twitch enthusiastically, and the other I will be sniffing and saying mmm mmm mmm about as loudly as I can. I will make you love me. Because if that's what fate wants, then that's what shall happen. And if that's not what fate wants, then tough cookie: I'm making it happen anyway. Because I believe in the kind of fate that gets me what I want.

Especially - and I need to make this point perfectly clear - if you are a stray tortoiseshell family of four kittens and you have little white bellies and big orange eyes and little meows that sound like a clean plate being squeaked with a finger. Especially then.

I don't know who they belong to - almost certainly nobody, because Nichinan has a stray cat problem - but I love them already and I only met them this morning. They're brand new - perhaps a week old - and they appear to be sleeping in the vegetable patch outside my bedroom, which is how I found them: I went outside to see who was squeaking plates while I was trying to sleep off pneumonia. They're orange and black and white and absolutely teeny, and when I went outside there was a flurry of orange and black and white streaks, disappearing under the wood pile.

All, that is, but one.

"What's all this racket about?" I said crossly.
"Squeak," said the naughtiest kitten, peering around the corner of the wood with big eyes and a head cocked rakishly to one side.
"Oh, hello," I said (this isn't strictly true, actually. What I really did was immediately get hit by two hundred tons of maternal instincts racing like a runaway train, drop to my knees and croon "heellllloooo you adorable little kitten," and then - when I realised it was Japanese - try out a few random Japanese words strung together in the hope that it might understand me).
"Squeak," the kitten said, and then disappeared behind the wood.
I waited. I'm good like that. I can be very patient in very short bursts as long as I know I'll get exactly what I want before I'm bored of waiting.
And then, sure enough -
"Squeak," the kitten said again, putting his head back round.
"Squeak," said another, copying exactly.
"Squeak," said the third, and there were three little stripy heads peering at me in a vertical line like a really cheap calendar front cover (or maybe not the front cover; maybe March, or July, or a month that nobody really likes like October). So I waited for the forth kitten to line up but apparently only 3/4 of the family were interested in me.
"Hold it there," I said, and went inside to kit myself out with a piece of straw and a pneumonia mask (it would be incredibly evil to give week old kittens pneumonia just because I was too lazy to put a bit of material over my face).
And then I spent a good hour and a half, crouched on the road, trying to coax them out from under the shed with the grass and a bit of milk in a saucer.

It didn't work. It nearly worked: one of them made at least fifty cautious attempts to get over the ditch and then decided the gap was too big (they are really, really tiny kittens), the other moved its little eyes and paws every time the grass twitched (and then got distracted and tried to eat a buttercup in its way), and the other slipped down a sheet of metal and then spent twenty minutes trying to get back up again. But it didn't work. They were too scared, and too tiny, and I looked a little bit like a gay Hannibal Lector in my pink flu mask.

"I want one," I told my friends said when they dropped off another bag of icecream (I'm getting ice cream deliveries every two and a half minutes at the moment; I'd like to see that happen in London).
"Take one, then. They're almost definitely stray."
"I can't go round stealing kittens."
"Ok, fair point. But if you really want a kitten, you could go and get one. There's a company in Miyazaki that take in stray kittens and try and find them homes so they don't have to be put down by the council."
"They put kittens down?"
"Not if they can help it. But it's a big problem in this area."
"But if I go to a company then it's not fate, is it. I can't go and make a choice to have a kitten; the kitten has to choose me."
Mainly, I added silently, because it would be totally irresponsible of me to get a kitten when I work all day and will only be here a year or two. Therefore the cat has to make the decision: not me.
"The cat has to choose you of its own accord?"
"Of course."
My friends looked at the pieces of grass and the saucer of milk and the cushion outside my front door with raised eyebrows.
"Looks like you're doing a fair bit to help fate on its way."
"Of course. As long as I can force the kitten to love me and live with me because it wants to, then that's ok. That's fate. And I can use every method in my power to get them to do exactly that."
"Does fate work like that?" my friends said doubtfully.
"My kind of fate does," I said, looking at the pile at my feet and wondering if a tiny toy mouse might help swing the balance slightly.

And my fate does work like that, even though it shouldn't. It's usually half a sign, and then me dogmatically hanging on until I get what I want. And if I should have learnt one thing in the past year with The Boy, it's that fate - and love - will not be forced, and it will not be coaxed, and it will not be bribed, and it will not be chased: no matter how much I want it, no matter how happy I think it would make me, no matter how strong the sign seems to be, no matter how strong my dreams are. Fate goes where it wants, with no help from me, and there isn't the slightest thing I can do to help it one way or another.

Luckily I haven't learnt a thing, so I'm going to spend the next few days hanging around outside and seducing some tiny kittens into loving me.

And if they don't now, they damn well will when I'm finished with them.

Diagnosis

I have pneumonia.

It's taken a good 36 hours to establish this - 36 hours after the test results were issued, thanks to the language barrier - but I have finally been told that I have fully fledged pneumonia. Which (thank God) explains why I sat in the hospital car park yesterday and sobbed my eyes out because I was so goddamn hot and I couldn't find my car. At all. For half an hour. Despite having parked it there myself.

It also explains why I was so desperate to start a fight with anybody I could find on Wednesday. I always become utterly foul when I'm poorly.

"I don't feel that good," I told my colleague in the morning as I got hotter and hotter.
"You don't look sick," he replied.
I immediately took offence.
"What do you mean by that?"
"You don't look sick," he said a bit more slowly, confused by my aggression (this is Japan. They don't really do violence).
"What are you trying to say? That I'm faking it? Are you trying to accuse me of pretending to be sick?"
"No, I'm saying that you look pretty."
"Oh." Normally this would be enough to shut me up, but this time it wasn't.
"It's make up," I said. "Have you heard of make up?"
"Yes."
"It's what women wear to make themselves look like something they're not. In this case, healthy."
"Yes."
"So I am sick. Just to make that clear."
"Yes. And pretty." I'm sure he would have broken into an Alanis Morrisette track if he had only known it existed. "And bad tempered," he added when he thought I couldn't hear him.

That didn't work, so I made contact with England instead; they're much more prone to arguing for the sake of it. In particular, I made contact with an adorable boy I used to date a long time ago, who therefore knows just how foul I am and wouldn't be surprised in the slightest or stop being my friend because of it.
"Start on me," I demanded.
"Why?"
"Just start on me. I need to fight someone."
"I don't want to fight with you."
"Oh so help me God, what's wrong with you, you pansy: just start on me!"
"Ok, ok. Get off your arse and start writing your book."
There was a silence.
"That was really unnecessary."
"You told me to start on you! I didn't mean it."
"Start on me, don't start on my book."
"But... But... You wanted a fight!"
"Now I just want to cry."
"Do you need a cuddle?"
"Yes, but I can't have one because everyone is so goddamn far away."
"You're the one who's far away, Hol. Everyone else is still here."
"Oh whatever. You're rubbish."
And then I left him to get down on his hands and knees and thank every single lucky star that he doesn't date me anymore.

Colleagues and friends having therefore failed me, I went home and was greeted by the mosquito.
"What's up?" he said.
"I don't feel well," I told him.
He started hovering around me, looking suspiciously happy to see me.
"You're fat," I added. "You look like a marshmallow."
"Yes, I've been eating you a lot," he told me happily. "Can I have another nibble?"
"Oh for the love of God, do you have no shame? I'm sick."
"Just one?"
"No."
"Half?"
"No. Seriously, don't push me today. I'm not in the mood."
"Please?" Then he landed on my arm anyway and made to stick his little nose out like a hungry, sharp elephant. And I decided that I'm sick of the kind of love that hurts, and lost my temper.
"You little bugger," I said.

And then, reader, I squished him.

I'm going back to bed, with my pneumonia and my temperature and my incredibly bad mood, and I warn you: if you try and contact me - and especially if you don't - there will be no mercy.

The mosquito would now testify to that. If he only he still could.

Sickness

Well, it has been a relatively dramatic 24 hours - relative to what I normally do on Thursdays - and I am now in quaranteen, or whatever it’s called when you are escorted off the school premises like a leper and told to stay in your house until further notice.

I don’t have Legionairres disease. Seven hours, three doctors, two surgeries, one hospital, one urine test, one blood test, one spit test, one chest x-ray and 8,000 yen established that. What they also established, unfortunately, was that I do have something.

“No Legionairres,” the doctor told me after an entire afternoon spent reading F Scott Fitzerald in an incredibly uncomfortable chair.
“Good,” I said. “I’m glad about that.”
Then she pointed to my blood test results.
“Sick, though.”
“Yes, I thought I might be. I don’t feel great.” I knew that I definitely didn’t feel great because I had just cried three times in the doctor’s waiting room, and I only cry for no reason at all when I’m pretty sick.
“Very high temperature, big white blood cells, antibodies.”
“Ah. So what’s wrong?”
“Sick.”
“Yes, but what’s wrong?”
“Big white blood cells, antibodies.”
I got ready to cry again.
“They’re symptoms of my sickness, not what’s causing it. What have I got?”
“Sick,” she said again. “Medicine.”
“For what?”
“Take medicine.”
I gave up, because I was too hot and tired and weepy to argue.
“Fine, just give me the drugs,” I told her, and then I got up and left and cried in the car because of how much they had charged me for what was now technically half a day’s holiday allocation.

This morning, I woke up and got out of bed; by which I mean that I opened swollen eyes and rolled onto the floor so that I could wedge my way upright with my elbows. My throat hurt, my head was hot, my ear felt like something was using a pick axe to climb into the inner part of it, and I was so tired that even a wooden floor looked comfortable to curl up on.

Which meant, obviously, that I went to school. I’m British; if you can still move you’re alive, and if you’re alive you’d better get your arse to work or everybody will whisper about how weak you are, and how they should have employed somebody a little less wan.

My school, unfortunately, did not agree.

Midway through my first lesson they rang the hospital to get my results (which would be highly illegal in England, but is standard practice here). And then: chaos. A teacher walked into my lesson and dragged me out almost bodily.

“You must go home now.”
“Huh? I’m okay. Honestly, I'm okay. I feel fine.” And comparatively I did: I've felt much worse and gone to work.
“Are not okay, are very sick. We spoke to hospital.”
“Huh?”
“Very bad news.”
“Am I dying?” I laughed, and then I stopped laughing because they weren't laughing. In fact, they looked very angry, and/or worried and/or anxious (I don’t know: I haven’t worked out those subtleties of Japanese facial expressions yet: fierce politeness means that it all kind of looks the same).
“You have serious illness, go home right now and stay home.”
“Midway through my lesson?”
“Right now.”
"It's just a cold."
"It's not just a cold," they said, which threw me for a loop, because what do people get if it's not just a cold? I thought that was the only type of illness there was.
“Oh,” I said, and then I was escorted off the premises without being allowed to say goodbye to any of my students or get my coffee, still sitting on my desk, and still not having a clue what was wrong with me or when I was allowed to come back or what I was supposed to do in the meantime.

Now I have nothing to do but sit at home and wait until somebody tells me what the hell is going on. And I'm not very good at sitting and waiting at the best of times, let alone with a very angry, if not raging, temperature.

So - until I have any idea of what is wrong with me - I think I'll just sit and have a nice little pointless, reasonless cry instead.

Leg Pulling

Health and beauty are important to women; especially women who are nearing their thirties and are therefore rapidly losing large quantities of both.

As my friend and I are two such women - me far more than her, although we are both the wrong side of 25 - we go at least once or twice a week to the local onsen, the Cherry. It’s not the nicest onsen in the area, it’s not the biggest onsen, and it doesn’t have the best free shampoo, but the water is known across this part of the country for being - well, pretty much magic. Which means we both spend as much time in it as possible, as often as possible, in the hope that we may accidentally step out one day with the skin we had ten years ago (a watery time machine much, much better than anything Michael J Fox ever climbed into).

I feel like crap, I texted her last night. I’m exhausted constantly and I’ve got a sore throat and I’m hot and cold and I’ve been up all night coughing up green shit.
Me too, my friend texted back. It must be work stress.
I didn't say anything, because it might be work stress for her but it is quite tangibly not work stress for me. I barely do any.
Onsen? she suggested.

So - as I never need persuading to sit in a hot tub of water and do nothing for two hours - we headed to the onsen, chatted cheerily to the naked old ladies and straightened out every problem the world had ever gallantly offered us.

“I feel so much better already,” my friend eventually admitted, after we had popped up again from holding our breath under water as long as we could.
“I love that this water is so smelly,” I said. Which - for those of you who have never been to an onsen - it is: a yellow colour, sulphorous, salty and full of minerals and other stuff I know nothing about but sounds really, really fun and good for you. The smellier the better, as far as my friend and I are concerned. It shows it must be doing something.
“It really feels like we’re getting better, doesn’t it?”
So we dived under the stinky water again, and - after another fifteen minutes of turning into salty little prunes - we eventually climbed out, feeling wonderful, coughed up some more green shit and went for a cigarette.

All of which means that the round of emails I woke up to this morning did not exactly fill me with the sparkle of a million fairies.

The Cherry Onsen was on the news last night, a local friend had emailed the Nichinan group of us. Legionairres disease has been found in the water. Does anyone go there?
Wouldn’t touch that place; it’s minging, another friend had replied.
Don’t Nam and Holly go there every week?
Yeah. Nuff said. Hahaha.
I wouldn’t worry. Apparently you just have to be concerned if you have cold like symptoms.
Are you pulling my leg-ionairres? Ahaha.
They said on the news you were only at high risk if you go under the water. And if you smoke.
Who goes under the water at an onsen?
Probably those two dickheads, the email round concluded, as if both of us weren’t cc’d into every single one of them.

I’d just finished reading when my phone beeped with a new date suggestion from my friend.

Two words: Irony, and Doctors?

There are very few things as important as being healthy and beautiful, you see. And not being dead or hospitalised from Legionairres disease is probably a step in the right direction. As is getting out of the healthy and beautiful smelly water that may have given it to you and getting into a doctor's surgery.

I just doubt that it will be as much fun.

See-saw

Ignorance is bliss. Which is lucky, because it`s a state I quite naturally revert to without much effort at all. It`s trying to change it that gets me into trouble.

As an experiment, three days ago I attached a meter to this site. I was curious; first of all to see how many people read what I write, and second – when I realised that the application showed me a lot more than just numbers – to see who was reading it, where they were reading it and how long they were reading it for.

I know a lot about you, now, reader. Not as much as you know about me, but I know a lot more than I did. I know what computer you use, I know precisely where you live in the world – down to the city - and I know what network you`re on, how you found me and what you clicked on to accidentally stumble upon this site. I know what time you read it, how many times you read it, which pages you click on. I don`t know your name, age or gender, but I`m convinced that if I could just work out which button to press, I would not only be able to work these out; I would also be able to find out what you had for breakfast this morning, whether you`re thinking about getting a new haircut in the next week or so, and if you pick your toenails in front of the television or not.

Luckily for you, I haven`t established which button this is yet.

Which was interesting for about three seconds – somebody reads this in India? Do I know somebody in India? Germany? New Zealand? Denmark? – and then became confusing and slightly scary. I started worrying over every single detail: would somebody from Canada be offended if I wrote this? What about Essex? What about Hatfield? What could I write of interest to someone in Denmark? Why did one person only spend one minute on the page? You can`t read anything in one minute. Didn`t they like it? Did I upset them? What did I do wrong? How can I make them like me more? Why is my sister not reading it? Why is my best friend not reading it? Is that entry one of my ex boyfriends? Is that daily click – from a precise area of Japan – from the ex boyfriend (heart spirals into mouth); and if not – definitely not, wrong language, wrong computer - why the hell is he not reading it too? Why doesn`t he care anymore? Why doesn`t anything I think or feel make a difference to him when he used to read it religiously, every single morning? Why do I still care so much about him - what he`s doing, what he`s thinking, how he`s feeling - when he doesn`t even stalk me sporadically anymore, and it`s so goddamn easy to?

And, before I knew it, my beautiful, invisible readers – mysterious and international and kind and forgiving and utterly unknown and strange to me, even the ones I knew – had become horribly real: horribly known, horribly transient, and horribly discerning. And – most terribly, in one particular case - horribly absent. The faceless, nationless, invisible people who visited my blog suddenly had computers and locations and `click numbers` and short boredom thresholds, and I realised that I had forgotten the fundamental rule of writing; that the reader is always, always half of it, and what the reader brings to each sentence is equally as important as anything written there. And that I need you all far, far more than you could ever need me, because writing does not exist without readers, whereas a reader will still exist without a writer. And my dependency on you to be who you are in my imagination was even more important than your dependency on me to be that way in yours.

It has made me so sad - so incredibly sad - because, as always, I pushed too far. I couldn`t just write and be read. I had to try to make sense of that relationship, as I try to make sense of every relationship: and, in trying to hold it in my hand and pull it into pieces so that I know more about it, I nearly crushed it. I had forgotten that the reader`s unimaginative, cruel and base exposure to me - in the form of scary, unsympathetic numbers, and scary, unforgiving silences - could be as damaging to my writing as my total and callous exposure would be to my readers.

The writer and reader have – always have had, always will have – a unique dependency on each other; they balance on the see-saw of creativity with such fragility that one tip too far can be enough to push it over and stop the process altogether. And I need you all to be what you always have been; as much to my imagination – as mysterious and infallible and invincible - as a writer should always be to yours. Even if I am partly writing, secretly, for a reader I love that has long since gone.

So please, readers, whoever you are - whether I know you or not, whether you read for one minute or two minutes or five hours or two seconds: keep reading. Keep your side of the see-saw off the ground, and I will do the same to mine.

I have turned the meter off, now, and it will stay off. You have your privacy back, and I will force out nothing else. I don`t need to know, and I never did. Not who you are, not how many you are, not where you are. Not whether we had a past, or whether we have a present, or whether we might have a future. It doesn`t matter. I write, you read, and the rest should just be as perfect as we imagine it to be.

I don`t want to destroy something beautiful by pulling it apart to see what it`s made of. I have done that to my heart already. I will not do it to my writing too.

Fame

The paparazzi just won't leave me alone. A year ago I was on telly for eight minutes - bitching and glaring and saying exactly what the director told me to say because I'm nice like that - and the media are apparently still hungry for my blood; twelve tiny months later and they've tracked me again so that they can suck me dry with all their unwanted attention.

This time, it was embarrassing: the way they tried to force me into any context so that they could compromise my privacy and sell more papers.

First, they didn't tell me they were going to be there. That was the first sign that they wanted me in their newspaper. Then they didn't mention me by name at all; that was the second sign that they had organised the entire article around me. Then they didn't mention me in any context whatsoever, even slightly, and talked about something else entirely, and that was the third sign that they were just going to keep trying to force me into the media limelight whether I liked it or not. Then - shameful, shameful journalist - they put at least twenty five people in front of me in the photograph, and waited until I was facing the wrong way and half way through a sentence before they immortalised me: they clearly weren't even going to pretend that anything in the world mattered but me. Blood sucking immoral scum, that's what the media is.

"Where?" my friend said when I showed him the picture. I have five, in case four of them get ruined.
"There," I said, pointing.
"Where?" they said again.
"There," I said a little bit crossly, getting a pen out and circling my head which is bobbing around somewhere at the back of the group.
There was a pause.
"It looks like you've been photoshopped on."
"It does not."
"Yeah it does. Look: you're not the same colour as anyone else at all."
"That's racist. You're racisting me."
My friend laughed, the bastard. He's clearly in on it with the media, trying to suck my life into an egocentric void. I won't let it happen. I'm real, you know. My dad was born in Hatfield.

So I took a copy to Baba instead.
"Doko?" she said, and even I know what that means, so I pointed to it a little more crossly.
She went to get her glasses, and then - after a few minutes of peering - she laughed and laughed and laughed and laughed until I grabbed the newspaper back off her. I think she's racisting me too.

They didn't stop there, though: oh, no. The local media all got wind of it, and twenty minutes later Baba was sticking herself to my spare room window like one of those little gummy toys you throw from a distance and yelling "T.B" at me, even though I was sitting just the other side of it.
"T.B!" she shouted. "T.B!"
So I followed her to her house to watch my fame blossom further.

It defied belief, really. Different journalists - ones with filming cameras this time - had filmed exactly the same story that had nothing to do with me whatsoever and then (how they can look themselves in the mirror at night, I don't know) failed to put me in it. At all. I was in the staffroom at the time, tie-dying bits of paper. I didn't think they would sink that low, but they had: they had made the story all about me again, because what was everyone in Nichinan going to be thinking except: where's that white girl that looks photoshopped on? Exactly. How horribly upsetting for the people the feature was supposed to be about. Sidelined because of my glory, once again.

It's shameful, really, the way the media hounds and hounds us until we're driven to our own obliteration. It's a good thing I'm so grounded, really, or God Only Knows what would happen next. As it is I'm that close to falling out of a Nichinan nightclub with my skirt tucked into one of my three remaining pairs of knickers, just so that the media can take another piece of me. And - if it wasn't for the fact that there aren't any clubs within a 200km radius - then I probably would do exactly that.

Luckily, the slippery slope of fame and glory out here isn't particularly slippery or slopey: there aren't any clubs to go to or drugs I can abuse when the attention gets too much, and there isn't an rehab to enter myself into when the drugs get too much, and there isn't any magazine I can sell my story to when the rehab gets too much. There isn't anywhere to slide into, frankly, which I think might be a restriction of the inherent freedom I should have to destroy myself in public.

The next time the media wants to coast off my fame, if there aren't at least thirty five people in front of me before they take the photo, I'm going to sue.

Those soul sucking paparazzi bastards are just going to have to try harder if they want to try and make fame change me.