Column 3

Hello humans, it’s the morning. My head feels like people are playing tennis in it. Stop playing tennis please. Go and play tennis somewhere else. Go and fight each other until you turn blue and die.

That is fighting. Yesterday, a man told me he’d been in prison for ten years because of fighting. I thought, I can’t tell if what you are saying is real. He smiled a lot. I thought, I hope it isn’t real. I thought, I want you to be whoever I want you to be. How often do people think that? How often do people listen to other people and then just pick out the bits they want to believe? Here are some things that I have tried to believe but failed to:

-that man is not trying to rape me

-I don’t need the toilet

-these humans don’t think I am terrible

-these humans are not going to run onto the stage and mercilessly beat me until I stop reading from my book

None of them worked. It doesn’t stop you thinking them though. Whenever I want a cigarette I think ‘you don’t want a cigarette’ even as I am walking outside to have one. I am lying to myself. Drama, baby.

Oh, and I haven’t held out my arms and shouted ‘Den Haag, baby’ as often as I’d like. Maybe I will try that today. Okay, wait. I’m going to open my window and lean out and shout that. I am daring myself.

I did it. Winner. There are a lot of people outside skateboarding. I have been watching them since I got here. They sit on the steps and talk to each other and laugh a lot. Just now, someone looked at me when I shouted. We were very far away but our eyes were touching. Here is a thought I had: you are never going to be an important part of my life and I am never going to be an important part of yours but right now we are both here so let’s look at each other and try to understand something about how we both exist separately as human beings in this world where people eat burgers and sing hymns and get jobs like ‘policeman’.

I wish that every time I looked at someone, I instantly knew everything about their life. I wish that we didn’t have to explain things like ‘I am from Bulgaria and I studied sociology at university’. Let’s all live in each other’s hearts.

Someone said ‘manatee’ yesterday and it was funny.

Manatee.

We went to the ‘afterparty’ and the DJ was very bad and the only drinks you could order were ‘wine’ and ‘beer’ and ‘bacardi and coke already mixed in a can’. It was fun. I smiled at people and walked around. I talked to Adam Levin a lot and he is one of my favourite authors in the world and I think the way I talked was similar to the way a twelve year old girl would talk to Justin Bieber. Sorry, Adam. It is exciting and cold here. Everyone is everyone.