Here it goes again…

I had a dream about you last night. Is that weird? I think that’s weird.

We all yelled at you not to jump, that it wasn’t worth it. But you did it anyway, you leaped from the sandy ridge and slid down the edge into the river, throwing the ball back up to us using your unfathomable momentum. You died apparently. You cut your leg on some greasy shard of metal and got septicemia, or you swallowed some of the toxic water and got cancer, I don’t know. But I know that there was a will written in crayons and my name smudged in red with sad little lovehearts dancing round it. You walked up beside me and took my hand in yours. We walked along the ridge where you fell and I had to force myself not to look at your dead, saturated body. I couldn’t stop talking in Spanish and you couldn’t understand me, so you held a finger to your lips and I fell silent. In front of us was the ball you went to receive, covered in slimy blood. When I turned you were gone but I could still feel your hand in mine, and I kicked the ball as hard as I could, covering myself in splatters of the shining black blood.

I don’t know what to think when I wake up. I wonder if I should feel happy or sad that you’re dead before I remember it was only a dream. I had a dream about you. Is that weird? I think that’s weird.

“I don’t know how you do it,” he says, swinging on the plastic kitchen counter and swirling water in his cheek, “I’m only thirty miles away and I can barely hack that.”

“Yeah, it sucks,” I reply. In the background I can hear giggling and “the terrorists are in the basement oh no” as a drunken girl stumbles about the in the other room. I want to go out for another cigarette but I’ve smoked twenty that night already and I don’t need another one. “But it’s good though. Really.”

He doesn’t believe me, he just fingers the scar under his eye from where an opponent pushed a key through his fingers before he hit him. He downs the water and sighs.

“Nah. I wouldn’t be able to hack it. All that distance, being so far away from each other. How can you not feel the distance?”

I stepped outside and lit a cigarette. He didn’t understand.

You wouldn’t think it would you? No, no, not in a million years. I didn’t, and I was wrong. All the other people didn’t, and they were very wrong. Maybe their mother knew, but I’m damned if she told me.

I had just sat back down on the coach after a brief stop in Carlisle, munching away at a bag of horrendously overpriced Doritos and enjoying my music when I sensed something. There’s nothing supernatural about this sense, it’s just feeling that everyone gets when there is someone just a bit too close to them. I turn round, and there he is. The middle member of this little trio is there, staring at me with his head in his hands and a monkey smile on his lips. I’m taken aback at first, but the thought that occurred to me was that kids can smell fear, so I smiled back and nodded. He grinned wider and disappeared. It was odd, I’ll admit, but I shrugged and settled into the window to grab some sleep before arriving home.

Halfway through my nap, I get that feeling again. Someone is very close to me, so I turn round and sure enough there he is again, this time chugging from a bottle of orange juice. I nod to him again and he grins back. I felt bizarre and awkward, as if I were the main character in some bad art house film. I offered him a Dorito and he took it unquestionably.

“I’m Johnathan,” I say, and offer him my hand. He shakes it, but doesn’t answer. “And you are?” He grins. “Right, so you’re not going to say a thing?” He laughs. “Fine then,” I say, and give him an earbud to my music player. He looks at it with wide-eyed shock before bouncing his head along to The Mars Volta and trying to hum to the erratic tune. I turn the music off abruptly and his eyes fly open and he’s begging me to turn the music back on.

At least, that’s what i think he’s doing. He doesn’t speak a word of English.

It’s not until later that I figure out that he and his family were Serbian, but the information at that point would not have been a great help to me. Soon after I turned off the music his two brothers came and joined him, and an interesting game of inter-lingual pictionary began where they would draw something and I would learn how to say it. They laughed at me plenty of times, repeating my failed attempts at saying “roller skates” in their language and they covered most of my notebook with scrawled, itchy pictures of busses, cars and clowns. They grew bored of my pens eventually though, so I taught them the nuances of high-fives and thumbs up and I beat them so many times at rock paper scissors that they started throwing wild-card weapons like dynamite and gun.

Now, looking at that picture up there and the other one down there, you wouldn’t think it would you? You wouldn’t think that three angelically smiling children could be the incarnations of something more sinister, something evil? Of course, I didn’t. I’m one of those annoying guys in a horror film that has a sword shoved through their skull right after they’ve lulled the viewer into a false sense of safety.

The kids, they get too much. They clamour for my attention, rifle through my bag, and try to steal my saved slice of lemon drizzle cake. I push them off harmlessly, managing to gently nudge away their hands every time they get close. But then they get bad. The laughing and hair pulling and nose tugging begins and face myself cornered in an onslaught of tiny hands with fingers like claws. I call out in vain for other people on the bus to help, but no one helps. I hear a snigger* or two from seats beside me and I manage to shoot the perpetrators a look before becoming engulfed my grabbing hands and screaming milk teeth.

Somehow I manage to pull myself out of the chair and onto my feet, with the littlest of the group hanging (literally hanging) off my hair. The mother notices and shoos them away from me with a barely apologetic smile. I retreat to my seat, lie back, and just as I’m about to drift off the oldest of the little bastards appears again with a devilish look in his eyes. As he prepares to lunge for me again I hold out my hand and manage to say “Prestana”, which I gathered over their attacks as “stop”. He cocked his head to one side and I gave him a high five again, then his brothers came over and I managed to snap one last picture before they disappeared forever.

God, I hate kids.

–
*Oh my god, the language correcter on my browser is trying to suggest that I change “snigger”** into “nigger”! Firefox you racist bastard!

**It’s doing it again!

an exam paper held in a lecturers hand, waiting to be opened and a sentence ready to be read.

Question: How do we store information in our long-term memory?

Answer: Ironically enough… I’ve forgotten.

There is a plausible explanation for this.

You see, some time during second essay, I developed a need. Yes, a need. I ignored it for a while and continued chewing on the end of my cigarette as I wrote (a handy exam technique I picked up, unnerve the people around you with a cigarette in your mouth and they get so distracted that your scores are bound to look better), but this need persisted. It grew, as a matter of fact. It grew from a need to a really need. I had a really need. So much in fact that I couldn’t concentrate on my third and final essay, and when I can’t concentrate on essays, I write jokes in them.

There’s your plausible explanation.

So, with forty minutes of the exam left to go, I handed in my work pad and walked desperately out the side door where my really need turned into a long satisfying ‘ahhhhhh’ sound. It was very long. So long, in fact, that an examiner came in to check that I wasn’t cheating despite me finishing the exam about seven minutes previous. He stayed behind me for so long, and he was staring so hard that I actually stopped mid-stream. So my need that turned to my really need that turned to my ‘ahhhhhh’ had now turned into pain. God awful pain. But he wouldn’t stop staring. So I had to stop myself, wash up, waddle my way back into the exam room, out onto the street and waddle-sprint a good long distance until I reached a safe bathroom with no prying eyes and bulging shirts.

And I can only pray that every exam will not be like this one.

Nothing I say ever comes out right, does it?*

—
*not even that.

a girl sitting beside me with dark glasses and long, elaborately pulled up, straight hair. She is wearing a grey cardigan with a deep blue shirt under it. I cannot see her legs, they are under the desk, but I can catch a glimpse of her shiny silver bag.

She knows I’m writing about her, and she’s sneakily watching while trying to look interested in her social networking site.

I’m listening to At the Drive-in. They are giving me a headache, but I still really like them. They’ve got a strange lyrical genious.

I think I know the girl sitting beside me. She may be from a long ago class or chance meeting. Who knows these days?

Oh! And I just found a bottle of coke in my bag. Score.

another note;

“Creative process usually accompanied by flash of insight, as reported by Darwin and Mozart. So the four phases would be Preparation, Incubation, Illumination and Verification, the middle two phases being highly debated in psychology. I don’t know why, but he’s so unassuming. He just sits there being an unassuming genius, and he just knows things. He doesn’t need to think, he knows. Is that admirable or scary? Several studies have found that incubation has no effect on solving a problem, no matter how varied the times are. Though it has been found to have an effect in children.”

I wonder to myself if I realised that I was writing that at the time.

an extra side note on my lecture notes saying;

“Hand is too sore to continue. Sorry Future Jonathan who is studying really really hard and is now pissed off with Past Self.”

Damn him indeed.

I have finally updated the Writings page. Go check it out to see how utterly amazing and swamped I am with ideas and strokes of genius.

and analysis I have found that;

Approximately 65% of people prefer my hair wild and curly.

30% prefer it straight.

5% are neutral.

(it should be noted here that this experiment consists of 10 people, but Charlotte holds an extra 5% sway of the vote, and the 5% neutral - i.e. half a person - can be explained that they were neutral/didn’t give a damn)

For the majority of voters, I have only this statement to clarify why people prefer my hair when it’s curly compared to straight:

“… ’cause you’re always gigglier whenever I’ve seen you with it. You’re like some sort of curly giggly thing.”

However, this statement was received by someone who was very tired and almost blind in one eye, so I cannot hold this as irrefutable evidence that curls=giggles ergo a more cheery, approachable character. Further evidence needs to be collected.

Though, all subjectiveness aside, I’d prefer not to be considered a giggly wistful person (though I have been known to sit on a summers day and smile at the sky), so my dictatorial reign over my hair shall remain the same; straight straight straight.

Unless, of course, it rains. I may be a totalitarianist leader of my features, but even I cannot defy nature.