The List - No, Not *That* List

Holy crud, I knew I had this post somewhere. That's what I get for using encrypted files. I lose them and then don't find them for two years.

Anyway.

I shouldn't have to tell you this is tongue-in-cheek, but I suppose I'd better, just in case.

The (Incomplete) List of Things I Look For In A Man

Intelligence and Learning:

Is smart - 5 pts
Is smarter than me - 50 pts
Is smarter than I used to be - 500 pts

Can talk to me intelligently about Plato - 5 pts
Can talk to me intelligently about Plato for more than 90 seconds - 50 pts
Can talk to me intelligently about Plato for more than 90 seconds without sounding condescending - 500 pts

Likes Studio Ghibli - 50 pts
Grave of the Fireflies is his favorite - minus 50 pts

Will happily read an essay of mine titled, "Exploring the Parallels in the Lives and Rise to Power of Emperor Haile Selassie and Simba the Lion King" - 50 pts
Will laugh at me because he knows the essay was at least 90% B.S. - 500 pts

Cleanliness and Appearance:

Showers or bathes before bed - 250 pts
Shaves daily - 250 pts
Keeps his pubic hair trimmed - 250 pts
Uses a nice-smelling detergent / fabric softener - 250 pts
Wears cologne or aftershave (and is willing to use one that I like) - 250 pts
Is happy to wear a nice suit now and then - 250 pts
Asks for my advice on picking one out - 250 pts

Hobbies:

Speaks Japanese - 250 pts
Speaks Spanish - 250 pts

Will quote me e.e. cummings - 100 pts
Will quote me Pablo Neruda - 100 pts
Will quote me Christina Rosetti - 100 pts
Will quote me Edgar Allan Poe - 100 pts
Will quote me Shelley - 100 pts

Buys me books for my birthday - 25 pts
Buys me books when it's not my birthday - 100 pts
Buys me MolyMod for my birthday, instead of what he thinks I should want - 1000 pts

Can cook food that tastes great - 25 pts
Can cook food that tastes great and is healthy - 100 pts

Buys me flowers now and then - 25 pts
Buys me flowers that suit my personality - 100 pts

Is creative and / or artistic - 25 pts
Thinks it's adorable that I'm not - 100 pts

Tells jokes that make me laugh - 25 pts
Tells clean jokes that still make me laugh - 100 pts
Tells clean jokes that make me laugh so hard I stop breathing for a minute - 250 pts

Corrects my grammar - plus or minus 50 pts, depending on how he does it

Does volunteer work - 50 pts

Looks:

Is tall - 250 pts (fuck off, sometimes I'm shallow)
Has nice strong shoulders - 250 pts
Has good skin - 250 pts
Has neatish eyebrows that don't meet in the middle - 250 pts
Has a few tattoos (more than 0, less than 5) - 250 pts
Has a few piercings (more than 0, less than 5) - 250 pts
Has a crooked smile - 250 pts
Wears eyeliner and / or mascara and / or nail polish - 250 pts
Has a moderately large nose - 250 pts (yes, seriously...I think it's a throwback to my Native American ancestry, but most of the guys I really crush on have large noses)

Arete:

Makes me want to be a better person - 500 pts
Makes me want to do things that I'm scared to do - 500 pts
Makes me want to do things that I might well regret - 500 pts

Got your score? Great. Now throw it away, because that was just for fun. For the right man, none of this counts.

Makes me feel all fluttery in my stomach when I see him - 500 pts
Makes me feel all fluttery in my stomach just by texting or calling me, or messaging me, or coming online - 5 million pts

Other People's Poetry - Elegy for Himself by Chidiock Tichborne

Elegy For Himself


My prime of youth is but a frost of cares;
 My feast of joy is but a dish of pain;
My crop of corn is but a field of tares;
 And all my good is but vain hope of gain:
The day is past, and yet I saw no sun;
And now I live, and now my life is done.

My tale was heard, and yet it was not told;
 My fruit is fall'n, and yet my leaves are green;
My youth is spent, and yet I am not old;
 I saw the world, and yet I was not seen:
My thread is cut, and yet it is not spun;
And now I live, and now my life is done.

I sought my death, and found it in my womb;
 I looked for life, and saw it was a shade;
I trod the earth, and knew it was my tomb;
 And now I die, and now I was but made:
My glass is full, and now my glass is run;
And now I live, and now my life is done.


~ Chidiock Tichborne (1586)

Nothing like an executed Elizabethan poet to make you feel better about your own life, eh?

Skinned Hearts And Skinned Knees

"Scars remind us where we've been. They don't have to dictate where we're going."

- Agent David Rossi, Criminal Minds

Scars interest me. They always have. They tell a person's life story. Sometimes they make me laugh, other times they make me cry or bubble over with anger, but they never fail to arouse emotion in me.

I've been thinking about them a lot lately, actually. My own, and other people's. Someone very dear to me has self-harm scars, and several times in the last few weeks I've woken from dreams where I was kissing them better. Kissing them never actually heals them, of course, nor should it. Scars ARE healed tissue, by definition. Most self-harm scars don't need to be healed or removed. They're badges of honour and courage that say to the world: I went through something terrible, and I survived it. Scars only form on living tissue. The very fact of their existence means you survived whatever caused them.

But I've had the dream several times nonetheless.

I've come 180 degrees in the last decade. I used to hate my scarred body, and find it ugly and shameful. I hid my arms, even on the hottest days of the year, and never went outside without a shawl at the very least. I hid my breasts, preferring to wear a bra even when I was in bed with a man. I hid my bikini area - well, I still hide that, but we're getting there. The ones I couldn't hide, I was always conscious of, and was convinced people were staring at them. Sometimes they were. Other times it was just paranoia.

Since I've stopped hiding them, not one single person has said anything negative about them.

There are some that I would get rid of, and hope to have treated when I have the money for laser removal. There are a proliferation of round scars down my spine and in rings coming out of it, from shingles outbreaks. These went keloid, and they get painful often. Occasionally they reopen and get infected, which is a pain in the ass. My whole back is covered in them - a lot of the time they look like moles, or molluscum contagiosum - and it feels rough and scaly to the touch. I'll have these treated when I can, although I worry about another shingles outbreak making things worse.

My arms are covered in rough, hyperpigmented scars from insect bites. Insects love me, and I have that unfortunate kind of skin that scars badly - partially because of my ancestry, partially because of the bacterial infections that run rife in my body (no immune system), partially because I don't have a decent blood supply going to my skin (before the last six months, I basically didn't bleed). I am still self-conscious about these, particularly when I see women with soft, unmarked skin. But I don't hide them. I wear cami tops and sundresses without cardigans in the summer. I wear strappy dresses and halters in nightclubs. I don't look like the other girls, but nobody's ever commented on the difference.

Some scars of mine are more interesting, as they have their own story. The middle finger on my left hand has a keloid scar underneath the nail, where someone ran over my hand when I fell while ice skating as a kid. (The teeth on ice skates hurt, and they carry a lot of bacteria, just FYI.) My forehead has a dimple just right of center, where I was splashed with boiling oil when I was four or five. My bellybutton has several scars around it, the biggest being from where I accidentally stabbed myself in the stomach while sewing a skirt in textiles class.

Anywhere that I grow hair I get blisters and scars, because I'm allergic to my own hair. Yes, this is possible, though rare. I suffer from several autoimmune conditions, and they're probably all related, including the hair allergy. (I'm also allergic to my sweat.) My scalp seems to be okay, and my eyebrows have gotten used to being there, as long as I keep them narrow and tidy, but arms, legs, underarms, stomach, toes, upper lip, bikini area and several other places all have to be kept shaved or waxed or epilated or plucked, depending on the area. Waxing lasts longest, but as nobody has yet developed a system of waxing that gets very short hairs, I usually end up shaving daily, at least my legs, which are the most likely to break out. Yes, every day. It's a nightmare. Several different doctors have suggested that maybe I'm getting a shaving rash rather than allergies, and have suggested I try doing it less frequently. One even made me go several months without shaving. The result was huge, weeping sores around the follicles, that didn't want to heal. By shaving my legs daily I can keep them almost wound-free, but I still get ulcers in the areas that I can't get daily.

I do have one bad hyperpigmented patch on my throat that blisters easily, and scars every time it blisters. It's about the size of a 50-penny-piece, and I acquired it after my larynx was crushed six or seven years ago. This is where I grow a beard, if I allow it to grow. It's exactly at the site where the worst damage was - where his fingernails were - and while I've never heard of skin starting to grow hair after trauma, if it's not connected it's a hell of a coincidence.

I hate this scar patch, as much for the hair as the dark tissue. I've been considering phoning Embarrassing Bodies to see if Dr Christian can take a look at it. I don't have the money to get it treated privately, and my GP doesn't consider it a medical problem.

I have round scars on my breasts and bikini area that resemble cigarette burns. I don't talk about these, not because I'm uncomfortable with them, but because if I told you how I came by them you wouldn't believe me. 

Some have gone AWOL over the years. A long burn on my left outer forearm (iron) and another long burn on my left thigh (hair straighteners) have faded into nonexistence in the last couple years. A beautiful, snake-like line stretching from the inside of my wrist to about two inches below my inner elbow on my right arm (snapped guitar string) has likewise vanished.

The back of my right thigh has the only wound that still causes me plenty of pain. Some of the others get infected and hurt from time to time, but the thigh burns me often, especially in very hot or very cold weather. I don't know what it looks like now - it's a hard place to see, even with mirrors - but I can always locate it by touch with no trouble, as even a light touch causes a small twinge of pain. I think it's possible that there's still a fragment of the bullet in there, and if it ever gets worse I guess I'll have to have it checked out, but for now it and I coexist. I tell people it's in the buttock, and it's high enough on the thigh to get away with that story. "Shot in the leg" shocks people, whereas "shot in the butt" gets giggles.

I was eleven when I got shot. In four more years, I'll have had that scar for fully two thirds of my life.

Huh. Feels like longer than that.

I love and hate the scars of my loved ones. I hate that they were in pain. I love that they survived their pain. Scars, and the pain that goes with them, seem to feature a lot in romance novels. Every tenth book I get from Silhouette or Harlequin seems to feature a brooding hero who hides away from the world because he thinks that his scarred face or missing hand or gammy leg makes him hideous to look at. It doesn't. Ever. It's just skin. It's an organ that's there to hold your insides in and keep dirt and bacteria out. No matter the texture, the colour, the markings on it, differences in skin do not make a person ugly, any more than a defect in a heart valve or fibroids on your kidneys do.

In the case of my friend, his scars are beautiful, because they're his, and he's beautiful.

And so am I, and so are you.

Lachrymosity

I cry when I'm angry.

This means I cry when my ex is being a douche; when my mother presses my buttons (and she does it better than anyone I know); when the Twin does something selfish when I know he's better than that; when I talk about the first Passover; when someone accuses me of doing something that they should know I wouldn't do if they knew anything at all about my character; when one of the kids at work does drugs or gets someone pregnant again (or gets pregnant again); when one of the kids gets arrested deservedly; when one of the kids gets arrested undeservedly; when my brother says something stupid and thoughtless about my weight or eating habits; when people ask me why I don't go on holiday / throw big parties / learn to drive and I have to tell them AGAIN that I don't have any money and then fend off mystified stares; when people constantly question my intelligence; when I find celery in a soup or other food that didn't say celery on the label; when someone borrows my clothes and smokes in them when I've asked them not to; when I try to cook something that I used to cook well and it goes completely wrong; when I see Juliet; when my clothes don't fit; when mom damages the spine of yet another book of mine; when I read political news articles; when I look at YouTube comments; and sometimes when the alarm goes off in the mornings.

I cry when I'm sad.

This means I cry when I talk to dead people; when I have nightmares; when my ex is being a douche; when I think of much of my childhood; when my mom is sad; when I watch the ending of Terminator 2; when I read Caroline B. Cooney's The Stranger; when I think of my parents dying; when I think about my BFF's marriage; when I think about Julian; when I watch Carousel or South Pacific; when I hear the words Agent Orange; when I watch a movie with Heath Ledger or Brad Renfro; when I read L.J. Smith's Forbidden Game trilogy; when I look at nine words someone sent me once; when I read old conversations between me and K; when I run into K; when I remember how my Dad's voice used to sound when he called me darling; when I give away or throw away books or clothes; when I remember that I won't ever be a surgeon or a photographer or a jewellery-maker ever (or ever again, for those last two); when a limited-edition food or make-up that I really like stops being sold; and when characters die in my favourite TV programs.

I cry when I'm afraid.

This means I cry when I think I'm going to throw up; when someone near me throws up; when I think about parasites invading my body; when I have to clear up maggots; when I dream about snakes (curiously, when I'm awake snakes don't bother me); when I'm swimming and I see a jellyfish; when I have the dead-baby dream; when I see black-and-white checkerboard tiles; when I see dark purple petunias; when I see Greek columns that aren't supporting anything; when I see Zeppelin airships; when I think of Pripyat; when I see barbed-wire fences with metal towers in the background; when I find myself thinking of Kenji's stories about the Ainu; when I find a toddler alone in a supermarket and don't know what the fuck to do with it (look around for a parent? Stand there keeping an eye on it and hope a parent comes soon, maybe getting mistaken for a child molestor? Go find security and leave the kid? Take the kid to security and chance the parent coming back and finding it missing? I am not a child-oriented person, unfortunately children do not seem to realise this); when I see pictures of New Zealand; when I see Miyazaki's On Your Mark video; when one of my friends talks - seriously or hyperbolically - about suicide; and when I can't figure out how to pay all the bills.

I cry when I'm overwhelmed.

This means I cry when I read Dean Koontz books; when I read Christopher Pike books; when God talks to me; when the moon looks red; when I have any of the spaceship dreams; when I hear (or sing) Carly Simon's Let the River Run; when I see the tree in the golden field at the end of Knowing; when I read about ancient civilisations; when I read the Chronicles of Narnia; when I read or see Lord of the Rings (they play all three of the main movies at Christmas - it's a very wet time in this house); when I hear Regina Spektor's The Call; when I think about time travel; when I look at nebulae; when I hear any of Clubroot's music; when I get to the mythical sections of any Pokémon game; when I hear the words "Tetragrammaton" or "New Jerusalem"; when I'm at the Teide National Park in Tenerife; when I remember past lives; when I see possible future ones; when I have really really great sex; when I think about living in Japan; when I get a compliment from someone I really admire; when I have dreams about when the continents were different; when Kenji tells me about the Ainu (yes, again); when the sheer weight of time presses on me; when I am just on the verge of remembering everything I've forgotten; and when I have a crush.

Occasionally I cry when I'm happy.

This means I cry when I watch the dancing / bedroom scene between Sarah and Karl in Love, Actually; when I look at real estate in Tokyo or Kyoto; when I see Example's eyes in the Kickstarts music video; when I read any of L.J. Smith's books other than Forbidden Game; when it's Halloween or I think about Halloween; when I see the leaves turn colour; when I'm at the beach or swimming in the ocean; when I think about going to watch live sports; when I read sappy Rebecca Winters books; when I see cherry blossom; when a new Pokémon game comes out; when I think of marrying the Love of my Life; when I talk to Anna; when I read Mary Francis Shura's Summer Dreams, Winter Love; when I read Christopher Pike's Final Friends trilogy or the beginning of Scavenger Hunt or Gimme a Kiss; when I think about attending high school in the USA; when I see Homecoming Queen sceptres; when I go shopping and everything looks good; when I get a dress-shopping scene in a book I love; when I date a man who's big enough and strong enough to pick me up and / or sit me on his lap; when it's time to get my autumn clothes out; when school starts again; when I meet a guy I'm really attracted to and then find out he speaks Japanese; when I write a piece of writing that's well-received; when Morgan says something totally gloriously romantic to Garcia on Criminal Minds; when I dream about skiing or ice skating; when I watch Chage & Aska on MTV Unplugged; when I see Prof Brian Cox smile; and when I do something well that I thought I couldn't do.


Perhaps this is why I'm single.

Do Inzombiacs Eat Brains? Because I Prefer Pizza...

I told myself a week or two ago that if I couldn't sleep, I wasn't allowed to spend any more nights reading and playing video games. There's too much stuff that needs to be done. If I can't sleep, I work.

I've managed a lot of cataloging, and quite a lot of paperwork. No writing, since I don't have the energy or the mental awareness. I've managed very little sleep, dammit.

I don't know if it's something to do with the weather, or what. Usually at this time of year, things are getting warmer, but here in Alby it's freezing (literally) and periodically snowing, even though it's nearly April and most recent years we've had bikini weather by April 1st. I'm in that generally unsettled frame of mind and body, where I'm not quite sick but not quite right either. I do keep getting stupid health problems, things that come right out of left field - since I got back from Somerset three weeks ago I've had four ear infections (yeah, I get a lot of ear infections, but four in three weeks is pushing it even for me) and a urinary tract infection and then today I broke a rib, stupidly. I don't even know how I did it - I was rushing to get in and out of the bath, and then get dressed and dry my hair, but there wasn't a particular moment when I suddenly felt the pain. No cracking sound or sensation, or sudden sharp pain. It just came on over a period of about ten minutes - a twinge at first, then a pain that I thought was a pulled muscle that I could walk off, and then half an hour later I couldn't move at all. I'm guessing it's a rib, anyway, unless I actually tore a muscle. I've had strains and sprains and pulled muscles before, and they don't hit me anywhere near as badly as this. That said, I've also had broken ribs, and they haven't been this bad, although the one that I broke in a car accident five or six years ago still gives me trouble if I sleep on it wrong. Ribs are funny like that.

So I'm stuck in bed. I literally cannot move most of the time, although I'm managing to make it to the bathroom and back every so often (although it takes about ten minutes to sit up and walk down the stairs, so I have to schedule bathroom breaks). I can't sit in a chair. I find it hard to stand. I find it uncomfortable to lie on my back. Lying on my stomach is the only position that's even vaguely comfortable (the injury is in my back) - everything else sends my entire left side trapezius and latissimus dorsi into spasms. I'm surprised at how much the darn thing hurts - I've had back injuries before, but never any that made it impossible to actually MOVE. There is, of course, the possibility that I'm just being a huge pussy, but you'd think that as used to pain as I am, I'd be able to cope with this better.

I'm generally irritable right now, because of the pain, and the tiredness that I've been feeling since Christmas - well, okay, since the strep in Oct 2011 really - and the extra weight I'm still lugging around on my body (with all the health problems I've had over the last year, I haven't managed to stick to an exercise regime for more than a couple weeks) and the constant, gnawing hunger that never quite goes away, even though I feel like I never stop eating. (In reality I'm probably not eating that much. I can't afford to eat more, though. Money is really tight, but that's for another blog post.)

I'm also irritable because I have so much freaking stuff that needs to be done, and I can't afford to be bedbound. I've been decorating - my walls are now entirely pink - and I've been painting the shelves and brackets white, since I can't afford to buy bookcases. Unfortunately, this is a VERY long process. Each shelf needs two coats of primer and at least two coats of paint (they're going from a very dark colour to white) and this results in me having to run to Wilko to buy more paint on a regular basis. I should really just buy several cans and be done with it. I can only paint one side at a time, unless I want to end up with paint smears everywhere. And I have to do the work outside because of the fumes - and it's been pissing it down with rain most of the time. I can't work in the rain. Or the snow.

I've been working on the damn shelves for at least a week now, and I'm not quite finished. I thought it would take me a couple days. But then I thought there'd be sunshine and warmer weather.

The walls are looking pretty good. They could have done with another coat of paint, but I ran out, and I certainly wasn't going to go out and spend twenty quid on another can. I can't believe how expensive paint has gotten.

The frill you see isn't part of the paint, it's just the shadow of the lampshade. I should have taken photos in daylight, but we aren't GETTING any real daylight right now. Shelves will go in this alcove - I actually put the brackets up yesterday, before I did the ribs.

You can see that the window surrounding needs another coat or two of paint, so I bought some tester pots just to do that...and then found out that you're not supposed to paint with them, because they don't give a decent finish. Fuck.

My bed is about the only pretty thing in the room right now, aside from the walls. Oh, and my bedside table. If I had the money, I'd dump all the furniture - I've had it since I was eight. But I don't have the money to replace everything. Nor will it paint (it's cheap MDF, and I've tried, to no avail). So I'm stuck until I can at least buy a dressing table.

The thing that really drives me batty is that there is so much STUFF everywhere. Stuff that doesn't have a home. There's like, NO storage space in this house. This suits mom well, because she likes open-plan thing - shelves made out of planks of wood and brackets; everything sitting out on display. I hate open-plan. Unless you have a weekly housekeeper, it's horribly impractical. Everything gets dusty and grimy and you can't ever get it properly clean. I like cupboards and wardrobes and closets and everything stored neatly in its place except when you're actually using it.

The room looked so nice when I had just finished painting, and there was nothing in it. I seriously wanted to throw out everything I owned and have a room that was empty except for my bed. I like starkness. It makes me feel clean. Or at least less dirty.

I wanted to put coving up, and to smooth the horrible textured ceiling out, but I'm not sure that I'm going to have the time. Mom's talking about putting the house on the market in May. (Bad timing for me to paint, but I've been putting it off for four years because Mom keeps saying we're moving. You can't put off life indefinitely.)

For so long I've had this idea in my head of what I wanted my room to look like, and now that I finally have the walls painted, I can no longer see the plans. I'm just so tired, and the amount of work that needs to be done in this house before we can sell it is weighing heavily on me. There are 200-odd boxes from the attic to sort through. I have to go through the emotional battle of trying to separate mom from her hoards, and the emotional battle of getting rid of some of my own books and clothes. I am not at my mom's stage of hoarding, where I keep things like dried-up tubs of paint and boxes of bricks, but I do find it hard to get rid of clothing and books. Stuffed animals, too, although those are in bags in Ryan's wardrobe right now, and have been for several years (my cardiologist told me I had to put them away until my allergies improved).

I guess the long and short of it is that I'm not feeling good, and I suppose I'm kind of depressed. Not suicidally depressed or anything; not focused on the futility of life, but exhausted mentally and physically. I can't see a way forward right now, except to keep plodding on. My health seems to get a bit worse each season, no matter what I try to do to keep things working. I don't sleep anywhere near enough, and for a couple months I've been waking up every morning in truckloads of pain in my back and neck. I thought it was my sleeping position, and have been working to change it, but so far it doesn't seem to matter what position I sleep in, I still have the pain in the mornings. I'm constantly shattered, constantly starving, and can't seem to lose any weight, even when I don't allow myself to overeat. If there had been any men in my life, I would wonder if I were pregnant, but barring alien abduction, that's not a possibility. Nothing I do seems to matter at the moment. Nothing touches the work that's piled up. No amount of money I bring home in my paycheck makes any difference to mom's debts at the bank and with the Visa. No amount of housework makes the house any cleaner or tidier. No amount of organising or throwing stuff away seems to make a dent in the shit that came out of the attic. I was looking into the possibility of hiring a storage locker to hold some of the stuff I had for my home when I have one - mostly stuff I bought when I was planning on moving in with C - but in this town, the cheapest storage unit I can get is £30 a week. A WEEK. I'd been expecting it to be about that a month.

Damn, this note is depressing. I'm just so tired. I seem to have a lot of blog posts over the years that say this. The fibromyalgia is kicking my butt, to be honest, no matter how good a fight I put up. I just wish I had someone who could and would help me out sometimes.

Strange Continent, Immune To All Reason

I hate you.
I love you.
Leave...don't go away.
I can't decide if I like your face
Or if I wish it would stray.
You're a child, but you're malicious,
You're sweet, but don't remember my name,
Heads I win,
Tails I'm lost,
Love equals pain.

~ Jewel, Gray Matter

He was one of those kids who would either grow up and change the world, or live his entire life as a petty thug. Some people are just made that way. There's no middle ground for them.

I alternately adored and loathed him, from the day I met him up until this moment.

It's funny: even with the memory damage that I've suffered, there are certain people who always stand out in my mind; certain people where I remember just about every conversation or meeting that we've ever had. I remember the day I met him. Not everything about the day, but certain things. It was a Monday. School was holding an assembly, not in the hall where we usually had them, but in the gym. We had to take our shoes off, and I remember freaking out because I'd forgotten to remove the pink polish from my toenails, and I was convinced that a teacher was going to yell at me. We had a sometimes-strict rule about nail polish and makeup at that school - I say sometimes-strict, because you could always tell which girls would get away with breaking it. I wasn't one of them. 

Anyway, I remember the morning clearly. Pink toenail polish, bare feet, and me freaking out. I didn't sit with the girls and boys I usually sat with, because that year my "friends" were the ones who the teachers watched, hawk-eyed. I sat with a different couple of girls and boys from my class, and a couple who weren't - I never had a set crowd in high school, I just kind of floated from group to group, always welcomed but never committed - and found myself sitting in front of The New Boy. One of the kids in our group asked me if I'd met him yet. I hadn't, and I knew how hard it could be to be the new kid, especially in a school as cliquey as ours, so I turned around and smiled. And my head nearly imploded. I was heavily into astronomy at that point, and I clearly remember thinking that looking at him felt like how I imagined it would feel to stare into a black hole. I'd never met a teenager so forceful and magnetic. Looking at him was like looking into endless darkness, yet with a feeling that there was so much that was hidden.

I need a name for him here. I can't continue to call him New Boy, so we'll continue with the astronomical theme and call him Pluto. It fits. Pluto was the Roman equivalent of Hades - "the unseen". I often felt like he was unseen by most of the teachers and students. I wonder if he felt that way too.

Me? Oh, I saw. I saw someone extraordinary. I wanted to know everything about him, to be his friend and walk and talk with him.

Except, for some reason, he seemed to take a dislike to me.

To this day, I don't know why. With other people he was friendly enough. Sometimes quiet, sometimes sullen, in the way that every teen on the planet can be, but reasonably friendly. He made friends with a group of boys, including my friend's boyfriend and the guy I sat next to in math, boys who I wasn't close to but none of whom seemed to hate me the way he did. Well, dislike. Hate is probably too strong a word.

I didn't confront him to ask him why he didn't like me. Nowadays, I might have done so. Back then, I wasn't as plain-spoken as I am now. Also, I was a coward. I didn't want to hear that I'd done something to offend him, or that he found my personality repellent, or that my face and body made him want to throw up. I wanted him to like me, as I - sometimes - liked him.

Again, like is the wrong word. I adored him, was drawn to him, but often didn't like him. Particularly on the day he slammed my hand in the math classroom door. Or the day he shoved past me going down the stairs and knocked me down half a flight. Or the day we were put in the same trampolining group, and he crawled under my trampoline when I was getting ready to execute a difficult flip that I'd never tried before, causing me to jar my back and putting me off the sport right up to this day.

Yeah, I hated him at times. None of that hate made me any less intrigued.

I missed a lot of school through illness - maybe half of my classes. In bad months, maybe two thirds. But when I was there, I watched him. I watched him when he laughed with friends, and when he sat alone, caught in depression. I smiled when he seemed happy, and my heart broke for him when he was sad. I burned with righteous anger when he was accused of damaging a teacher's car, something that I don't think was ever proven whether he did or not - although of course that never stopped the rumours spreading.

I took art in Year 10 and 11, and my fingers itched to draw him. The boy defined chiaroscuro. Dark brown hair, darkened to black by the use of hair gel. Moonshine skin, eyes like obsidian chips. He bore more than a passing resemblance to a young David Boreanaz, which may have been part of the attraction for me, but there was a wintriness to him that even the vampire Angel didn't possess. Sometimes I attempted to draw him, but the pictures never came out right. I always felt like my pictures were of a glossy illusion, a reflection in those obsidian chips, rather than the real boy. Yet I'm not sure that, had I got to know him better, my drawings would have been any more successful. I feel like the real him was too big to be confined on paper.

We talked occasionally. Sometimes, on seemingly random occasions, he'd walk up to me and insult me. On rarer occasions, he'd start an actual conversation, talk for a few minutes, and then insult me. Usually it was mild insults, like telling me I had a stupid name. For most of my school days, I went by Sandy, so he took to calling me Pebbles. Nowadays, of course, I'd laugh at that and take it as a compliment that a guy wanted to give me a nickname. Back then, all I could think of was that he thought I had a stupid name. :)

Some of the insults were a little harsher. Once, I was sitting after trampolining with a friendly acquaintance - not quite a friend - who had seen the gems that I carried in my purse and bag and pockets. I was into crystal healing a lot that year, and carried a heap of carnelians (for blood purification and energy) and lapis lazuli (to stimulate creativity), as well as a few others - jade for mental clarity, citrine for physical energy. I swear, my handbag and pockets looked like I'd walked out of ancient Egypt. *grins* She and I were looking at the gems, and I was telling her what they were supposed to do. And Pluto walked over - we were waiting for the minibus to take us back to school, and there weren't many people around - and asked to see the stones. He ran his fingers through the pile of crystals on my hand, and asked for an explanation.

And then told me I should be in a mental asylum.

I can laugh about it now, but I wouldn't talk to him for about a month after that. Particularly when the rumour started flowing that I HAD been in a psych hospital. I have no real reason to think he started the rumour, but at the time I assumed it was him. Perhaps unfairly.

Looking back, I wonder if he really hated me as much as it appeared. In some ways, I'd had a sheltered life as a kid. People had generally liked me. A few had been outright cruel, but they had always been very vocal about why they didn't like me. I'd never come across the phenomenon of boys being mean to girls they like - or, indeed, the other way round - and it never occurred to me that he might feel anything but this unexplained apparent abhorrence for me.

Three things over the years have given me pause to think that perhaps his feelings for me were as complicated as mine for him. Firstly, the guy I sat next to in math told me, on the very last day of school, that Pluto didn't hate me. At least I think he did. I casually brought it up - they were good friends, and it was easy to steer the subject in that direction - and when I laughed and said that Pluto had always seemed to dislike me, math guy stared and me for what seemed like half an hour, shook his head, and said, "Jesus, you're smart, but when you get things wrong you really get them wrong." I never asked for clarification, and math guy died a few years later, so I'll never get it.

Secondly, one time when I was walking to my Dad's house with a couple other friendly acquaintances - again, not close friends - a boy appeared out of nowhere and started walking with me. He was sweet and charming and cute, and he talked to me for a good twenty minutes, and offered to carry my bag. I didn't recognise him, and assumed he was from the year above - it was a big school (by English standards), with perhaps 500-600 kids spread over seven classes, and while I knew all the kids in my class I didn't know all that many from the other classes. Much later, one of the girls I'd been walking with that day mentioned how Pluto had carried my bag for me and talked to me. I was shocked to find that the charming boy of that day, who I'd been vainly searching for in school, was actually my tormentor.

This may sound odd to you, but I suffer from a condition called prosopagnosia - face blindness. People with this condition (although it comes in varying levels of seriousness - mine is moderate) find it difficult to recognise faces as a whole, without thinking about it. I recognise my mother, and one or two people that I've known for many years, but most people - even close friends - require some thinking about. I can put features together to make a composite, but it takes me a little while. My brain can see a friend and say, "High cheekbones, broad face, pointed chin, green eyes, freckles, blonde hair - it must be Sasha." But I have to do it consciously, whereas most people recognise familiar faces unconsciously. Also, context matters a great deal. If I see Sasha in a place that I was meant to meet her, I'll recognise her with few problems. If I accidentally run into her in our town, it'll take me a few moments to kick my brain into gear. If I run into her in an unexpected place, say in Manchester or abroad, my brain will struggle to recognise her at all. And if she dyes her hair black or wears heavy makeup or a push-up bra? Forget it. And that's Sasha, who I've known for twelve years.

I'd known Pluto for a year or two at that point. I'd never seen him with anything other than his regular hairstyle - his hair spiked with gel that made it look black. But on this afternoon it was brown and soft and shiny and flopped in his eyes - I guess he'd had a shower after gym and forgotten to style it. We were all wearing uniform. I'd never known him to walk home that way before. I had no chance of recognising him.

I wish I had. I wish that I'd known that the sweet boy I was talking to was him, because maybe that could have opened a door to friendship.

Thirdly, a month or two after the crystal incident, I got a present in the mail. It was an utterly beautiful pair of silver earrings, with a piece of lapis in the centre. They came in a white box, and written on the box was a note, signed with his first name. It is a common name - I know at least four other boys who have it, boys that are closer to me than he was, and I have no real reason to think the earrings were from him, particularly since he would have had to get my address from someone at school. But it did always make me wonder.

[Edit: I searched for, and finally found, the earrings, although not the box.]

One of the last days I saw him at school, we were sitting in reception at lunchtime, waiting on teachers. He looked sad and tired, and I wanted to lean over to him, and tell him how extraordinary he was.

Why didn't I do that?

I'm not writing this well. I want to tell you all the wonderful things about him, all the reasons why he shone, but I don't know how to express those things. So many of them were intangible. He was a wonderful artist, and had a keen intellect - on the few times he spoke up in class. But so much of his beauty was hidden. You're probably reading this note and wondering why I loved him. I can't tell you why. All I can tell you is that there was so much beauty under the surface.

We left school. I saw him once at a nightclub, and once at a party, and once across a platform at a crowded station. Even there, my eyes were drawn to him. Then I never saw him again.

I occasionally searched, as I did for many of the people I went to school with. I did Google searches in the year or two after school finished, with the vague idea in the back of my mind that I could say hi and maybe bury whatever invisible hatchet there was. I never found him. The few friends I kept in touch with shook their heads and said they didn't know. Usually they followed this with, "Why would you want to get in touch with him? You hated each other in school!"

That was why, although I could never verbalise my feelings to my friends. I still can't put them out here, quite. I never had a satisfactory resolution to the question of why he disliked me. I don't like unfinished business.

So I looked for him. I never found him. I wondered if he had died, and I mourned. By the time Facebook rolled around, it didn't occur to me to search. Until recently.

Recently, I found out that he didn't die. The reason I never found him is that he got famous and changed his name.

You'd think that my feelings upon hearing this would be envy, or wistfulness, and there's a dollop of those in there. But the overwhelming emotions, the things that fill my heart and make it want to shatter, are pride and joy. I'm so proud of him. It's not my place to be, but I am anyway. And the joy I feel is tremendous. The thought that a boy who seemed so unhappy most of the time, who spent so much time in the shadows, unseen, is now established in a career that he loves where he's respected by thousands - that lifts my soul more than I can say.

Music is his speciality, which surprised me, because I had never known him to be a musician. He was an excellent artist, and had a wellspring of creativity, but I'd never known his musical side.

I YouTubed him, and listened, with tears streaming down my face. His music is piercingly beautiful.

There's a place in Menorca, called the Cova d'en Xoroi, that's entirely made of a network of caves in the side of a cliff overlooking the ocean. Many years ago it was made into a nightclub, but it remains mostly natural - the only things that have been added are necessities like bars and toilets, and a couple of outdoor terraces with chairs and loungers. When the moon is in the right phase, it rises over the ocean. You can sit in a chair on the terrace, with the ocean breeze blowing, ambient trance music - the favourite of most of the club's DJs - playing at just the right volume inside, and the moon in front of you, making a silver path on the waves that looks for all the world like you can walk on it.

That's how Pluto's music feels to me. It feels like the moon and the ocean and the cool breeze in my hair. It breaks my heart and lifts it up simultaneously. Much as he did, all those years ago.

Chances are I will never write to him. If I do, I'll just be another douchebag from school who wants something now that he's famous. I won't do that. My years of wanting something from him are over.

But I'll keep him on my iPod. I'll listen. I'll probably cry from time to time, with sadness for a boy who carried the weight of the world on him, and happiness and pride for a man who has become more brilliant than even I could ever have imagined.

Pinterested?

Because I'm an eejit who apparently doesn't think she has enough internet crap to keep her busy, you can now find me pinning my fashion must-haves (and occasionally just WANTS) at Pinterest under the name TheNordicAlien. Since Sati was taken and starlight_crystal was apparently too long. Feel free to drop in.