Question: What does it feel like to get shot?

I was shot in the leg when I was 11, by one of the sons of my mother's then boyfriend. No particular reason, they just felt like it. *shrugs* I don't know exactly what kind of gun or bullet it was - I'm English, we don't "do" guns - but I know it was a rifle. Not an air rifle. The bullet lodged in my leg rather than passing through, made an entrance wound that was quite small but larger under the skin, and left several fragments. Maybe someone who knows firearms can extrapolate something from that (if you care that much about the details), but that's the limit of my knowledge when it comes to the type of gun and ammo.

(Apologies if I'm getting any of the terms wrong.)

I'm going to try and explain the way it felt, but it may not make sense to readers, as I find it impossible to separate the physical feelings from the emotional feelings that I had at the time.

I remember that I was bent over at the time - I was hanging out washing - and when the bullet hit me, I pitched forward and hit the ground head first. I don't know if whacking my head had any effect on my thoughts and feelings at the time. It's hard to explain how the bullet wound felt - it hurt and it didn't hurt at the same time. I was aware that there was pain, but the pain felt sort of irrelevant, because what I was most concerned with was a feeling of shattering. At the time, I was convinced that I'd been caught in an explosion - perhaps that I'd stepped on a landmine. I lay there on the grass, feeling myself disintegrate into dust and vapour, and for a while - seconds, minutes, hours, who knows? - it didn't occur to me to get up, because I felt like there was no 'me' left to move. I fully believed I was dead at that point, and all I could think was, So I guess that's that, then.

The sound of the boys laughing was what brought me back initially. Neither of them came to check on me, but I could hear them up by the house. I glanced around and caught sight of my hand, which confused me - How can I still have a hand if I'm nothing but dust and red mist? Who is 'I' anyway?Then I became aware of the pain once again, but in an abstract way. I recognised that I was in pain, but it didn't really affect me.

(I should mention that this sort of depersonalisation is something that I'm prone to, and always have been, so it wasn't necessarily caused by the shock of being shot, though that may have added to it. I switch into "robot mode" when confronted with any sort of emergency, which makes me able to cope with most kinds of pain, as well as excellent in a crisis. The downside is an aloofness and lack of empathy during crisis periods. If you need to be rescued and taken to safety, or you need a situation resolved rapidly, I'm your girl. If you need comfort, hopefully there's someone else around to give it, because that's not my forte, though I'm quite capable of giving comfort and sympathy during normal times.)

I made my way to my bedroom in a sort of daze, and got the first aid kit from the bathroom. It never occurred to me to call my mother, or her boyfriend, or an ambulance, nor to ask the boys for help. I've always been used to taking care of myself. With the help of a mirror (and a lot of thankfulness for the fact that I used to take ballet and have always been limber), I started picking bullet fragments out of my leg. I remember thinking that the world had shrunk, because the hole looked so tiny, and I couldn't figure out how it was possible for something that felt so big to look so small. The pain got progressively worse as I worked on it, but it didn't really affect me. I had a job to do, and pain was irrelevant. I got out what I thought was everything, disinfected the wound, slapped a dressing on and took a nap.

Over the next few days, the pain got worse, and once the crisis was over I actually started to feel the pain rather than just being aware of it. It was hideous - I don't have a good comparison for it, but it felt sort of like a contact burn that went on and on; like putting your hand on a hot grill and not removing it. When I came down to breakfast with a fever and a sweaty face, about four days after being shot, I confessed to my mom. I don't remember exactly what happened then, but I know I ended up getting the rest of the fragments, and the infected tissue, removed by a professional under local anaesthetic, and getting a nasty course of oral antibiotics that put me off my food for a month or so. If I'd been in America, it probably would have been a hospital stay, but England is a patch-them-up-and-send-them-home country, and I was back in my own bed by nighttime.

It hurt for a long time. Once the infection was gone, the ache continued - the closest thing I've felt to it was having a tooth pulled. Sometimes it still burns, if I get extremely hot or extremely cold. If I let my skin get too dry, I occasionally get a tugging sensation in the scar tissue that's not terribly pleasant. Moisturising cream only does so much, so when it gets dry I find the best thing I can do is eat an avocado every day for a week or so, which seems to fix the dehydrated skin. Sounds weird, but it works for me.

I can still feel the puckered skin with my fingers, although there are times when it's obvious and times when it feels almost normal to the touch. Regardless of how it feels to my fingers, I can always find it without a problem - the sensitivity has never gone away. I don't know how visible it is - it's on the back of my right thigh, right below my buttock, and I've never been curious enough to try and see it with a hand mirror. The last person who asked to see it said it was really visible and clearly a bullet wound, but that was in 2003. According to her, it's about the size of an average thumbnail (perhaps 1.25 - 1.5 cm diameter), paler than the surrounding skin, and sort of shiny.

If I ever tell people the story - which I don't often - I make a joke out of it, and tell them I was shot in the butt. "Shot in the leg" draws gasps of horror; "shot in the ass" makes people giggle.

I don't think about it much these days, except when it's hurting. Life happens, you know? It's not the worst thing that ever happened to me. Probably not even in the top 5.

That said, twenty years on I still have dreams. Sometimes when I'm asleep, I hear and feel a huge explosion. Sometimes it's a bomb, but usually the image I get in my mind is a huge crystal - larger than a person, clear and brilliant with shimmering lights on a million facets - being shattered by some force inside it. Shards fly off in every direction, and even though I can see the crystal, at the same time I understand that it's actually me who's shattering into splinters and diamond dust. I jerk awake in shock and horror, unsure whether I'm alive or dead. And the lone thought running through my head is always the same as it was that day. So I guess that's that, then.

My doctor calls this Exploding Head Syndrome, which is a (very odd) parasomnia with unknown cause. I'm never sure whether the doc is right, or if I'm just reliving the memory, or if it's some combination of the two. Either way, it leaves me haunted and uneasy for several hours after.

This post originally appeared on www.quora.com.

Holding Back The Darkness

WARNING: dark and triggery.

I've never raised a child. I was foster mommy for two years to a teenager, and I've played the roles of surrogate mom, big sister, counsellor and teacher to three dozen other teens over the years, but I've never been responsible for raising a child fully; for instilling values in someone.

I've read a lot about parenting. All the books in the world can't make up for lack of hands-on experience. That said, time and books and interactions with other humans have taught me some of the key things that kids need. Not all, but some. They need love, support, room to explore and learn for themselves and still know someone will catch them when they fall. They need discipline that's firm but not cruel, and that knows when to bend. They need space to grow up gradually and take on more responsibilities and privileges as they grow, rather than being wrapped in cotton wool for eighteen years and then overnight handed freedom that they won't have learned to use wisely. They need to know that mistakes are okay as long as you learn from them, that they don't have to know everything and get everything right, that one of the main things that makes any relationship strong is the ability to forgive and be forgiven.

They also need to get gentle reality checks. Kids are dreamers. They're excitable. They need to know that dreams are good but better if they have solid foundations; that hope is always a good thing if you also have resilience when things go wrong. That life is a mix of good and bad. That sometimes they won't get that job offer no matter how hard they try; that sometimes they'll get their heart broken; that not everything is fair. That they're wonderful and loved and special to their parents, but they're not the centre of the universe.

I never got the memo for that last bit.

I was born for one purpose and have lived for thirty years with that single goal in mind: keeping my mother alive and sane. From the first time that my stepfather and brother patted me on the head and told me to be a big girl and look after mom - I think I was two at the time - my mother's wellbeing has been my main, if not sole, concern.

I clearly remember the first time my mother tried to kill herself. At least, the first time since I was born. Oddly, I don't know how old I was. I can use a few markers to estimate - we're at Daddy Mike's house on Beaumont Avenue, and I'm old enough to read, and Tony still has the light blue car with the tail fins, so I'm somewhere between 2 and 5 - but I can't pinpoint it further than that. Mama's been acting strangely for a few days, and this morning she dropped me at Daddy Mike's house and then disappeared. She's somewhere in the house, I know, because she guards me militantly and wouldn't leave without saying goodbye - she doesn't even let me stay with babysitters, and never goes out alone. Daddy's wringing his hands and looking worried, and I know he doesn't know how to deal with me - he's not used to looking after me, so I'm trying to be unobtrusive and not make trouble for anyone. He's given me orange-and-pineapple squash and some of those hard biscuits with the scalloped edges and the raisins (the type that come in a tea time selection pack and are always left after I eat the jam ones and the chocolate ones) - two things I hate, but I don't complain. I want mama. But daddy says she wants to be alone and that I should let her be, and I have to stay in the front room with my squash and biscuits and book.

It's a book of children's poetry, half as tall as I am, and it's a struggle to keep it on my lap, but I sit on the pale blue couch with the white diamond pattern, with my doll and brown bear by my side and the book on my lap, and I get caught up in nursery rhymes about the sun and moon, and mice, and the jabberwocky, and a spinning dreidel - what's a dreidel? Maybe daddy knows, but daddy's gone off somewhere too - and flowers and cats and ribbons:

Run a little this way,
Run a little that,
Fine new flowers
For a fine straw hat.
A fine straw hat
For a lady fair -
Run around and turn about
And jump in the air!

Run a little this way,
Run a little that,
White silk ribbon
For a black silk cat.
A black silk cat
For the Lord Mayor's wife,
Run around and dance about
And jump for your life!

Mama said I could have my own cat, but I think she's forgotten. I want a black silk cat with a white silk ribbon, and a straw hat with flowers on. Maybe if I find mama she'll take me to buy a cat? I put the book down and search for mama. I don't find her in the house, or daddy, but I can hear someone outside so I walk into the back garden and follow the noise.

Mama's not in the garden. She's in the shed halfway down the garden. The door's shut, but I can hear sounds coming from it, like somebody's hurt, so I open the door. Mama's hiding, sitting on the floor behind an old mattress with her knees pulled up to her chest. She's crying - that's nothing new, because she's always crying - but this is different, she's crying and choking and it sounds like she's trying to scream but her throat won't make the screaming sounds. She's chewing on her hand and wrist, shoving them into her mouth and down her throat, and she's been sick several times, all down the front and the arm of the black rollneck sweater that I like so much, but it's not enough, she keeps making herself sicker and sicker, clawing at her face and mouth and throat, and she's babbling about how maybe if she takes things to make her sick like Micky did then she'll die like Micky did - Micky was my brother, he got sick in his sleep and died a few years ago - and how she wants to die. I'm there, right in front of her, begging her to stop, but she doesn't even see me.

I scream. It seems like I'm screaming forever, but eventually Daddy comes. He shoves me aside and screams at mama to tell him what she's done. What did you take, Carol? Drugs? Rat poison?

I don't know what happens then. Everything goes blank for a while. Mama goes away, I don't know for how long, and then when she comes back she's still sad but she pretends to be happy. Until anything goes wrong. She gets sad easily when things go wrong. If I scrape my knee or hit my head, she falls apart and cries and wails about what a bad mother she is. If I'm ever rude or ungrateful, she gets angry and then gets sick and cries.

So I guess I just have to make sure nothing ever goes wrong, right?

And this is what I did for years. Tried to be perfect, to make sure everything in life was as close to perfect as was possible. I went to school and laughed and made sure everyone knew everything was fine. I got good grades and scored the highest marks on tests. I was friendly and sweet and well-liked, but not *too* friendly, which was a difficult balancing act - I needed to be popular enough that my mom would be proud and happy, but not so popular that it would make demands on my time that would cut into my time with her. If I kept life running along smoothly, if I made sure I was never sad and never angry and never rude or insensitive or cruel, then mama would stay happy, or happy enough, and if she stayed happy then she would stay alive.

Some kids go off the rails when they have this kind of upbringing. Some, like me, gain an overactive sense of responsibility and a tremendous capacity for guilt. Because sometimes I wasn't happy. Sometimes I was sad or angry or rude or insensitive, and I made my mother cry, or scream, or get sick. And every time this happened, I mentally and emotionally - and at times, physically - flagellated myself. I still do, any time I step out of line even a little. Not just with my mother - with anyone. The smallest offence that I commit feels like a mortal sin to me.

My mother, ironically enough, took courses in psychology and grief therapies over the years, and eventually became a counsellor. I say ironically because, while she became excellent at helping others to cope with their tragedies, she is almost entirely lost when it comes to understanding her daughter. Some post-traumatic amnesia came into play with her, and she has little to no memory of the years of meltdowns and suicide threats. Sometimes she will talk about what an idyllic childhood I had - and to be fair, when it wasn't hideous it was wonderful, there was nothing inbetween - and as she cannot remember, she cannot understand where my crushing burden of guilt and responsibility comes from. Nobody in the family talks about that dark time, nobody even acknowledges that anything happened. To acknowledge it would be to admit that leaving a grief-stricken, suicidal woman who'd previously struggled with bipolar disorder and probable borderline personality disorder in the care of a child under five was not an okay thing to do. And nobody wants to admit that.

Ironic it is, that a family who are so good at talking the talk about the need for openness and good communication, are so very good at sweeping things under the carpet, both amongst ourselves and when dealing with the world in general. We give the impression of being a close family. We give the impression of being strong, happy, mentally healthy, sociable.

After she recovered from that first breakdown, my mom had others occasionally, when anything went badly - but never in public. Behind closed doors she was often sick or depressed or occasionally raging (although not all, or even the majority of the time - I don't mean to give the impression that the meltdowns were a daily, or even a weekly, thing; indeed much of the time everything was happy-happy, the way manic-depressives often are), but in public she was the charming ingenue that everybody loved. This has continued to this day - although she is something of a recluse now, and it's a struggle to get her out of bed some days, when she DOES go out she shines golden light upon everyone she meets. Everybody loves my mother. Literally, everybody. I can't think of a single person who doesn't get on well with her. There have been a few people in the past who weren't captivated by her, but all, bar none, have come round in time. Even the ex-wives of her past boyfriends, even the widow of the neighbour she had a fling with - they chat to her in a friendly manner and tell me constantly what a nice person she is. My friends today all love her. My friends from school all used to wish she was their mom.

It is odd that a woman so universally liked doesn't have any real friends. But over the last decade, and probably a few more years besides, she hasn't been willing to put in the effort to make and keep people close to her. For years I reminded, nagged, cajoled and occasionally bribed her to return phone calls or make coffee dates or write letters to any of the people who were constantly trying to keep in touch with her. Now I've stopped trying, and they've stopped calling and writing, although if we run into them at any time, they still want to chat with her. I don't know if she's lonely. Sometimes she'll say something about how she doesn't have any friends, but any time I make suggestions about how she can meet people, she finds a reason to reject them.

Nothing ever mattered much to mom other than her husband and children. Her husband was gone long ago - my mom and my Daddy Mike (who is not my biological father) were separated long before I was born, although they are only in the process of divorcing now - and when we lost my brother, a part of her died too. Tony, my surviving brother, was already in university at the time Micky died, and he has never moved back home with my mom. He was established in the life of a normal young man, and has progressed through life in a similar way to most of his peers. Oh, he has had his ups and downs, but his life has been reasonably normal. He had already had eighteen years of normality before our family broke. He knew how to carry on the pattern once the dust settled.

By contrast, I have been the touchstone that links my mother to the world. I have been the caretaker, the security blanket to which she clings so tightly.

I didn't go out much with the neighbourhood kids when I was younger. I was always the one who wasn't allowed to leave the garden. I barely dated in high school. The few casual boyfriends that I had, I hid from everyone lest word get back to my mother that I was doing something risky like dating. I am now thirty years old and I have never had a proper boyfriend, never lived with a man except the one who rented a room from my mother, never taken a vacation with a man or alone. Never had someone that I was committed to above all else. How could I, when I was already committed?

I have had a succession of part-time, low-paying jobs, most of them temporary, because for years I have listened to her worries of how my health is too poor to handle a normal job, how I am too fragile to work full-time at something that would be demanding and pay well. I currently work from home, 24 hours a week, for which I bring home about £2500 a year. Yes, I am disabled and physically fragile. But I do not believe that this should have prevented me from trying to do a normal job. Plenty of people who are sick and disabled work outside the home. Plenty of sick and disabled people go to university and try for a degree, even if it takes them twice as long to complete as the average student, but although I was accepted to five medical schools - including Brunel, which runs a program that gets more than a thousand undergrad applications every year and accepts eighty of them - I let myself be convinced that I couldn't handle going to school full-time.

I have never ridden a motorbike. Never parachuted. Never scuba dived in the ocean (though I trained in a pool) or gone white-water rafting. My mother begs me to "PLEASE be careful, and don't overdo" when I go to the gym to spend half an hour on the treadmill and crosstrainer.

I will be running and walking a 5K in June, the first physical challenge I have ever set myself. It's important to me. Nobody will be there to watch me. Mom thinks it would be too nerve-wracking for her to be there. She doesn't say whether she's worried about my nerves or her own.

I lived away from my mother once, for a year, to attend a sixth form college when I was 17. She seemed reasonably healthy then. She was living in Spain, enjoying better physical health than normal (in addition to her emotional issues, she has bad osteoarthritis, and has had a hip replacement and many surgeries on her spine), and had friends, including a steady man friend. We coped with the separation quite well, until my health started to deteriorate and she came home to take care of me. Since I moved back into her home at the end of that year, I have spent less than forty nights away from her, most of them spent house-sitting for my father and stepmother, or visiting them. In the last fourteen years the sum total of my vacations have been a day and two nights in Germany in 2004 (with my mother), four days visiting a boyfriend in Liverpool in 2008 (the one and only time I ever put my foot down and said that I was going to visit this man whether she liked it or not), and one night alone in the Hatfield Travelodge - five miles away - for my birthday last year.

The funny thing about all this is that people look in from the outside and think that I'm getting a pretty cushy deal. Living at home with your mother looking after you, cooking your dinner and doing your laundry! Rent-free! What an ungrateful daughter you must be, to think that you could ever complain! You should be thanking her every day, and paying your share of the rent and bills! What people don't see is that I spend hours every day helping her bathe and dress, reminding her to eat or to put on more clothes if she's cold, moving furniture and boxes because she can't decide where she wants them, sorting out her medication, emptying her bedpans, washing her hair, buying groceries, trying to rid the house of some of the hoards that she's managed to acquire, seeing to accounts, making sure mail is read and answered, trying to make sure she gets out of bed and dressed every day, trying to keep things clean and tidy - almost all of it against her will. The hours that I'm not actively working, I'm on call. I'm on call 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, aside from the few hours a week that I spend in class or grocery shopping or at the gym. I rarely go out for anything other than those three things. I sleep lightly and hypervigilantly, on constant alert for sickness or asthma attacks. I try not to lose my patience. If I did, it wouldn't be the end of the world - while her physical health has declined greatly in the last few years, and she's become more reclusive, she's also been blessed with much more stable moods, and if I ever say something insensitive or impatient or snappy, at worst it causes an argument and some hurt feelings, and often it just gets laughed off. I still beat myself up over those moments. It's become a habit by now.

I do my own laundry, btw, as well as hers most of the time, and cook for myself if I'm ever hungry, which I'm not often.

And I am very vulnerable to criticism when it comes to my relationship with my mother, and my treatment of her. In my head I know that I am not rotten or neglectful or cruel. But my heart and gut never manage to get the message. You would think that with as much criticism as I've taken over it, as many people who've accused me over the years of being a terrible daughter, that I'd be used to it. I'm not. Every time someone accuses me of mistreating her, of not honouring her the way kids should honour their parents, of being cold or mean, it sinks into me, a stone in the depths of my belly that I can't ever reach to remove. Any time someone accuses me of being a bad daughter it just echoes everything that I've ever told myself, everything about myself that I hate, that I've hated ever since I gained the ability to think. Everything that I've felt deep down since I was born and my brother died, since my birth became the catalyst for a chain of events that broke us. That voice inside tells me that I broke my family, and anything that I have to do to patch it up - even though those patches are never anything but temporary bandaids - any sacrifices that I have to make, are nothing less than I deserve. No matter how much the things people say hurt, they're only echoes of what I've always believed about myself. No judgements that you can make about me will be harsher than my own.

I love my mother, and I know she loves me more than anything. She carried me for nine months, gave birth to me, nursed me as a child and then again as a sick adult, lived a life of poverty because of her beloved parasite daughter. I owe her. So I did what had to be done, and if I had to, I'd do it again. As a teenager - and sometimes an adult - I did it grudgingly, and I regret that more than I can say, and will spend the rest of my life trying to make up for it.

A Month of Blogs - How Not To Fall In Downward Dog

How Not to Fall in Downward Dog

Suggested by Dee Dee M.


As a writer who seems to have hit a low point in creativity and / or just getting off my ass and writing, I signed myself up to write 31 blog posts during October - one a day - on any subjects that are suggested to me. The only rules for suggestions are that they can't be anything that involve me having to take on a particular viewpoint (so no "Why I Hate Twilight" or "Why Rock Music is the Best Music") - this isn't debating class, and right now I'm not interested in trying to argue something that I may or may not agree with. Anything else goes - it can be a specific subject or a broad one, one that I've written about in the past or something new that will need research. If you're interested in playing along, you can leave a comment here, or email me at thenordicalien@gmail.com. (I'll try and remember to check there, honest!)
I was both intrigued and worried when I got this post request, which is why I'm writing it out of the order that it came in. The worrying part was whether I'd actually be able to write it, since a) I haven't taken a yoga class since 2005; and b) when I did, I was too busy giggling with my friend over the term "downward dog" to have committed much to memory. The intriguing part is also the above, since it's a post that I knew would take research, and the possibility of learning something new is always an intriguing one.

My first port of call was YouTube videos. The comments on these indicated that I was going to be cringing by the end, but when I started to play the clips, things didn't look so bad. Oh, THAT one! I exclaimed. I remember that position! I wonder if I can still do it? I got off my bed onto the floor, adopted a very undignified position on my hands and knees, stomach and breasts swinging unrestrainedly, curled my toes under, and pushed up into an approximation of downward dog. Ten seconds later I had a puffy red eye from taking a boob to the face, but I also had a feeling of accomplishment.

Note to self: wear a sports bra while attempting yoga.

So admittedly, I didn't see too many problems with this position. I think this may have something to do with an unconventional childhood full of unconventional pastimes, one of which was pony-vaulting. For the uninitiated, pony-vaulting is basically a form of horse-based gymnastics. Yoga poses, ballet poses, eventual handstands and headstands and somersaults...all of it on (or off of) the back of a cantering horse. It was the one and only dangerous thing my mother ever let me do, and I'm grateful for it, although I never got up to the handstand stage. I spent my early years in Menorca, and in the eighties it was a little dead in the winter, and we were only doing half days in school at this point, so Robbie (my childhood friend) and I found ourselves enrolled in this thoroughly bizarre circus gym class twice a week in the afternoons. Robbie was much better at it than I was, as a result of having twice my energy levels, a daredevil streak wider than the Mississippi, and a mother who didn't freak out over every little thing he did. We learned to ride bareback; to ride backwards; to spin around on our butts ("la molina" - the windmill); to balance on one hand and one knee while we raised an arm and the opposite leg high in the air ("la bandera" - the flag); to lie on our stomach and bend a leg behind us at both the hip and knee so the sole of our foot touched the top of our head (I think that one had a name, but I don't remember what it was).

Long story short: if you can pull off a yoga pose while balancing on a large sorrel gelding named Chianti, you can probably do it anywhere.

However, that doesn't mean that you can do it well. Or that you can communicate how to do it to anyone else. So with that in mind, I decided to ask a professional.

Haley Blackman is the owner and yoga teacher at The Beauty of Yoga, based in London and Herts. She teaches Hatha, Hatha Flow and Yin Yoga, and she was nice enough to write me some easy-to-follow (I hope!) instructions to quote for this post.

Keep fingers spread and push the top of the mat away from the body, really pressing down with the triangle between the forefingers and thumb, says Haley. Keep eyes of the elbows facing one another, triceps rolled outwards, shoulders away from ears. Cinch in the waist, extend up through the torso like a telescope and extend the chest towards the thighs. Sitting bones are lifted towards the sky. Lift the knees to engage the quads, lift through the shins. Heels are gently reaching towards the floor. Keep breathing slowly and deeply. Once these body parts are activated the pose can be held.

So there you have it. I may have to take another class to be able to picture these instructions fully - and if I do, I'll write a Part 2 to this post - but hopefully anyone who knows the basics of yoga will be able to understand.

Me, I have plenty more bicep curls and oblique-strengthening exercises to do until I can hold my downward dog comfortably for more than five seconds. :)


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A Month of Blogs - Are Dogs Really Man's Best Friend?

Are Dogs Really Man's Best Friend?

Suggested by Joanna J.

As a writer who seems to have hit a low point in creativity and / or just getting off my ass and writing, I signed myself up to write 31 blog posts during October - one a day - on any subjects that are suggested to me. The only rules for suggestions are that they can't be anything that involve me having to take on a particular viewpoint (so no "Why I Hate Twilight" or "Why Rock Music is the Best Music") - this isn't debating class, and right now I'm not interested in trying to argue something that I may or may not agree with. Anything else goes - it can be a specific subject or a broad one, one that I've written about in the past or something new that will need research. If you're interested in playing along, you can leave a comment here, or email me at thenordicalien@gmail.com. (I'll try and remember to check there, honest!)

I was talking to my ex on whatsapp while I was writing this post, and when he asked me what I was writing, I told him.

"They're not," he said.

"Personally, I think books are man's best friend," I said.

I was expecting him to say something about cats. He's very much a cat person.

"Boobs are man's best friend," said he.

That story has nothing to do with this post, but it made me smile.

Are dogs man's best friend? Many people would say yes.

I am not really a dog person, so my answer is a more restrained, sometimes.

I had a dog once. Actually I had two dogs, sort of, except that the first one - a black Lab puppy called Knight, when I was 9 - was bought by my mother's lodger as a joint present for "the kids" (me and her son, who was a couple years younger than me), and was never really my dog at all. I think Sarah only said he was for the two of us as a way of getting him into the house, since I was never allowed to walk him, rarely allowed to play with him, and he met a sad end after a confrontation with a car when he was only a few months old. (Sarah was a not a big believer in rules, thinking that they stifled kids' and animals' natural growth, and her disdain for such things extended to the idea of keeping a very young puppy on a leash when out in public. Eyeroll.)

But I digress.

I had a dog. Bonni was a Jack Russell - her papers said purebred, although mom and I agreed that this was a load of bollocks. Mama said I could have a puppy for my tenth birthday, providing I was responsible for her, and being folks who didn't really know about the need to get dogs from shelters or friends' litters, or at least from registered breeders, we trundled off to a pet shop in Bushey a few days after I turned ten. This was 1994, before shops stopped selling kittens and puppies. The man in the shop had a bunch of Yorkshire Terrier puppies who looked like hairy rats, and one white ball of fluff with brown patches on. He told us that we wouldn't be able to take any of them home today, as they weren't quite ready to be sold, and I remember almost having a meltdown in the store. While my episodes of behaving badly as a kid can be counted probably on one hand (and certainly on two), I had really wanted a puppy to take home. At that age, patience wasn't my strong suit.

Come to think of it, it still isn't. I get crabby waiting for books to come in the mail. I nearly threw a wobbly on Friday because my couriered package of candy corn and mellowcreme pumpkins didn't arrive.

Anyway.

Mom managed to calm me down, and we decided that even if we had to wait, we'd get one of these puppies. Not one of the Yorkshires - neither mom nor I have ever been fond of that breed - but the white and brown fluffball. We went and told the man, and he seemed shocked that I wanted her. That one? He said. Oh, you can take that one home with you now. I didn't realise you wanted that one.

By this time I had built up quite an amount of loathing for the man, but I was so thrilled to be getting my very own dog that we paid and took her home. This was the beginning of a very strange, tempestuous, often frustrating relationship.

Bonni was neurotic. There really isn't any other way to say it. You know those girls you see on TV and if you're unlucky, in real life - the ones who are quivering masses of tension, who cry every time they get picked last for gym, who cling to their boyfriends as though they have no way of breathing or moving on their own, who treat every disappointment, from relationship breakups to bad grades to broken fingernails as though it were a life-altering crisis? Those girls? Bonni was the canine equivalent. I've never worked out if this was due to abuse that she suffered before we got her, or something that I did wrong, or if she just picked up on my mother's anxiety disorders and tendency to cling. Probably all of the above. My mom can be a limpet at times - although she's better now than she was when I was a kid - and animals definitely pick up on human behaviour. I certainly knew nothing about training a puppy, and I failed her grossly in that regard. And she was almost certainly abused and / or neglected by the pet shop owner, or the breeder before him. When we first took her to the vet, the vet was so furious at her state that she had to leave the room for several minutes before she could talk to us. She had more fleas and worms than the vet had ever seen, there were patches of red, inflamed skin infection on her forelegs, she had mastitis, her tail had been docked, and she was at least four weeks younger than her papers said - meaning that we got her when she was less than a month old.

(I am happy to say that the vet managed to get the pet shop closed down shortly after that, and the shop owner prosecuted.)

I'd like to inject a serious piece of advice / warning here - don't ever buy a dog for a child, or even for yourself, without doing your research first. Find out how to raise a dog right, if you've never raised one before. Research different breed characteristics to find out what sort of breed / mix would suit you, rather than just buying the first one you find that looks cute. Read as many books as you can and be prepared to shell out the money for a comprehensive obedience / house-training course if you're buying a puppy. Don't even consider getting a dog if you have a hair-trigger temper, or an aversion to rules, or control issues.

We did it wrong. We loved our puppy, but we should never have had her. We didn't have the money to get her professionally trained, and she was untrainable at home. We didn't have the time and energy to walk her for the several hours a day that a dog with so much energy required. Mom has always had issues with control, and having had children who were almost unfailingly obedient and respectful, she took Bonni's disobedience and challenges to authority as a personal insult. We screwed up in every possible way. This is what I mean when I say that I am not a dog person. I don't have the patience or personal skills to raise a dog to be happy and well-adjusted. I can just barely handle cats.

But oh, how I loved her, even when she drove me round the bend. During the first year, we took her to school quite often to show her off to the other kids. As a young dog, she enjoyed the company of people she didn't know, although she got crabby around strangers when she got older. We used to walk in the woods after school most days, for an hour or so. Other days we'd go to the park and throw sticks. She had an incredible grip - something Jack Russells are known for - and she loved to play tug-of-war with sticks or her leash. Imagine the horror that mom and I experienced when we were playing one day and a couple of her teeth flew out. We rushed her straight to the vet, who laughed and explained that puppies lose their milk teeth, same as human kids. Neither of us had had any idea.

When she got a little older, we got her one of the microchip passports, and took her to Spain with us, where we used to run along the beach and bark and the waves. Yes, we. I've done my share of running and barking.

As she got older, she got more and more clingy. She'd cry if you left her outside for more than five minutes, even in the summer. She'd cry when you locked her in the kitchen. She was a compulsive licker and jumper. My allergies worsened as I got older, to the point that I had red weals over my body most of the time from her dander, and if she licked me my skin would start to peel off, so I didn't spend as much cuddling time as she wanted. (Although I think anything less than 100% of the time would have been less than she wanted.) I wish there'd been a dog whisperer around to help me train her and make her feel better, but at that time I'd never heard of such a thing.

She reminds me of my mother in so many ways.

Bonni survived until she was 16, when she started getting sick. We're not sure what was wrong with her, because she didn't make it to the vet's appointment. She had a big lump on her head one day. The next day it was bigger and she was having trouble walking and standing up. Next day she was gone.

Sometimes I think I would like to get a dog again. I like dogs much in the way that I like children - that is, I like to borrow a friend's and then be able to give them back at the end of the day. I like to read about dogs. Dean Koontz writes his canine companions particularly well - some are super-smart, genetically engineered dogs (he's a thriller / sci-fi writer) and others are ordinary, friendly, loyal, wonderful pups that anyone would be thrilled to call part of the family.

I read Koontz, and I think I want this. Then I realise, I don't really know how to cope with family.

Dogs probably are man's best friend. That said, not all people do well having best friends. Some of us find too much closeness to be stifling. Some of us don't like having anyone around who relies on us too much. And that's OK.

After all, there's always cats.

Or Pokemon.

Some of Dean Koontz's books with awesome dogs:

Watchers - featuring a genetically enhanced golden retriever with a wicked sense of humor - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32423.Watchers .

One Door Away From Heaven - featuring a boy who can form human-dog friendship bonds - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15746.One_Door_Away_from_Heaven .

The Darkest Evening of the Year - featuring a dog who came back as an angel - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/379316.The_Darkest_Evening_of_the_Year .

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A Month of Blogs - If I Could Snap My Fingers And Be Anywhere, Where Would It Be?

If I Could Snap My Fingers And Be Anywhere, Where Would It Be?

Suggested by Chris P.


As a writer who seems to have hit a low point in creativity and / or just getting off my ass and writing, I signed myself up to write 31 blog posts during October - one a day - on any subjects that are suggested to me. The only rules for suggestions are that they can't be anything that involve me having to take on a particular viewpoint (so no "Why I Hate Twilight" or "Why Rock Music is the Best Music") - this isn't debating class, and right now I'm not interested in trying to argue something that I may or may not agree with. Anything else goes - it can be a specific subject or a broad one, one that I've written about in the past or something new that will need research. If you're interested in playing along, you can leave a comment here, or email me at thenordicalien@gmail.com. (I'll try and remember to check there, honest!)

Where would I be? The Star Light Zone in the Mega Drive / Genesis version of Sonic the Hedgehog.

I fell in love with the Star Light Zone when I first played Sonic, back in 1991. For those of you who've never played the game - have you been living under a rock? - the Star Light Zone is a large pale green and gray construction site under a black sky filled with thousands of bright stars. As the second-to-last zone in the game (aside from the Final Zone), it is one of the harder zones, filled with unkillable beasties, bottomless pits and spiked balls that you have to use as counterweights on catapults. Yet it is the strangest mix of difficult and peaceful, and I decided the first time I saw it that I wanted to live there.

Nobody had pointed out to this seven-year-old that this would not be possible.

Over the last twenty-some years I've tried to work out why I have such deep affection for a game level, and I've never come up with a satisfactory answer. The closest I can get is that it feels like home. It might be the strange, space-age streetlights that remind me so much of the ones we had in Spain when I was a kid. It might be the astonishing amount of stars that you can see in the sky; stars that, like the streetlights, remind me of a childhood spent where the air was dry and unpolluted and the night sky filled with wonder. It might be the fact that I spent many an hour playing on construction sites as a kid, and find the atmosphere comfortable.

Maybe it's just that it's a city. I've always felt most at home in space-age cities. It's why I originally started studying Japanese, and why I hope to take up Cantonese - Tokyo and Hong Kong are two places that I want to live.

In my early years of playing Sonic, I found it hard to get up as far as Star Light, often turning off the Mega Drive before I got there, and considered it to be a prize that was dangled in front of my face only to be cruelly snatched away. There was a cheat code you could use to access a screen that would allow you to choose your level - on the title screen, you sort of smush your thumb on the D-Pad in all directions at once, while pressing Start, and if you're super-lucky you'll get a brown screen that brings up the level selection - but it was an incredibly hard cheat to manage and usually left me throwing my controller to the ground in frustration even more than the early levels of Sonic did. As an adult, I prefer to think of Star Light as a reward for getting through the sheer awfulness that is Labyrinth Zone. (I HATE the underwater levels on Sonic games. Every. Single. One.)

There are multiple places across the globe - and indeed, in books and movies (Rivendell, anyone?) - that I'd like to visit or live in, as well as places that I'd like to be able to teleport myself to any time I'm in need of a dose of happy. Sports stadiums at night are one of the places where I feel the happiest, and I don't think it's a coincidence that the floodlights remind me of the Star Light Zone.

Thanks to the miracle of YouTube, I can watch other people zipping the little blue critter through my homeland without having to do it myself - handy, since I no longer own a Mega Drive (it disappeared when Ryan did, after being stored in his wardrobe for several months, and I can only assume he accidentally took the bag with him and then was too embarrassed to bring it back when he realised what it was) and I don't often have my GameCube hooked up to the TV. I probably should see if there's a Sonic Collection or a Mega Drive Collection available for GBA or Nintendo DS - I know there's one for PSP that I played when I was staying with Siji. Regardless, YouTube has made it possible to view the Star Light Zone whenever I want.

But there will always be that little part of me that grieves for the fact that I will never be able to live there.


Go see Star Light played (WARNING: He curses a lot, and says "cunt" a lot. I know some people are sensitive about that word.) - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWreQW1-MX4

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A Month of Blogs - Drugs

Drugs

Suggested by Jonny F.


As a writer who seems to have hit a low point in creativity and / or just getting off my ass and writing, I signed myself up to write 31 blog posts during October - one a day - on any subjects that are suggested to me. The only rules for suggestions are that they can't be anything that involve me having to take on a particular viewpoint (so no "Why I Hate Twilight" or "Why Rock Music is the Best Music") - this isn't debating class, and right now I'm not interested in trying to argue something that I may or may not agree with. Anything else goes - it can be a specific subject or a broad one, one that I've written about in the past or something new that will need research. If you're interested in playing along, you can leave a comment here, or email me at thenordicalien@gmail.com. (I'll try and remember to check there, honest!)


Drugs are bad, mmmkay?

- Mr Mackey


I have a friend who's an addict.

Truthfully, I have several friends who are probably (drug) addicts, many more if you add in things like cigarettes and junk food. But right now I'm thinking about one friend in particular. My friend got into drugs lightly as a teen, with pot, and then more heavily as a 20-something. I won't specify what kind of drugs, since that could be seen as identifying evidence, which for obvious reasons would be a bad thing for the purposes of this post. All I'll say is that my friend's choice of drugs doesn't involve needles, and that they started out with a legal - i.e. prescription - drug habit, and slid down that slippery slope into semi-legal and then illegal drugs.

We talk on a fairly regular basis about my friend's habit, as they consider me to be someone they can talk to who won't judge them. (I find this amusing, since I'm one of the most judgemental people I know. I can only assume what they mean is that when I judge them, for the most part I'll keep my opinions to myself unless asked for them, and I'll continue to love them anyway even when I think they've royally fucked up.) One of the things that we've discussed at some length is why my friend's an addict.

On their less honest days, my friend gives me the spiel about needing drugs. They're prescribed by a doctor, they have a medical condition that requires them, etc. I inevitably call bullshit on this, as a) not all the drugs are prescribed by a doctor, at least not for my friend by THEIR doctor; b) my friend buys and sells a whole lot more on the side; c) my friend doesn't use the prescribed drugs in the way that they're meant to be used (think twice as many, and up the nose instead of in the mouth); and d) my friend hasn't had any extensive testing for their medical condition in the years since they were injured and has no real idea whether they still suffer from it. (I could also object due to my feeling that there are other ways to handle an injury than with hard drugs - graduated exercise, CBT, pain management courses - and if you're not willing to explore those ways you shouldn't be prescribed unlimited medication, but that's a personal opinion rather than a fact so I tend to leave that out of my arguments.)

On their more honest days, my friend will talk to me about how good it feels to be buzzed, which really gets down to the bones of it. Highs feel nice. They feel nice enough that people chase them, through all manner of ways. I'm no exception here - I spend much of my free time in search of that elusive bliss, although I tend to chase my highs with exercise, books, nature, hobbies and occasionally food. Everyone does, in one way or another. It seems to be human nature to seek out pleasure and to escape from boredom or pain.

My friend has been through more pain than a lot of people, although more cushiness as well. That dichotomy has set them up for what is perhaps a more persistent need to chase extremes of pleasure than you'll find in many people. A childhood raised by a permissive single parent - and I would like to add the caveat here that none of these things will ensure addiction in the future; simply that the convergence of factors in my friend's case has set them up with the tendency to think that a rollercoaster of extreme highs and lows is normal and necessary - who coddled them and protected them and always allowed them to have their own way, followed by teenage years in which they were blessed with an excess of charm, above average looks, brains and natural athletic ability, followed by the death of several loved ones and a sense of having lost their place in the world, have caused my friend to think of their life as split into two parts: the early part (good) and the later part (bad). Childhood and teenagehood were good and fun and exciting. Adulthood is bad and boring and painful. Drugs are the crutch which both livens up their adult years and dulls a lot of the pain.

This isn't an unusual story. Using drugs as a killer of emotional pain and a thing that makes your life brighter and shinier are two very common things. My friend's case is complicated by the fact that the losses they suffered came right at the beginning of their twenties, as their brain was coming down off the natural high that the teenage years bring. Recent progress in neuroscience has found that teenagers don't think and feel the same way that adult humans do. Impulse control and the ability to plan ahead and stick to that plan are some of the last parts of the brain that develop fully. Perhaps more importantly, the parts of the brain that deal with memory and emotional responses are overloaded by adult standards - although many of my teenagers argue that the teenage brain is the one we're supposed to have, and adults' brains are merely atrophied - causing everything to feel more wonderful, more exciting, more awful. Just more. Nothing is ever quite as emotionally powerful as it is when you're in your teens. No music sticks with you as strongly as the music that you loved when you were young; no memories of wild nights hit you with quite the same degree of nostalgia; few romances are as hard to forget as the ones you had when your volume of gray matter was at its highest and your body was flooded with hormones. Those memories, and the feelings that go with them, are indelibly imprinted on the brain, and even those of us whose teen years were often unbearable tend to look back at the good parts through rose-coloured lenses.

In my friend's case, the combination of the natural highs of the teen years and the fact that the brutal losses they suffered came right at the end of that period have resulted in an uncontrolled yearning for the past, for security, for excitement. The drugs don't bring back the dead, or send my friend back into the past, but they provide an echo of the feelings that are so sorely missed. They will, of course, never provide more than an echo.

I think this is the real reason why I agree with Mr Mackey. Drugs are bad. Not because they wreck your body (plenty of things do), not even because they're dangerous and possibly deadly - although both those things alone are reasons for me personally to stay away. Drugs are bad because they catfish you with pretty promises of feeling good, promises which they can never deliver after the first few times, unless you take more and more of them.

Of course, I lost a brother to a drug overdose when I was a kid. I'm biased.

Probably not everyone who becomes addicted to drugs is trying to revive their teenage years, although I'd hazard a guess that a large portion of them are. But I feel reasonably safe in saying that everyone who becomes addicted, and stays addicted, is either escaping from pain, escaping from boredom through the chasing of larger and larger highs, or some combination of the two.

Is chasing a high necessarily a bad thing? Can you be a social drug user without turning into an addict? Those are two questions I've been asking myself while writing this post (and, indeed, for many years before now) and I've never come up with a completely satisfying answer. I do think that some people, if they have a great deal of self-control, can be recreational drug users. (I also think that a heck of a lot of people who describe themselves as recreational drug users, aren't.) Marijuana is one of the drugs that's most talked-about at the moment, what with all the legal revisions going on in the US. When people ask me - which they often do - what my position on the legalisation of pot is, I admit that I'm not really sure. I suppose I support legalisation sort of by default, since I don't believe that it should be illegal when tobacco and alcohol are legally available just about everywhere, and I know full well that banning those things would be both impossible and unnecessary. The problem I have with legalisation is that I worry that it won't be done in the right way. If a formerly illegal substance is to become legal, I feel that it needs to be regulated, taxed (I know this will be an unpopular opinion; since how many of us actually want to pay taxes?) and studied extensively. So far, this hasn't happened with marijuana, or at least what regulation and studying has been done hasn't been widely publicised. The fact that a thing is legal does not necessarily mean it's safe. It doesn't mean it doesn't have ill-effects, both short and long-term. It doesn't mean we should automatically stick it in our mouths. When it comes to weed, most people fall into one of two camps: the "Weed is dangerous / a gateway drug / supports drug barons / etc" camp, or the "It's natural and good and as harmless as sparkly unicorns" camp. As far as the harmful side-effects go, I'm witholding judgement until more research is done, but assuming that there can't possibly be any seems dangerously naive to me. In addition to my practical concerns, there is my personal, irrational bug-a-boo: why can't life be enough? Why can't the planet, with all its wonders, be enough for people without the need for mind-altering substances?

I don't generally bring up that last point with people unless they ask me directly, since most folks would tell me to mind my own business, and they'd be right. The fact that I find it sad that people feel dissatisfaction with what, to me, seems like an extraordinary world full of wonder, is my own problem, not anyone else's. And you'd also be right if you said I was a bit of a hypocrite to feel that way, as I mentioned earlier that I find myself chasing my own highs quite often. When I push myself in the swimming pool or on the ice rink, when I take a walk on an autumn day, when I immerse myself in the crowd at a hockey game or an MMA match, I'm chasing those peaks of emotion. And when I reread a book that I've loved, when I eat a favourite food, when I listen to a song that fills me with joy or rerun a memory in my mind that makes my heart pound, I'm using repetition to try to recreate the feelings I had last time those things made me happy. Human nature - the need to seek out pleasure - meets human habit - the tendency to repeat behaviours in the hopes that they have the same positive result. Physical pleasure - pleasure in exercise, in food, in sex - and emotion come together in this wonderful synergy. And with the best of these things, the things that you love above all others, whether we're talking about songs or books or foods or lovers or anything else - they're always good. Perhaps a fraction less good than the first time, or perhaps not, but always good. And the periods inbetween, while not giving a person the wash of bliss that they get from the peaks, don't throw you into those deep depressing troughs either.

That's why I think you can consider me only a bit of a hypocrite. Because, personal likes and dislikes aside (or as far aside as they can ever truly be), I do honestly feel that there's a difference between chasing a high through drugs, and chasing it in the ways I've mentioned just above. The drug high can be hell for your body, while the things above (junk food and MMA excluded) are generally safe, and it's expensive - but more importantly, the drug high never fully satisfies after the first time, and people end up spending their whole lives chasing something that is physically impossible to attain.

And what kind of a life is that?


I haven't cited any sources for this blog post, as I wrote it off the top of my head, based on what I've learned over the years. However, if you want to learn more about the science behind teenage brains, you can try the following pages:

National Institute of Mental Health - http://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/the-teen-brain-still-under-construction/index.shtml

A PBS programme - http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/teenbrain/

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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.