For Apollo, Who Shone Brighter Than the Sun

I have a body wash in my bathroom that isn't made anymore. Imperial Leather Foamburst with sea kelp and birch bark. I came SO close to throwing it out today when I cleaned the bathroom shelf, because it's really not usable anymore - it's totally lost its pressure, and I can barely eke out the tiniest bit. Certainly I can't get enough to wash with it anymore. I couldn't throw it, though, because every now and then I squirt a teensy bit onto my finger, and inhale, and you're there with me. That's one of the things that I remember the best about you. The way you always smelled like the ocean.

I have a redcurrant lipsalve, that I bought back in 2001, and I can't throw that away either. I certainly wouldn't use it - can you imagine the bacteria it must have picked up after fourteen years? - but sometimes I open it and smell it and immediately think, "Ah, Jay." If you were watching, you would be able to see the tension melt out of my body with the first inhalation. You didn't wear redcurrant lipsalve - that I'm aware of, anyway *laughs* - but I wore it, back in the days of Batchwood and birthday parties and the bluest eyes in the world staring at me from across a darkened room.

God, I miss you.

I sometimes called you The SBD. People wondered what that stood for; assumed it was something dirty. I let them, because it was easier than explaining how a therapist of mine had once tried to teach me to meditate on the image of a blue diamond, spinning in my mind, any time I felt out of control - and how the diamond image had always failed, because every time I tried to think of a blue diamond I could only think of your gaze.

The technique worked, even if I could never get the right image. YOU were my spinning blue diamond. You kept me calm. You kept me sane. You kept me alive, during the worst times. You saved my life more times than I can count, and I would have given up everything I had if I could have done the same for you.

I talk to the dead. Sometimes the dead talk back. That's one of my bigger secrets, one that I don't hide, exactly, but I don't discuss openly with many people either. And I find it both comforting and heartbreaking that you have never once been here to talk to. I'm so glad that you moved on quickly - so many don't, you know - and I have faith that wherever you are is exactly where you need to be, doing exactly what you need to do. Yet...I miss you. That's all. I wish you were here.

Though maybe not tonight. I probably wouldn't want to face your reaction to the box of mozzarella sticks, half-bag of curly fries, or four shots of Aftershock over ice that I had for dinner. That kind of shit is best kept to myself, not shared with beautiful boys who I want to have good opinions of me. :)

Hey, I never claimed that lack of vanity was one of my virtues.

In another two months, it'll have been a year, and some days I still can't wrap my head around it. My emotions are complex and often irrational. I don't understand how someone like me, who's been dying for half my life, who's been caught and thrown back by Death SEVEN TIMES so far, is still occupying territory on this side of the veil, and someone like you, who I never even knew to have a cold, could just up and die like that. Six weeks. I checked my Facebook messages for the one I sent you the day after I started dreaming and worrying about you, and it was six weeks - almost to the day - between me knowing something was wrong, and you dying. How can a healthy, active person, a person who's dedicated his entire existence to nourishing physical and mental health in himself and others, a person who's barely been sick a day in his life, go from healthy to dead in six weeks? It doesn't make sense to me. It's not logical. I should be old enough and experienced enough to know by now that the universe doesn't always run on logic - and most of the time, I do. But all my practicality goes out the window where you're concerned.

The alcohol is wearing off - about bloody time, it's nearly 6am - and I can't remember if there was a point to this letter. Maybe it was just to tell you I love you. Always have, always will. I've loved you every day of my life since I was twelve years old, and I'll love you every day of the rest of it. 

Rules of Engagement #1 - Brutal Honesty or Polite Bullshit

We all have rules in our relationships. Some are widely used by many people, and some are very personal. Some are across-the-board rules, some differ from relationship to relationship. Some are set in stone, and some are subject to exceptions.

Two of my main rules, veritable social laws that I try (read: occasionally fail) to follow with other adult humans, involve honesty:

- Don't ask questions that you don't really want an honest answer to;
- Don't tell people things that you know they don't want to hear, unless absolutely necessary.

Rule #1 is easy enough to follow (most of the time), but Rule #2 is considerably harder for me. My desire to not burden people with information that is unpleasant, hurtful, and not need-to-know, wars with my desire to not infringe upon their free will. I could deal with this by simply choosing to not share personal information, but that doesn't come naturally to me; personal privacy is not something I place a lot of value upon. In fact, I find myself getting itchy and emotionally claustrophobic when I try to keep secrets about myself and my life. I'm not quite an open book - while you usually get the truth from me, you rarely get the whole truth, because the whole truth is usually complicated - but I'm not a locked one either. More like a library of books, where all information is available to you if you know where to look.

One habit that I've developed over the years is asking people if they're sure they really want to know something. I find that people's questions are often idle, and answering them candidly can mean dumping a lot of information upon them that they didn't expect and don't want. I'm willing to share almost anything about myself with anyone who asks - but I do need to know that you genuinely want to know, even if the answer is unpleasant, and your question wasn't just you making small talk.

Hence my return question, when asked difficult questions: Brutal honesty or polite bullshit? Which do you want to hear?

Polite bullshit isn't always bullshit, of course. Sometimes it's a face-saving lie, but sometimes it's just truth with a bit of sugar coating. Sometimes it's an alternative truth, because some questions have more than one true answer. Consider:

"Sati, why do you always wear white dresses, and rarely any other colours?"

The Polite Bullshit answer could be, "White cotton keeps me cooler." It could be, "It cuts down on the loads of washing I have to do." It could be, "I'm lazy, and a white sundress means I don't have to mess around trying to match my clothes up." It could be, "I think I look best in white." These are all true, and all reasons why I prefer wearing white dresses to any other clothes.

The Brutal Honesty answer would be, "White's not a gang colour." Also true, and at times - depending on where I'm working - more relevant. It's an answer that a lot of people find jarring, though, so it's one that I use with caution.

Likewise, brutal honesty may not be truly brutal. Sometimes it involves things that you don't want to hear about yourself. Sometimes it involves things you may not want to hear about me. Sometimes it involves things that I think you don't want to hear, but you actually are happy about. For example:

"Sati, are you okay? You're shivering, and your breathing changed."

The Polite Bullshit answer might be, "I'm fine, just chilly." Or, "Nothing's wrong, just need to catch my breath." Whereas the Brutal Honesty answer could be, "For some reason I just imagined you kissing me, and it was a surprisingly arousing image."

See, I might think that you don't want to hear that, while you're actually quite happy to hear it. It's hard to tell these things sometimes.

I'm a cautious person, and a thinker. I take risks, but they're considered risks. Spontaneity is not in my nature - though I've learned to weigh up the pros and cons of something in a split-second when necessary, so I sometimes appear to be acting spontaneously - and I'll never be comfortable with rash decisions. In addition to thinking (some would say overthinking!), I'm naturally protective of others, and the inclination to protect people from unpleasantness seems to be my default. Of course, that's not always possible, nor is it always beneficial - for you or for me. Asking people to choose between the honest answer and the polite answer allows me to respect your agency and free will, while still (mostly) satisfying Rule #2, and protecting the sensibilities of those friends and family members who are not quite as deliberate with their questions as I am.

So don't be surprised if you get the question during our conversations from time to time. You could take it as a potential trigger warning, if you wanted. A warning that the subject might be uncomfortable listening. Alternatively, if you're so inclined, you could consider it to be my version of a red pill / blue pill offer. Choose the one, and stay in the comfortable, friendly acquaintance levels of small talk. Choose the other, and learn things about me that might possibly make you either run for the hills, or love me passionately.

Your choice. As always.

Pounding Holes

So yesterday I had a guy over. A lover. No names will be mentioned, for obvious reasons.

We're upstairs in my room, "playing chess". "Playing chess" is what I tell my mother I'm doing when I retire to my bedroom with a date or guy friend (unless it's Adam, then we're watching anime - and we actually ARE). Of course she knows we're not playing chess. It's just a way for my dates to save face. I don't give a shit what my mom knows about my sex life, but guys tend to have this weird embarrassment about facing someone whose daughter they've been fucking. *shrugs* Whatevs. Not that I play much these days. Until yesterday, I'd only had one opponent in the last three years or more. But I digress.

We're in bed. Or on the bed. We're moving around a lot, and so is the bed. What can I say, our chess games have always been energetic ones. He's not a big guy, so the bed should take us fine (my last chess opponent was half a foot taller and maybe seventy pounds heavier, and we never had any issues) - but he's strong. Very strong. And we're really giving that bed a workout. So I'm startled, but not entirely surprised, when I hear something crack and the bed drops down half an inch.

"Oh shit, we broke the bed!" I half scream half laugh.

He slows down.

"Don't stop!" I screech.

And I forget about the bed.

After he's gone home, I collapse and fall asleep, but I keep waking throughout the night to a squeaking sound. I tell myself I'll tighten the bed screws and check out the break when I wake up, but I forget. It's only when I go to bed tonight that the bed sinks under me at an angle, and I lean over the side to check out the slats, when I notice the hole. And it's not in the bed.

We didn't break the bed, we broke the fucking floorboard. 

The Itchy and Scratchy Show

For all of you out there who think you're having a bad week...

...all I can say is, at least you don't have shingles on your lady parts.

(Apologies to anyone who's dealt with death or violence or heartbreak this week, and is genuinely having a worse week than I am.)

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.

Soundproofed

WARNING: Contains graphic references to sex. Lots of them. Thou hast been warned.

I'm a screamer.

People don't expect this. When clothed, I'm reasonably quiet. I think a lot. I like to watch people. I'm friendly enough and laugh a lot in the right groups, but I wouldn't say I'm loud.

In bed, I'm the opposite of quiet. I scream, I moan, I cry, I wail. I giggle and purr and talk, a lot. Sex with me isn't ever a quiet event, and some guys probably want to shove a ball gag in my mouth just to get me to shut the fuck up...but dammit, you'll never have to ask me, "did you come?"

I think this is one reason why I love hotels. Motels, Holiday Inns...it doesn't matter to me as long as they're clean, peaceful and reasonably soundproof. There are other reasons I love staying in hotels, of course - room service (or at least a nearby restaurant), an afternoon to read without guilt, and a night where I don't have to sleep with my eyes and ears open for disaster - but sex is way up there on the list. I don't take vacations - I haven't had a week away in fifteen years - but I occasionally spring for a night in a Travelodge or Premier Inn. If I'm there on my own, I always have a little devil on my shoulder that tells me to pick up a guy in the bar. So far, I haven't done this.

Travelling with, or meeting, a lover, is always the best thing though, because you can fuck me in a hotel room in ways that you can't in my mother's house, liberal though she may be.

You can press me up against the door the instant we cross the threshold, and tear off everything I'm wearing. Nudity is fine in hotels. You have everything you need right there. There's no need to keep a robe at hand to go to the bathroom. Nobody gives a damn if you don't get dressed the whole time you're there.

You can throw me on the bed as soon as I'm naked, manoeuvring me into position before I even get a chance to shower. Face down, ass up. I'm getting the sheets dirty - so what? At home, a set of sheets needs to last a week; here the maid will change them daily if you request it. And you can slam into me as hard as you want, really force your dick deep inside me, bang me up against the headboard - I don't care if it hurts. Actually, I lie. It's better if it hurts, just a bit. Throw me around, bang my head against the wall, fall on top of me like a ton of bricks. It's fine. This isn't my elegant white cast-iron bed with the bronze finials, made for gentle lovemaking and sweet snuggling - this bed is tough. This bed was made for us to fuck hard.

You can look out the window while I suck your cock, if you want. Five floors up, nobody's going to see my head bobbing up and down just above the windowledge, and if they do - who cares? Who gives a damn if passers-by look up and see how your face contorts when I take you deep in my throat, or even if they hear you groaning my name through the open window as I lick up every drop of pre-cum just before you spurt all over my face and tits? Even if they see and hear, even if the windowsill is low enough for them to see me on my knees with a face covered in cum - what are the chances that in a busy hotel, in a busy city, we'd ever have to see those people again?

Want to take a shower together? Shower's right there, and nobody else is going to be waiting in line for it. It's non-slip, and has that nice little seat for disabled people, so if you want me to sit there and wrap my legs around you, I'm quite happy to do that. We can't do that at home - I don't even have a shower, and you just have a tub with a curtain where I constantly feel like I'm going to fall over. But here, we can sit, or stand, or lie on the floor while the water pours over us. Want to introduce me to the joys of anal? Go right ahead. It's easy enough to get clean, and it's not like the water's going to run cold.

Back in bed, we can go all night, or at least till we exhaust ourselves. And you can talk to me. You know how I like it, with that hard dick forcing its way into me roughly, and a voice in my ear ordering me to cum. Nobody's going to bang on the walls to shut us up. Pull my hair, or reach around and put your hands on my belly and thighs, and force me back even further onto your cock, or press our bodies together as tight as they'll go. I don't care. Just hold me tight and take me rough and hard. Make me moan and scream and cry and beg for more. Nobody can hear. Nobody's going to call the police because they heard me sobbing and begging you. I know you like it when I beg, and I have no qualms about getting on my knees and pleading if it gets us both what we want.

I'm not saying I don't have sex at home. I'm saying I don't get fucked at home. There's a difference. My bedroom at home is for love and lightness and laughter, for cuddly afternoon sex while the rain pours outside the open window, for half-asleep morning sex in the pale light of dawn. Home is for shuddering breaths and staring into each other's eyes when we orgasm, for quiet passion and deep emotional bonds. Hotels are for nights when we fuck till we're raw. For spanking and clawing and biting and pulling my hair and making me hurt so good that I can't help but scream your name until I'm hoarse. For leaning over me while you're deep inside and biting my neck and throat and chin and cheeks until you leave red bruises all over me that I'll have to try and cover with makeup tomorrow, and probably fail. They're for coming inside me so many times that when and if we finally decide to get dressed and go pick up something to eat instead of getting it delivered, I'll be standing in line for takeout with my legs pressed together because I can feel your juices running down my thighs, and I have to wonder if everyone in the place can smell you on me, if they all know that you've marked me as yours, at least for tonight.

I'm always going to be an intense lover. That's just me, I can't be anything else. But whereas my own bed is a place where I weave a spell of love and affection and emotional attachment, hotel rooms are places where an entirely different type of intensity comes to light. Like rollercoasters or birthday cake, it's not something that I could deal with having every day - but any time I'm lucky enough to have a night in a hotel with a lover, the world simultaneously recedes into a dream-state and yet seems more bright and real than ever, and I find myself wondering how I can possibly go back to my sweet, soft, pastel existence when our rendezvous is over.

Babel Fish

“If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.”

― Nelson Mandela

I have an ear for languages. I rarely progress past a certain level of fluency - around the point when the grammar starts to get really hard, and I have to put a whole lot more work into it, I usually fall down. I don't always find the time or energy (or money!) to take classes, and I've never been someone who studies well on my own - I much prefer the structure of school to distance-learning, even if I only go to class once a week.

Common wisdom has always been that if you want kids to find languages easy, then raise them speaking more than one, because they're much easier to pick up as a child. I don't know how true this is for everyone, but it's certainly been that way for me. The surprising thing, though, is that some of the languages that come most naturally are ones I had little or no exposure to as a child.

I grew up in Menorca, which means I had to know Castilian (regular) Spanish and Catalan - schools teach in both, switching back and forth between, and businesses use both or either. (Government changed from Castilian Spanish to Catalan in the last eighties and early nineties, much to the horror of many of the island's inhabitants - even in 2014 it's still common to find road signs defaced and the Castilian spelling of things written in. Frankly, I don't blame them. I don't like Catalan either.)

In addition to Catalan and Castilian Spanish, many inhabitants of Menorca speak a dialect called Menorquín or Menorquí, which is spoken nowhere but the island. Kids don't want to be left out, and the town kids spoke it while playing, so I learned it too, though never as well as I'd have liked.

After moving back to England, I attended a private school for a while, where they taught Latin. Classics are avoided in state schools in England (though some let you take them as extras, after school), but my little private girls' school taught Latin as part of the general curriculum. I only took it there for a year - the school closed the year after I started learning it - but it's something I'd like to go back to at some point. I enjoy the structure of Latin.

In 1992, I had an au pair from Northern Spain, who gave me daily lessons in Basque. The uninitiated might think this is just another Spanish dialect, easily learned - wrong. Basque is what's known as a language isolate - it's not related to any other language on the planet - and I found it brutally hard, and never continued.

All English school kids learn some amount of French, or at least they did in my day. My school made you take French from Year 7 until the end of Year 9, and then a second language (Spanish or German; I took Spanish because I was lazy) for Year 8 and Year 9. In Year 10 you can carry on either or both, but you have to do at least one (I dropped French - there just weren't enough hours in the week. I needed Hermione's Time-Turner). So I took three years of French, plus four extra years of Spanish, and got to a reasonable level of fluency in both, though I wish I'd carried on with French instead of the useless art and drama classes I ended up taking. I also wish I'd tackled German instead of lazily choosing a language I already spoke - though I had a German boyfriend all through high school, it is one language that I've never learned and always wanted to. Though I did pick up ancient Nordic runes from my German boyfriend - not a language per se, but I've always liked symbols and codes.

I picked up basic Greek in my last two years of high school, purely for fun. I needed to know the alphabet anyway, for math and physics (and occasionally biology) so it didn't seem like a hardship to learn a bit more. It was handy when we went on holiday to Corfu for two weeks at the end of Year 10, too - all the road signs were in Greek, so I ended up the designated navigator every day.

After school, I fell into Italian, sort of against my will. I briefly dated a guy in Spain (when I moved back there in my teens) who was from Naples. He spoke no English; I spoke no Italian at the time. I figured we could meet in the middle and speak Spanish - we were in Spain, after all - but no. He couldn't handle Spanish. So I learned basic Italian. Though the relationship was brief, I used the Italian again when we had an Italian lodger who avoided house rules by refusing to learn English (I can say "please flush the toilet" with the best of them!) and a third time when my doctor ordered me to take up opera to help improve my lungs after repeated bouts of pneumonia. Now I'm supposed to be learning properly, in preparation to live in Milan, but my plans keep falling by the wayside - once again there are not enough hours in the day to do all that needs doing. The handy thing about being brought up speaking Spanish is that Catalan, Italian and Portuguese (which I don't speak, but can sometimes translate) - and even French at times - come much more easily, as the Romance languages have similar structures.

When I got the head injury in 2005 and lost my memory, I lost many of my language skills. D'oh. I can still read and translate - poorly - in Spanish and Catalan and sometimes Italian and French, but can't have a conversation. I can read the Greek letters but have no idea what any of the words mean. The funny thing about my memory since the brain damage is that I still have some of the information in my brain, but it's no longer organised the way it used to be and I often don't know that I have information about a subject until I need to access it. Even nine years later, it's common for a subject to come up (language or anything else), upon which I find I have a wealth of knowledge to impart. Afterwards friends will look at me like, "I didn't know you knew anything about..." (Australian snakes / the Dogon people of Mali / how to build ships / cross-pollination of pepper plants / 18th century French court clothing / etc ad infinitum...) Yeah, I didn't know I knew anything either, till I needed it. Due to this oddity, I hold on to the possibility that my language skills will make a miraculous return if I ever find myself in the middle of a bunch of Greeks / Italians / Menorquí people.

After the brain damage and the resulting fallout, I needed a change, so one day, out of the blue, I bought myself a DS game called My Japanese Coach. I was hooked from the first lesson. That autumn I booked myself on a part-time Japanese course at our local uni, and here I am four years later. Everyone thought I was crazy and tried to discourage me. "Why do you want to learn Japanese? You've never learned anything like it before. You can't use it in a career..." Both reasons were exactly why I wanted to learn it. Japanese was the first thing I'd ever done, in my entire life, that was mine. It wasn't for school, it wasn't future career planning, it wasn't because it would help me do my job better or because I was dating a guy who spoke it or because I intended to take a vacation there. It was for no reason other than it was fun and I wanted to. While I'd always enjoyed learning other languages - and everything else I learned - I'd never done anything in my life purely because I wanted to. Every choice I'd ever made, everything I'd learned, every book I'd read and CD I'd listened to, every hobby I'd done, had been about either pleasing my parents, taking recommendations from friends and boyfriends, or acquiring skills that might help me somewhere down the line. Japanese wasn't any of those things. I didn't think I'd ever use it. Japanese was mine.

I'm off school this semester, due to lack of money and the pressures of moving house, but in the autumn I plan to go back to Japanese and pick up Mandarin, if I'm near a school that teaches it. (My current university does, but I don't know where I'll be living come autumn.) I'd also like to start Cantonese, but I haven't found a part-time course yet. Those two are half-fun and half-future planning. With China being the economic power it is these days, it seems smart to speak the languages, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't enthralled by the challenge. It's been a while since I took up something right from scratch, with no prior knowledge - I think Japanese was the last thing, back in 2009. I always like to have something to get my teeth into.

Not all languages come well to me. I seem to have a mental block against Russian and Hebrew - I've tried to learn them several times, and it's never gone well. It's not the writing systems either - in addition to the western alphabet I read Greek upper and lowercase, Nordic runes, hiragana, katakana and some kanji; there's no logical reason why I shouldn't be able to learn Russian and Hebrew. It's just a mental thing. I've never tried Arabic, and that is one that I really should have learned a long while ago, given my job. There are a dozen languages that would help me in my job as a social worker in South and East London - Yoruba, Hindi, Urdu and Punjabi are at the top of the list. And I want to learn Vietnamese and Korean some day, just because they're beautiful.

If I lived another hundred years I would only make a dent in all the things I want to learn.

I can never decide whether that fact makes me sad or happy.