Thoughts, Feelings, Daydreams, and Bullet Points.

Lately I’ve been feeling deeply melancholy, and I can’t even quite figure out why. Perhaps it’s the darkness of autumn, or the rain and clouds that hover low in the sky like a smothering blanket. Or perhaps it’s just me, just my natural temperament. I always thought I was a naturally positive, optimistic person, as if I could only be one thing, that how I was on the surface was the same as who I was in my depth, but lately I have come to realise that that isn’t the case. On the surface I seem pessimistic, and beneath that is a layer of hopefulness, of optimism, and right at my core there is yet another layer of pessimism. Which am I? Am I hopeful or hopeless? Sometimes it’s hard to tell.

It’s becoming harder and harder not to become completely embittered about life. It feels as though everything I want is just being pushed further and further into the future, and I have nothing to look forward to in my life (apart from the fact that the Mockingjay movie comes out in three weeks!!! :D #justsayin’). I have hopes and dreams and plans of how I want my life to go, but right now they’re less than a shadow – they not real to me except in my dreams, or my daydreams.

I like to think that I have a nice firm grip on reality, but I spend at least 80 percent of my time daydreaming and making little stories in my head of how things will turn out, and they almost never happen the way I want them to. I can only think of one occasion where one of my daydreams actually happened. I had been thinking about someone I knew and hadn’t seen in a while, and my mind just drifted off into flights of fantasy (the way it always does). I saw him a couple of days later, and it went almost identical to how it was in my head. But that was the exception, not the rule. Generally, if something I want to happen does happen, it will happen with a twist, making it something that I don’t really want. Because life’s fair, you know?

The thing about my unrealistically optimistic daydreams is that it’s not that unlikely that they will happen; it’s just about circumstance and timing. I know what I want, and when I want something, I will go after it with all I’ve got. I’m not going to use the term obsession, but that’s pretty much it. I don’t really have any hobbies – unless you count writing, reading, and over-thinking – so when I decide there is something I want to gain or achieve, I will work towards it with all the strength I possess.

I know what I want to do in my life:

• I want to go to Oxford University and study English Literature & Language.
• I want to travel all over the world, and go to places like Russia and Estonia (because CONSEQUENCE, AMEND, and TRANSCEND are set in those countries, so I can be like “Yeeeaaahhh! Half my characters are going to be murdered here in about three hundred years! Isn’t that absolutely fantastic?!”), New York (city of dreams, and I’m such a dreamer), Nashville (because I love country music) and I want to go to places that no one has heard of as well, because that would be totally amazing, to just get lost in some far-flung corner of the world.
• I want to get married
• I want to have children (this is all obviously when I’m at least a decade older than I am now); so long as they’re not evil monsters.
• I want to write loads of books which will become world-renowned best-sellers that millions of people will read and fall in love with and see themselves in. I don’t want to be famous or anything, but I want my books to be famous.
• I want to have a really successful career, whether that’s as an author or as anything else I choose to be.
• When I grow old, I want to be one of those cool old ladies that are really eccentric and people are all like “oh my gosh, what on Earth has Granny done now?”
• Mostly I just want to be middle-aged. I don’t know why, but that is my life aspiration. I want to be late thirties-early forties, married, with like four kids or something, I want to write loads of books and stuff, but I just want to be settled in a nice, quiet (but still awesome and passionate) routine after having spent twenty years doing loads of amazing things.
• I also want to go to protests and wave placards in the air and fight for a better world.

Out of all the things on the list, how many of them aren’t possible? (Marriage, maybe?) Even going to Oxford, which seems quite a challenge isn’t that impossible. To study English, I need to get three A grades at A Level. I’m two months into Year 12, and my current grades are this:

English Lit: B

History: D (cries a thousand tears)

Media: B

Philosophy: A (hell yes!!!!!!!!)

Apart from the trauma that is my History grade (it physically hurts me to get such an awful grade) I’m pretty close to three As already. I have close to two years to get the grades I need, and, on top of that, because I am (sadly) in a Comprehensive school, I have 80 percent more chance of getting into Oxford or Cambridge than somebody from a private school, because the top universities have to pay a fine if they don’t let “ordinary” people in. So dream no.1 isn’t as impossible as it sometimes feels.

Dream number two is probably slightly more expensive, but still completely possible, as are all my dreams (okay, I don’t know how possible it is for my books to become world-renowned best-sellers, but hey, never say never).

It is my short-term goals which feel as though they’re blocked by insurmountable obstacles, because these goals aren’t things you can achieve by getting good grades or saving up money. My current goals are this:

• To no longer be isolated. To have friends who understand me, who hear me when I’m quiet, who accept me for me, and who choose me again and again. I want to find my tribe, the people I belong with, people who I click with.
• I want people at school to stop talking crap about me, and I want random thirteen-year-olds who I don’t even talk to to stop laughing at me for stupid things which really aren’t their business.
• I want more people to read my books.
• I want to be happy (which I’m not).
• I also want things such as: to get paid more; to be able to drive (only three months till I can start learning); to get a car once I’ve learned to drive; to do more fun things (I don’t even know what fun is); to have more spare time, rather than writing five essays a week and falling asleep the moment I get home from school. But these little things aren’t impossible, they just take time. It’s the rest of the list which doesn’t feel possible.

That’s why I feel sad: because I feel lonely even when I’m with other people, and because so many people laugh at me, and because I’m unhappy. I’m so unhappy. I don’t connect properly with people my age. No matter how hard I try, I just don’t fit in. I’m not saying I’m special, or that I’m better or worse than anyone else, and I’m not romanticizing my differences, or anything else that people have said I apparently do in my blogs; I am simply saying how I feel, and how I feel is completely alone, because I don’t know how to be normal.

I hate being the age that I am (I’ve already mentioned that I’d rather be middle-aged). I don’t want to be so young, because I don’t feel like I am. I want to have life-experience, and I want to have been to lots of places and seen lots of things. I still want an amazing future, but I also want an amazing past.

I have come to realise that time is the answer to practically all of my problems, but the problem with time is that it’s not in the present moment, it’s something in the future, and I don’t know when it will be, and until then I have to find a way to make the best of what I have right now, rather than being so miserable about things that will one-day end. Even school, which feels like it will last forever, will be finished in twenty months, at least four of which will be half-terms/holidays, plus two days off for weekends, so that twenty months quickly diminishes, and isn’t half as much time as it seems. Before I know it I’ll (hopefully) be going to University (hopefully Oxford), and my life will be completely different (hopefully). I have so much to hope for, so much to wish for, and maybe my hopes and wishes aren’t real right now, but one day they could be. So until then I shall live in my little dream world, and revel in the fact that Taylor Swift released an album a couple of days ago (and quote lyrics from that album on every possible occasion), and I shall strive to get the grades I need, and when my twenty-month sentence is done, I shall be out of here, and move on to greater things (hopefully).

And if all else fails, I can become a hermit in the Scottish Highlands, or the Himalayas, or maybe the North Pole, and I can get a really big cat to snuggle, and read lots of books, and everything will be okay.

Grenzy – A Feline Obituary

When I was four years old, a stray cat came into our home, and she never left. I remember Mum said we had to wait till Dad came home before we decided whether we could keep her or not. When we did indeed decide that she would stay, we found her a little basket, and put into it a pair of my trousers that had a hole in, so that she would have somewhere comfortable to sleep. This cat was called Bella (which I believe foreshadowed my sister’s Twilight obsession.)

Bella died a year later, but not before she had left us with five beautiful kittens: Athena, Maria, Gretel, Elvis, and Demeter. Gretel was “mine”, and she was named after Gretel from The Sound of Music (which I was obsessed with when I was five). Gretel went through a series of names, including Gwaup (pronounced Gwoop) and Grempseed (as in hempseed), and eventually became Grenzy, which she was known as for the rest of her life. Grenzy lived for 11 years, 4 months, 6 days, and 4 hours.

Recently, Grenzy hadn’t been well. She had lost so much weight and she had a permanent cold. She was emaciated, and she sneezed all the time, and she peed everywhere, and she was incredibly ill. She was put down yesterday, and we found out that she’d had a really bad case of cat flu.

I didn’t come to the vets with Mum and Dad. I could have, it wasn’t till after school was finished. But I didn’t want to. I’m a coward, and I didn’t want to see my cat die. I didn’t come outside when Mum and Dad buried her. I didn’t give her a cuddle before they took her to the vet. I’m a coward, and I hate myself for it. Yes, she was in a horrible condition when I last saw her, but that’s no excuse for my cowardice. Grenzy was my best friend when I was a child. I was the first human she saw when she was born, and I should have been there at the end, but I wasn’t, because I’m selfish.

Grenzy was the most diverse playmate I could have hoped for, but in retrospect, I think it was probably cat abuse. I carried Grenzy for the first sixth months of her life, and by “carried” I mean I held her upside down, carried her around in a bag, draped her around my shoulders, let her sit on my head. I once put her in a sandal so that she could “drive a car” up my sister’s back. She fell off Bethany’s (my sister’s) head. My grandmother once broke a shelf up into individual cradles for the kittens, and I dressed Grenzy and Demeter up in dolls’ dresses, and put them to bed in there. Grenzy was my baby, my best friend, my cat, and the first thing I loved completely whom I wasn’t related to.

Grenzy would feature heavily in the games I played. She was obviously romantically linked with the knitted Tom Kitten toy that my Dad’s auntie made me for my seventh birthday, and she was obviously a rival to Ty, my toy cat (who was also in a relationship with Tom Kitten). (My childhood games were scarily similar to some of the books I write), and she was the “mother” of half the china dolls I used to collect. The games involving the china dolls were very…disturbing (not just because they had a cat for a mother). Grenzy used to come into my room during the night, and I’d wake up to her sleeping on my head. Grenzy was my everything for so long.

But things changed. I grew up, and decided I didn’t want to be covered in cat fur all the time, and so I stopped cuddling her, stopped loving her quite as much as I used to. And on top of that, there were other cats. We gave most of the kittens away (except Elvis, who probably got sick of being pushed in and out the cat door whilst Dad said “Elvis has left the building”, and decided to leave). Bella died. We got a new cat, Henry, but he ran away after only two months. Henry was a complete legend; he had so much personality. He would lie, spread out, in the middle of my bed, so I would have to sleep half on the bed and half on the windowsill, and he’d stick his head in people’s armpits.

After Henry came William, and, later, Charlie. William is the most adorable, massive ball of fluffiness to ever exist. He’s a short-haired Persian who had to leave his previous home because he wasn’t very nice to the thirteen-year-old cat that he lived with. And so he became ours. I put my fingers into his cat-cage on the way home, and he licked them, and that’s when I fell in love with him. He’s cute and cuddly, and unbelievably grumpy, and he’s the squishiest, cutest thing ever. William took up some of the love that had been designated for Grenzy, and I don’t know how to forgive myself for that.

Then came Charlie, “The Ginger Whinger”, who never stopped meowing, and had a tendency to pee everywhere. Charlie didn’t get on with William, and after two years, we decided it was best for Charlie to go back to the animal rescue centre (“we” being Mum and Dad).

William and Grenzy lived in peace together for the rest of her life – some of their most adorable moments were when they would curl up on the same armchair, looking so incredibly cute. But Grenzy became more and more unwell, and yesterday, she was dead. Put down. Killed.

Grenzy was manipulative, possessive, controlling, and she wanted to be as close to people as they would allow; closer, even. But she was loving, also. She would curl up on people's laps, and purr, and dig her claws into them. She was so friendly, so lovely, and she's gone.

I don’t know how to deal with her being gone. I feel guilty – I wasn’t very kind towards her recently; I didn’t cuddle her, I didn’t stroke her, I got irritated when she tried to come in my room and sleep/sneeze on my bed. But I did love her; I still do, and that will last forever.

 Grenzy, the ultimate photo-bomber.

 William, my only remaining cat.

 Me and Grenzy, when we were young: