1

Nothing will happen between these pages; nothing remarkable, nothing notable, just the passing of another average life. Everyday I look into the faces of strangers and wonder what it is they’ll leave behind: short lived memories, empty smiles in fading photographs?

Have you ever lay at the bottom of a high rise building staring up at the sky? It’s the biggest rush I’ve ever had. Laying on the hard, warmish concrete slabs, my young calves pressing against the roughness, my hands feeling for tufts of grass and weeds that define the concrete grid, blindly tearing the green spears from their roots, all the while my eyes wide open and drawn soaring upwards. You need a clear blue sky of course, for the best effect. And those fluffy little white clouds, like bunny tails. They have to be small and singular, great swathes will just ruin the effect. And a breeze. You need a breeze to blow the clouds from way up high behind you out towards your feet. When conditions are right, a good summer’s day perhaps, you lie there prostrate looking backwards and upwards (at least twelve storeys) fixing your eyes on the top horizontal line of the building, taking in the exaggerated perspective, then you wait for the clouds to come over. Any second and it feels like the whole edifice will come tumbling down over your pale rag-doll body, covering you with its cool, welcome weightiness.

We’d heard about a man who’d jumped to his death from the sixth floor of a block of flats, the one I used to lay at the bottom of. I imagine his few fleeting moments of utter freedom. My best friend said he should have survived; he was a ballet dancer you see, trained to make the perfect pliet landing, which she gracefully demonstrated. Knees bent. All good landings must be made with the knees bent. Even then, as an eight year old child, I fully understood what my best friend couldn’t even begin to comprehend.

When you have that insight and you face up to it square on - and let’s face it, most of the few that do turn and run a mile – life surely becomes one of two things: a hedonistic rampage through the days, or the quest to leave something substantial behind; something more than the old photographs that will inevitably become more and more meaningless with each passing generation. I decided on the latter approach. It was a conscious decision; I remember exactly when I made it. There I was, watching my teenage friends imbibe and dance the night away towards the promised fumble in the dark and I realised, with absolute clarity, that if I wasn’t going to jump off a balcony (and I’d thought about it) I could either lose myself in the pleasure of being myself or I could make damn sure no-one would ever forget I’d been on this earth. I don’t know why I thought that would be the better option, after all I didn’t have any special talents and I knew for sure that it wouldn’t be me that cured cancer or became the first woman to walk on the moon (has a woman ever walked on the moon?). Looking back, of course it’s easy to see that I chose the most difficult path, but when you’re a teenager you have no idea how big the world is and that you’ll have enough trouble making an impact on the people around you, let alone the whole bloody world.

As it is I’ve got to this age (no I’m not going to tell you what that is, you can work it out for yourself) and I’m constantly wondering why I didn’t choose the other way through this life of mine. There’s always that sneaking suspicion that life might actually have been more fun; that life might actually have been a bit more full of life, if I hadn’t thought that it should be some sort of quest. Instead here I am, sitting staring at a blank page in my journal, which by the way I’ve been writing for years but never quite as honestly as I’d like, never quite able to let myself go for fear of someone reading it before I die, and trying to imagine that it’s my life; a blank slate that I can write up just as I like. What would I write for myself? More sex, more drugs (actually I’ve never really taken any, so just drugs would do), more drink and more rock ‘n’ roll. More life. But what the hell is life? It feels like something I should’ve had by right, but somehow have missed out on completely. This empty page that I’m looking at, it’s like a Christmas list: full of hopes and dreams, fantasies. It’s like your imagination buzzes with the thrill of promise, the anticipation of touching, smelling, caressing. And if I could re-write it, I know I wouldn’t tow the line.

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Next installment: Narrative Self: 1.1