Sweeties,

Sometimes when the weather starts to get cold, when my hair gets darker with its lack of sunshine, skin paler and my cheeks turn pink with the chill, when I have to much time on my hands and to much to do, I start to feel like that same 14 year old girl felt. I feel myself thinking like her again, getting scared like her, feeling aimless, messy and misspoken. Sometimes I wish I could free myself of her, this big jumper wearing, collarbone comparing, soft pink girl with no one to talk to and no one to see except her own crowded mind and fuzzy reflection. This girl consumed by the song Clementine by Sarah Jaffe and Pearls by Antje Duvekot specifically, who tried to only eat oats with water and walked or ran for consuming hours.

I wish my 18 year old self could outgrow her, this pink cupcake shirt wearing, version of myself who put peaches and spinach in salad, with an atrocious screen and bed time. I know I've already lived through those experiences so that I don't have to go back to them, but they come back, I can feel when they want to take my mind back over so that I can recluse into this old being.

Autumn is my in-between, my relapsed state, of fever and chill. Of sore nail beds, blurry watered plants and piles of washing to fold, half packed boxes and pages spewed across my lap, untouched. Of dust on every surface, discolouring the world, of rain and wind that shake my windowpane and bed while I fight to sleep. When I bring out jumpers that have layed untouched in my ottoman box that feels like a time capsule to that little lost girl who didn't feel little. When she felt like the sheep she walked past judged her steps, and the mannequin, on a bike, on the corner road laughed at her trying.

Sometimes when I go out alone, carrying a bag that doesnt feel right, and smiling at everyone who passes cause I don't know what else to do, when I try to sit on a chair at a cafe by myself and feel like I'm the biggest most intruding inconvenience on that space that I can't stand my own flushing skin, and all I can think about is how loud and busy my mind is and that people must be able to hear it. I want to feel the knowing of being in a space and belong to it.

My mum says that when she moved out, she loved being by herself in the world, taking herself places with only her own hand to hold, I'm finding it hard to find that same level of contentness. I think we're sometimes too similar and my own hermit nature can become my only one. That sometimes we don't know how to act and that I inherited her fast paced, never stopping, whirlwind of a mind and her over expressive but confusing face. Our same tendency to surround ourselves with clutter, to nest ourselves in with anything we can get our itching, searching fingertips on, to build walls around us that people would have to tiptoe, twist and turn around all of our collections to get past. We surround ourselves in our flannelette sheets and empty glasses, our cold hot waterbottles and paintings leaned against walls held by bedside tables, paperwork that we can never file and overflowing dressers.

University is sucking my life force out of me and I don't know how to handle this. My procrastination guilt cycle is unmatched and my thoughts and feeling of isolation are spiralling. It's funny that the time when I'm in a place that is literally the centre of a big town I feel the smallest and strangest.

My dorm rooms window placement though is pointed directly at a brick building and diagonally across from an overpriced fuel station, it has also reintroduced me to watching the sunlight on my eyes, in my giant sliding mirrors, in a way that I haven't looked at them in a long time, standing there watching my eyes watch me back, watching myself glance beside me to the reflection of the sun quickly creeping behind the hill of houses, deafening the sound of my thoughts as I watch the small twitches of my skin, under my eyes, my cheek, the tension from the pull of my creased eyebrows, needing to be smoothed out with my fingertips, the shine of sunlight through my ears, and onto the roots of my hair.

I haven't seen her that closely in a while, I wonder if my body misses being watched like that, and wishes for me to massage the tension out of my eyebrows and hardness off my jaw. Does she want me to circle my fingertips across my hairline, running my hands into my hair, with gentleness instead of hard determined scrubbing.

I've been watching the black, quick backs of people slipping into doors that slam and technologically lock behind them, hearing as doors open just as I leave, hearing the faint sound of footsteps in the quite and finding nothing out there, or hearing hushed talking behind closed doors from the hallway behind. The obscurity of my new apartment building, its long sliding mirrors, trying to let spirits in, the incessant bathroom light and fan that refuses to turn off when you walk past it, that hums and hums and hums, blinding and forceful in its brightness. The drain that lets water run across the whole bathroom and the lack of anywhere to put bottles in the shower.

The most human thing; the sound of the pigeons flapping, as they try to find a place to land that isn't covered in spikes that try to stop there roosting. There crooning and caressing of each other on the dirty brick wall, like its there own sanctuary, watching as they try to balance on the slippery, pointed tin roof that stares at me. But even they seem to know that something is off, they sense the obscurity and ridiculousness of it too, I know they do with their sideways glances and familiarity of the clock tower bell. Maybe Ray Bradbury has put too many ideas in my head but the maddening loneliness coupled with being surrounded by hundreds of people but feeling the lonliness in every room and street is starting to replace my rationalising side.

The cold or too much time, brings out this empty nested version of myself, that wants to curl up on the dewy grass all day and watch as my usually predictable town, changes around me. I don't want to curl back into her again. I hope wherever you are you feel like you belong in that space, in the air, in the room or like the weight of your body on the ground is welcomed.

Affectionately yours,

Nettle