let lemons be angry

Manda, one of the few i know who spend their wealth wisely, has been flying all over the world to visit stef and sheila. In a couple of weeks 1d girls will gather in singapore, and pick up right where we left off. We were always good at idling away the hours--usually with food, and our nonsensical stories about our great big dramatic lives.

We really used to just laze around, and not merely sit. We'd laze around on stef's bunk or floor, on manda's waterbed, on sheila's blue floor mattress, on the spex gal steps, on the canteen benches, anywhere that allowed us to sprawl out. I think that's why we survived life in a college that has the reputation of producing elite and uncaring workhorses. Our priorities during school were the chances to nap and eat, and sing and take imaginary trips to south africa.

Another reason I survived was the art room. There were only 4 of us taking a-level art, and then it dropped to 3. But I had the most free periods, and so the room was mostly mine. So I acquired for myself a huge room with the only balcony in the school, with stashes of paint and expensive markers, lots of wire and string and wood and miscellaneous things to create with, things left behind by seniors from ten years ago, and tables I could scratch and paint on. I learnt where all the good stuff was kept, things nobody knew about. There were two computers, and I moved my stereo in so I could just about live there. There was a combination lock on the door that I cracked like a thief, a blackboard nobody used, and fairy lights I put up all across the ceiling. There would be joeun doing maths, doodling or just sitting at one of the tables. And our friends who came in and sat around with authority because they did come to think it was my room, rather than the school's art room. I cut their hair in that room. Viknes's hair on the floor looked like two human heads in a pile. And I reared kittens in that room that the authorities didn't know about. It was a little zoo, this makeshift enclosure with towels and the smell of milk, and the tiny furballs I rescued from the ignorant and foolish cat boy (whose idea of giving them water to drink was to simply put the cats in a pail of water). And of course I took lots of naps to kill the free periods. It was a haven; no teacher ever came in.

That's the difference between those days and these days, I suppose. Not that I spent less time in solitude then. But I was busy building a life while I was being alone.