Alphabetical 2024
Or, the beautiful chaos of a year without context
As you may know, I read Alphabetical Diaries this year (I wrote a full post on the book, here.) I love the concept of isolating lines in a diary from their context and categorising them into abstraction. So therefore, please accept my own mini alphabet of lines taken from my 2024 diary entries as a way to commemorate the year.
A
Autumn is coming and there’s mist in the air again.
B
But how on earth do I say this with the pink muscles of my throat?
C
Couldn’t forget the hassle of my body as a perceivable phenomenon.
D
D. had a quiver of arrows which became intermingled with roses as the night went on. Dying of pneumonia while photographing snowflakes.
E
Evening dress shops with infantas icons hanging outside. Everyone was wearing bows and white lace, dollies on the crown like skullcaps.
F
Finally, after being both cosmic and bestial, she stripped and ran nakedly human (flew naked) around the room turning off lamps.
G
Going on dating apps to swipe on pictures of girls wearing armour – long, beautiful women.
H
He told me a very long story about when he was spear fishing in Texas and killed a stingray which he slung up on a neighbour’s roof. Hemmingway shooting himself with an Abercrombie and Fitch rifle – an All-American death.
I
I am brilliant – I can be brilliant if I just maintain my focus. I bought a bookcase for £25 from the British heart foundation and me and K. carried it the 10-minute walk home. I feel content but empty in a way that all my angst has ebbed away from me and left nothing in the mud but rushes of love and simplicity. I feel like I’m fighting to keep my interiority carved out – to stop it caving in and leaving behind only muscle memory harping on variations of a personality. I felt everlasting, like everything I wanted was there within my reach and what I wanted was mud and rain and someone who I could kiss on the temples and would hold me the right way. I felt juvenile. I have time, I have to have time. I knew, somehow, I was failing the night, failing R. so I took myself upstairs and laid on R.’s bed for the last hour until people went home. I love them both with so much of my heart. I suddenly felt very silly walking along with my eye makeup and my bunch of sunflowers. I went alone, I think because Ellen Terry’s Macbeth portrait and beetle dress were on display, and after the PhD disappointment I wasn’t sure what emotions would arise. I went to see Manon with M. at the Royal Opera House. I’ve been reading Fleur Jaeggy and Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Kingdoms of Elfin – the effect of the two back to back gave life a drugged quality and also made me aware of a sickly, obsequious dependence on reality which I wish I could throw off – to see people with chipped eyelids, talk to crows, go to the sea and watch shipwrecks for sport. I’ve been sick for the last few days – one of those intense three-day flus which start with a sore throat and culminate in feverish nightmares and aching leg muscles – waking up from phantom positions and phantom faces and expecting to see them in the dark. In the second half of the lecture, she said she had moved to Iceland because there were no trees there. Instead, I let the laundry pile up and rush to and from work and try to make appointments for fun and all these terribly stocky (solid sense and cliché sense) facts. It felt surreal, looking at these 800-year-old bones down in the basements of the British Library, listening to the tubes run along side us. It was a hot 30-degree day, so at about 9 we went up onto the hill to watch the sun set, sitting among the wildflowers and under a lilac sky and a yellow full moon, listening to the crickets and drinking gin. It’s been over 7 years since I was 16 in that minibus, all my atoms have been swapped out. It’s deep in the countryside, where dead moles are hung off fenceposts. It’s perverse, in a way, that my need to be liked reveals my own ugliness.
J
Just a sludge of goodness, steaming with affectation that hides the lack of form.
M
Maybe the self’s need to feel itself fighting in to or out of a greater interiority is all the interiority there is. My skin was starting to itch from being in the company of too many beautiful people.
O
On the way to the churchyard, I’d look down at the shore from the road and seen a large stag skull gleaming white.
P
People in the long corridor bottle-necked at the foetuses at various terms – the last one as big as a baby doll with eyes that would have opened onto 18th century London, with its barges and gin palaces and syphilitic priests, but instead remain forever closed while a simulation of history moves in the darkness until the unknowing of the eyes shift contexts – her unknowing and unseeable sights compounding from her mother’s face to the iPhone camera that now looks at her almost as intensely. People of the tube reading books with the titles “The importance of childhood illness” and “Sworn virgin.” Perhaps the only real classification of poets is whether they would like to move somewhere with or without trees.
R
Remember to demand more, to ask for your own time, and don’t forget to move, to travel.
S
Saw a wax vanitas of Queen Elizabeth I’s skeletal face, half covered in spiders and snakes. She succeeded in making me feel special when I worry so much about me is stale. She’d filled the whole flat with candles and the next morning I kept finding wax in my hair. She’s not afraid to say uncomfortable things and rambles on, mainly to herself, and I like that. So much jarred, jarring life. Suddenly I was reminded the germ of death is already inside me and I can never claw it out. Summer is becoming fumes, weighted down by the watermelon rinds that lie discarded in the sun-bleached park.
T
The belief that there is more on the other side of the mirror, a you beyond you, which either has no face or infinite faces. The next morning, she bought me the FT and gave me to culture section to read while she read the economy. The night was warm, and you could see the stars. The silent wardship of men able to compartmentalise the air, swapping out husks of ether while I look up from below. Then they blow out the candle and I have strange dreams of cameras and corpses in hotel rooms. There was a moment when K. went out the room and I sat there naked with my hair around my shoulders – ate a dumpling, drank a little red wine, looked at my hair in the mirror, then out into the glass wall of the sunroom where a cat ran, silhouetted, across a garden wall. There’s so much grief in animating limbs that can no longer support themselves, of a body that betrays the truth of death no matter how much brunt lifeforce is applied to it. They’ve cleared away the flowers from where the boy was stabbed in February. To be the youngest person in interesting rooms – is that what success is? Trump had been shot and I was at a film festival thinking that I didn’t like my face.
W
We clearly over-estimated our strength and for the next week I had bruises all up my arms and couldn’t hold a coffee cup without shaking. We drank orange wine and stole roses. Would these brains and throats floating in formaldehyde be better at loving out-loud than me?