My eyes locked on the time 7:58am.
“Fuck! It is March 1st already!” – I clock the Christmas decorations still in the hall, I haven’t put them in the loft yet. I swear it feels like last week I put them there and it is March!
I look at my face in the mirror. No. I study my face in the mirror, stare deep into my eyes as I say, “Lauren?” Like I am trying to summon me from the depths of this skin suit that contains my being. I have always been so aware of being inside this skin suit. Like a genie in a bottle, stuck with a lid on tight. Maybe my lid has flipped, I thought.
“Wow we are 30! No! We are in our 30’s!” my eyes open wider with fear almost. Time, entirely man made, but oh my does that clock and calendar haunt me. People say time flies, but I truly did not mean for all this time to go by. My baby is 13 this year! I am 32 this year! I am in my thirties, unmarried, and STILL AT FUCKING SCHOOL! I try a tie on with my shirt. It doesn’t make me look like a boss bitch, it highlights the fact I am still at school, so I quickly remove it. Unlike the clock my face has not changed much in 15 years. It is still me; I am everywhere I go.
Does that seem strange that sentence? Many do not come to realise they will always be with themselves; I have always known this. Yourself is something that you cannot escape. I think that is why so many people go these package holiday deals, they think once they arrive, they will have a sense of freedom, but they do not realise that which they are trying to free themselves from is in fact them. So, no number of holidays makes them happy, the horizon will never be found. I do like me; it is others I struggle with. I guess that is why I have ended up alone. In a lecture hall full of 150 students (that I should relate to, as hey we are all linguists), I still feel entirely alone, trapped in the skin suit, lid on tight. If the lid has flipped nobody has noticed. I just remain at the back of the shelf having gone flat. I laugh and put lip liner on, always one for the dramatic darling aren’t you – I scoff and sip my coffee…
By this stage in life my mum was married with a mortgage and three kids, that seriously baffles me. Where do people find this time? I don’t even know what I want to be when I grow up. How did this happen? Ruminating through my suitcase of bad memories is something I have become professional at, going through circumstances to find a reason why I am like this is an easier option than sorting out why I am like this – especially nobody fucking cares. In fact, I don’t think they even see I am different. A creative, cooky, eccentric… these are things people might associate with Lauren. Autistic, traumatised, and sensitive? Never! They haven’t even correlated the lack of emotion I show with some sort of neurodivergence, no, they just call me harsh, critical, hormonal, things like that are easy to label women in their 30’s with. Women in their 30’s, even typing that makes me float out of my body with disassociation. I am not one of them, I am not a real woman in her 30’s I am a 17-year-old wearing her mums coat and carrying her handbag round the supermarket playing mums. None of this was real, it was never supposed to be like this. Why has it taken me all this time to realise? I think. It had never occurred me how many decades had went by, I sleep through new year, so it makes it easier to forget… time.
Who do you want to be? I ask myself.
All I ever wanted was to be a writer, not a fighter, just a writer.
Maybe I should write about it all and I will understand where the time has gone?
I have been pretending every other day of my life, why not pretend to be a writer? Pretend my “upper cottage” (four in a block flat), is a dreamy little witchy retreat in the hidden nooks of Glencoe and write a book. I am alone anyway, what is the worst that might happen? Nobody notices, or time goes by. Heaven forbids!
Lauren McGhee.
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