Okay so, first off, some necessary preamble. I’m going to assume that the internet has its own social environment and set of moral and behavioural codes. I won’t argue this at length because I think it’s fairly obvious given that the internet cannot exactly simulate real life, and therefore cannot exactly mirror its organising social principles. Right? Okay. Also, a lot of this is based on my understanding of internet culture so if you don’t like the sound of that sorry you hate deinstitutionalised pontification and are racist I guess. I’m also not going to focus on solutions; this essay is going to be about diagnosing temperatures and lamenting the moment. I have not, unfortunately, been socially emboldened to think that I can affect structural change of any kind, so I will never subject you to any tone of authority. But maybe if you, dear reader, sufficiently validate my intellectual refuse, I could one day instrumentalise my malaise into the production of some theoretical framework for surviving the wasteland as a bimbo zombie with a penchant for the baroque, my mind cracked open to reveal a baby pink spillage of potentially usefully synthesised meta simulacra.

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So anyway, I’d been thinking a lot about Princess Cadance’s more discernible black eyeliner, that rims the span of her eyes, and seems especially stark in contrast to Twilight Sparkle’s thinly outlined eyes, alongside whom Cadance is often depicted. I came to notice soon after that all of the princess characters in Equestria are animated with a more pronounced black outline on the top and bottom of their eyes. Nonetheless, I think it’s interesting that Cadance’s royalty (and goodness) is conferred by her higher contrast design, angelic outline and even more technicolor animation. Whereas most manes in Equestria are comprised of two or three colours, pink and yellow for Fluttershy for example, Cadance’s comprises of several, along with a discordantly coloured blue heart shaped crystal as her cutie mark. It is for these reasons that I, somewhat speculatively, think Princess Cadance is ambiguously ethnically coded, or at the very least, much less speculatively, coded as other. I have considered this at length because Princess Cadance is my second favourite character in the MLP universe, with Rarity having secured the top spot early on. Anyway, vitally, despite her otherness and elevated hierarchical position in the monarchic Equestria, Princess Cadance does not interrupt its harmonious collectivism. She, despite being other, in status and chromatic rendering, works to maintain the wellbeing of the collective. In A Canterlot Wedding - Part 1, when Twilight Sparkle asks why Princess Cadance has agreed to foal-sit her despite her elevated status, Princess Cadance rolls her eyes to demonstrate that she does not see herself as socially superior. This fully integrated harmonious impulse is embedded seamlessly into the moral machinery of the collective throughout the show. Although admittedly, since Equestria operates with a closed fictional ethics, instances in which more philosophically complicated circumstances could arise, which could strain Equestria’s moral paradigms, are unlikely. But prototypically it’s useful okay. And it happens to remind me of another little digital realm.

I grew up on a blue website. A very specific shade of blue. Almost navy, a little grey toned. Matte blue against an infinite scroll function. Not blue like an ocean. Blue like a website. The users who made themselves visible were quite resolutely scrawled into the margins of the notebook that was 2010s society. Transgender hijabis and genderfluid, demisexual fairykin, sex workers, anarchists and fetishists, and hordes of the clinically lonely and ambiguously mentally ill. A lot of people who couldn’t come out of the closet; who carved cherry pie lattices into their thighs; who sought same sex partners who lived on different continents. This website had a very specific politics. And a very specific conception of morality. It was, if truly distilled, much like the land of Equestria in MLP, based on friendship, community and understanding. If you were averse to unconventional hair colours, you were fundamentally incompatible with the vast majority of Tumblr, and that is how it offered respite to people who were, in a lot of ways, pushed to the edges of society. NB. Admittedly, some people may have placed themselves there but I have come to understand that there is almost always a good reason.

Now whether Tumblr actually embodied the sort of collectivism I perceived, I can’t be sure. But generally, I would argue, yes. Because it allowed varying subcultures to co-exist on one platform, and to exist relationally, and to reinforce each other by offering a fixed general ethos which was broadly: find people who like what you like, which is the basis of most friendship. The reblog function made blog curation an essentially communal activity. That’s what I think made Tumblr proto-Equestria. That being said, I know that Tumblr wasn’t a perfectly functioning imagined community. There were micro-political issues that were constantly being hotly debated on the site from 2012-2015. But they very rarely ventured far from Tumblr’s basic ethos and baseline politics, which were pretty much consistently progressive.

(Also side note, a lot of people think Tumblr tanked after the porn ban, which definitely contributed to its death I will concur, but it was mostly because Tumblr seriously resisted monetisation in a weird constitutive way. I also think one of the major issues was that Tumblr, despite hosting many an ideological mini war, could absorb the shock whilst retaining its platform identity, which is basically unheard of on modern major media platforms, which don’t tend to have an ethos at all separate from commerce and don’t really let dissent meaningfully exist anymore but that’s a slightly different topic.)

Alongside the colour palettes of various ponies, I was thinking about the way in which Tumblr constituted an early model of the Internet which used an understanding of one another as its main stabilising axis. Our early understanding of the internet was one rooted in learning, intermixture (of both theory and identity) and a kind of productive collectivism. These elements stabilised into a certain contemporary digital reality. The internet still largely operates according to the assumption of this collectivism, although ideologically, we’ve strayed considerably. As we transitioned from very late stage capitalism into what is now often referred to as a kind of techno-feudalist system, the seeming plasticity of early internet spaces has now been pretty resolutely invaded by capital. It is not so much that the basic impulses of the internet user have changed; they are still very much rooted in a desire for connection, community and personal identity reinforcement. But that capital has become a fixed intermediary in the online pursuit of these sensations. The ‘pure internet’ (I made that up, sorry about that), as in spaces where these sensations can be freely accessed, are not obsolete, I know, but they’re just too hard to find.

I also feel like this became aesthetically palpable in the colourlessness of the 2020s, or more specifically, the slow draining of it. From the sunflower yellows of the instagram art hoe, to the canonical blue haired leftists, to the lilac lipstick donning pastel goths and the checkerboard posting soft grunge adherents. Heck, even the nymphets had their cherry reds and Lolita inspired eyelet whites. When brands imposed their veneer over the free internet, it was necessarily beige (briefly washed out millennial pink, now pearl grey/ redundant retina-burning tiktok technicolour that’s net effect is non colour) because beige could operate as the ultimate compressor for basically every type of femininity. At the time, this probably seemed like the best possible strategy for mapping the new digital landscape. Brands sought to carve out neutral aesthetics, and when they became the mediator between visible internet user and participatory internet user, the beige proliferated. And of course, as the general politics of the internet neutralised from the broad chromatic spectrum of 2010s woke into brand friendly obfuscation, colour palettes followed. Now, I’m not asserting that this is still the case. It was a trend, and it changed and will change. But even if surface trends change, the precepts of the pure internet seem to remain unrecoverable. The current internet is a bazaar and all the people merely vendors, which sucks, because the internet used to be fun.

To conclude, O Pony! My Pony!

But I’m Miss Karachi. The one and only, DHA princess. This acrylic heat runs through my veins. Hardens behind my eyes. I rim it with کاجل. Dark black. Super black. No, you don’t understand. I need it to be super black. I need it not to move. It’s hot and it’ll slip. And you’re gone. So I go get my hair blown out. Volume on the sides, not at the crown, undone curls from halfway down. I’m checking my phone. I’m waiting for you. I’m cutting up fruit and waiting for you. Little blossoms of blood. Falling onto the balcony floor. Like confetti. That’s how I know I won. I’m Miss Karachi. The one and only, Park Tower princess. And I have everything to give you, but the life I haven’t lived.

I live in a dangerous and expensive neighbourhood.

You could never understand the addicts and criminals I let crash on my couch.

But I just got lonely sometimes.

I frost my mouth with pink Lancôme lipgloss every day after I brush my teeth. I have dark, shiny hair down to my waist. It’s clean most of the time. I can be maybe five different people (sexy allyana, baby allyana, spooky allyana, abandoned allyana and angel).

I’d barely had the chance to acquaint the six of you when you told me you didn’t like the picture of that Russian model with four cigarettes in her mouth on my Spotify playlist cover. You were so weird about things like that. You wanted me to fit into a mould that you made up for me. But I’m already made up. I’m already set. So everything started oozing and dripping out the sides and it was liquid but solid, kind of like putty. Pink. Or blue. No, pink! Blue! I was being art for you and you thought I was making a mess.

You said you never understood why the curtains being blue had to mean anything. You didn’t understand why everything had to reverberate somewhere in my body; painful or wonderful or hot. You kept trying to break me down, unglue my parts, scatter them around the apartment. So tonight, I’ll spare you the effort. I’ll unclasp the Pink Sparkle caboodle and show you what’s inside.

I’m made of: Disney Princesses (Ariel + Cinderella to be precise), sexy angel/nurse costumes, Haifa Wehbe lying about being 20-something when she was actually 35, black eyeliner pencil, expensive things from the early 2000s, TRUE AND REAL love, melodies from God, Park Towers, cotton candy and the smell of it, Bridget Marquardt’s dispassionate birthday cake strip tease for Hugh Hefner’s 80th birthday, Courtney Love’s America’s Sweetheart record, (get it? Because everyone hated her; it was a commercial failure), derelict office blocks with red and blue gelatinous lights inside, when Elliott smith sang ‘cuz everyone is a fucking pro and they’ve all got answers from trouble they’ve known and they all gotta say what you should and shouldn’t do, though they don’t have a clue’, an insatiable lust for calm danger like a marriage that never stops, and a lot of other things that you may or may not understand and that I cannot remember at this time.

The point is, that strange/ugly/mangled/attention seeking/sad/broken/gauche ideas are always contained inside beautiful things. Jeder Engel ist schrecklich. You didn’t even understand poems. That’s why I’ll always think you’re hopeless. It’s like you’re walking through life with one eye wide open and the other puckered shut on purpose. Like the islamic antichrist. Philistine. Meanie.

You were obsessed with the way that people were looking at me. You were always looking at me. With delight; in anger; in awe. That’s where the no poetry thing comes in again. All you knew how to do was look. You wouldn’t know how to see if John Berger smacked you in the face. You didn’t want to see. That I am more than a limited edition Valentine’s Day rhinestone panty from Victoria’s secret PINK and there are more colours than plaid.

Some people are haunted houses. I am one of those. Things are always going bump, cupboard doors are always flying open; the lights go out. I am a repository of things that are neither dead nor alive, neither present nor past. And it sounds counterintuitive, I know, but it’s only that way because I’m smitten with the life I’ve been given. I feel blessed. Isn’t that the premise of souvenirs? Relics from romantic vacations. You didn’t like that about me. It was as heinous as hating my banged up nurse Hello Kitty phone charm. It wasn’t her fault she was so banged up, it was mine.

You wanted me to live quietly, because you wanted me to be yours. And I could never be. All I ever wanted since I was a little girl was to be the whole world’s girlfriend. Wipe the whole world’s tears. Kiss it goodnight.

And now that you’ve been exorcised, I’m wondering whether I’m the haunted house, or the haunted house is in me. I’m putting too much French vanilla creamer in my coffee and trying to alchemise these clown demons that you left in here with me. At first they wouldn’t let me sleep; they’d follow me around; start chatting idly with the resident ghosts; scare angel jr. But then I noticed that they actually had really great bone structure. So I drew little beauty marks over their face paint and dressed them up in the Dior sunglasses and Louis Purses you bought me. A little pink lipgloss to finish, (peach for Bobette because she’s a spring) and now they do my screaming for me.

Anyway, I know, deep down in my heart, that wherever you are, you’re being a weird bitch.

Bad case of reality, in dire need of fantasy.

Dr angel says: Abstain from self help and non fiction, pop a novel and call me in the morning.

Being so literal is a sin. Like, literally. I’ve heard it’s worse than all seven others.

But.

A part of me used to love you. And in this haunted house, no naïve bimbo ghost is ever cast out onto the street.

I promise you don’t always have to be so serious. It’s an awful idea to always do what you think you should. Laugh on cue. Rage on cue. And it’s so boring. We all belong to each other. The world is a plush, tropical wind and it hugs us all. It must be terribly lonely thinking that you belong to yourself.

You made it rain for a year and a half. Here are your flowers.

Like if they could just break me apart with their hands, something that felt like love would spill onto them instead of blood. Mine. Satin Jimmy Choo red, with a 0.03% alcohol content.

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When I started taking Valium I stopped remembering. There’d be days of work that were just empty spaces in my memory. Valium was the lux mattress I didn’t own. It was discontinued marshmallow lipgloss and a silver lined highway exit. I just wanted to work and go home and watch Winx Club and eat cereal. Every part of me hurt. When you melt every crayon in the carton, the mixture turns brown. I worried that I couldn’t go back now. I used to be able to tell the difference. Between different feelings, different sensations, different boys. It was all brown now. Like childhood covered in old blood. Not my blood. Theirs. 0.06% alcohol content.

I felt tears gather behind my eyes for every reason I could think of. I tipped my head back against the couch to keep them in. I refused to be sad tonight. I refused to compromise my vibration. I pressed play on the next episode of my show.

10 minutes in and I had failed, so I thought some shopping might help.

I went online and ordered these way cute little shoe clips from a nearby lingerie store. One with little bunched up pink rosettes on a bed of green ribbon leaves that reminded me of Aurora. And one with a ruched white and blue strip, like a wedding garter, finished with a lush satin bow that reminded me of Cinderella.

I was on a Disney Princess movie kick. I had gotten into the habit of leaving them playing at low volume on my laptop to fall asleep. I liked the diffused audio and the original Cinderella from 1950, complete with the few fleeting frames of a barely discernible, dotted glitter halo appearing above Cinderella’s head as her house dress transformed into her famous blue ballgown. I had read that the halo detail represented Cinderella’s essential goodness and embodiment of Christian values, and that Fairy Godmother’s magic was simply the spiritual return for Cinderella’s graceful endurance of cruelty and misfortune.

As I lay on the couch in the dark, I waited for my own faint, dotted halo.

Anyway, the shoe clips were so great because I could fix them on to the same pair of heels and they would match a bunch of different outfits and I’d save so much money that way. I liked theming my outfits; it made me feel creative. It was one of my passions. I told myself that I couldn’t give up.

Don’t give up, I wrote on a post it note. I stuck it onto the mirror where I got ready, so I wouldn’t forget. I was still young; I was still pretty; there was still time. To let this heavy skin drop like a red curtain. It would happen someday. I couldn’t let the dream die. That’d really be the end of everything, I’d read about it online.

I couldn’t undo the fingermarks that had been pushed into my skin and left there, but I could forget. And when I did, I’d sing songs that everyone would love, and I wouldn’t cry so easily. And I’d finally be something like a success, and a real princess; I just had to be patient. Because a dream is a wish your heart makes. And mine was still beating.

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The bathroom was Hollywood Regency style, like in the first animated Cinderella movie, with pale blue and off-white scrolls on square tiles.

It was one of my favourite things to do on the days I felt especially depressed.

I’d run the water and slip off my t-shirt and terry cloth sweatpants, then step into the tub. Big enough for two people; with coloured jets that would pump warm water against the porcelain, anointed with Strawberries and Champagne.

The window overlooked the garden, with a white glossy paint on the metal scrolls that you could trace from top to bottom and side to side on the window frame.

I would lay back in the warm water, feeling the soft pulsations of the jets against my skin. The bubbles like the heaving bass of a song playing from the next room, muted bubblegum through plaster. I’d slip down a little lower in the tub. And think about how I would do it.

I daydreamed of a stream of silver liquid passing through the tissues of my brain. Or of rubies spilling onto the surface of the water from both of my wrists, the sparkling droplets of red and blue projecting a watery, patriotic kaleidoscope onto the bathroom tiles.

Maybe I could just stand up, and let the little rivulets of water drip down my body like aquamarine crystals. Clutch the metal, climb up onto the window frame and balance myself on that hot, glistening paint. Then throw myself down from the master bathroom window, down onto the concrete driveway. If I were naked there’d be a classicism to it; an ode to how, even in death, I could never amount to much more than the sum of my body parts. Fat and tissue and muscle and blood becoming one against the easter green artificial turf.

I watched my cellphone ring at the edge of the tub, my initials glittering like sugar in the sun. I’d spelled them out in holographic stickers on a lemonade day, amidst circling the things I wanted from the Victoria’s Secret catalogue with a pink mechanical pencil. But in those moments I hated them, reminding me of what had been lost to this body, like flat soda or a pool party gone wrong. I found that I could never commit to the feeling long enough to peel them off. And they’d probably leave glue stains on the casing anyway. It wasn’t worth it. It didn’t matter. And now the phone had stopped ringing and I didn’t care.

My mind wandered to manicured lawns and beige garage doors, still leaves and hibiscus, a flag waving softly in the wind. Miss Hawaiian Tropics 2004. Magazines in a cardboard box under a bed. I wasn’t like anyone in the town where I grew up. The kids rode their bikes around in a closed circuit.

I sat up and rearranged my legs under the bathwater. I felt far away from my hands, even though I could see them right in front of me. The sparkles in my nail polish flared like fireworks as my eyes defocussed.

I went back to my sequence. Landing on the grass. I replayed the descent again and again in my head, modifying it slightly each time.

I wondered if my blood would trickle into the individual blades and harden against them. Or if it would congeal. Or look like thin coloured icing seeping into the grass. My hair tangles easily in hot weather. But I guess it would only really matter if I landed face down.

I thought that ideally, I’d like to land on my back with my hands folded over my stomach like Aurora in the Sleeping Beauty movie; a little composite of dried up tears and frantically abandoned ideas of better ways of living. I thought about my bones shattering like a mirror.

I meditated on what kind of lipstick I’d want to die in. I could do a rosy blush colour and keep it true to the fairytale, or maybe my usual blotted and bitten to oblivion baby pink, because I figured then I’d look most like myself. I thought about those pictures I’d seen of an actress face down on the day she died, dark hair swirled like a smashed scoop of rocky road ice cream against the pillow. I had wondered if there was lipstick on it and made a mental note to find out later. I only cared because I thought she might have known what it was like too. To have dreams that grew brutal as they blossomed. Until they pierced through skin, glinting. But I would always ultimately decide that, at the end of the day, I’d want to go out like me, whatever that means.

I wondered who’d be the first to turn white, or green, depending on how long I’m laying out there, and say, “Oh my God! Somebody! Help! She’s dead!” Or something to that effect. I thought about the gardener raking the leaves and discovering me beneath them. Or the driver catching a glimpse of my lifeless body in the rearview mirror.

It was around this point that I’d notice the tips of my fingers had wrinkled and the Bath & Body Works nausea was starting to set in, so I’d have to contemplate removing myself from the bathtub. I’d wrap a towel around myself, taking one last look at those unbearably green trees that lined the front of the house, deep and close set and impossible. A few strands of my hair would usually have fallen loose and gotten wet. They would stick to my forehead; my mascara smudged slightly in the steam.

I always felt a little ashamed afterwards, while I smoothed the makeup from underneath my eyes. Sometimes, right before I got out, I’d hold the sides of the tub and arch my back, lifting one of my soapy legs up pinup style. It made it all seem silly.

Miss December trying to drown in a bubble bath!

The wet hair still candied against my forehead, glistening.

Sometime in the spring of 2015, I saw a set of GIFs on Tumblr of The Hills reality TV star Heidi Montag on Access Hollywood talking about the 10 successive cosmetic procedures she had done in one day. She shook her Barbie blonde hair out of her eyes as what was to become my personal mantra escaped her lipgloss: “At the end of the day, you die.”

In that string of clips, Heidi Montag sat upright like some plastic angel, like a prayer candle of the blessed virgin, like a schoolgirl, and talked about the primordial struggle between beauty and pain. “I feel perfect” she said. On TV, on tape, on YouTube, it was the perfect sublimation of everything I held close to my teenage heart. The next morning, I printed stills of the interview and pasted them in a collage all over my mirror, filling in the gaps with wedding confetti. I was a product of my time; obsessed with pretty. Feeling pretty, smelling pretty, seeing pretty, having pretty, making pretty.

And I’d been that way for as long as I could remember. When I was little, I was a little precocious and a little spaced out. I would sit at the top of the staircase in my parents’ house and sing the song from Cinderella that she sang as she mopped the floor and wished on bubbles. I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t aware of my body. I was acutely conscious of the space I took up, of the height of my ponytail, of the way my skin pulled different coloured undertones in different seasons.

Zahia Dehar wore an important dress that resembled a cupcake. She was a lot like me. We both liked vintage Chanel and weren’t committed to the preservation of the soul-body connection when it came to what it took to acquire it. My family wasn’t poor but we hadn’t had much when it counted. A single bed pressed up against another single bed pushed against a cot in a room with 3 closets built into the wall and barely enough room to walk from the door to the corner bed. The wallpaper was wheat coloured and peeling, blemished with haphazardly applied glow-in-the-dark stars, and the beds were pressed up against the window so we didn’t often open the curtains. The room was crammed full of terrible purple cushions with flaps of heaped and indelicate felt and coarse, zebra print fabric that unfurled at the lightest touch.

I would sit on the floor opposite the mirror and gaze into my webcam, MAC Angel lipstick sinking into the faint lines on my lips, as if I could catch a glimpse of a more promising life if I looked long enough. I had a feeling pretty would save me, like a distant pink life ring on a dark and blustery sea. It just had to be bright enough, true enough. And I couldn’t help that I wanted everything; that I found some crystalline truth in lacquered charms and quilted pastel leather and especially cute shoes. Pretty really was the currency I dealt in this world. It was my favourite language. When I felt vulnerable or afraid, I just imagined myself in a translucent white, heart shaped bubble and reminded myself that I was protected within that. That even if the air outside my bubble was unbreathable, it was sugar and air in here.

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After school on Friday evenings, I watched tv with my Dad. I remember thinking that some of the girls seemed destined to be pasted onto the veil that separates this world from the next. I was a 2000’s baby; so I’d soon devised my own bespoke genealogy of reality TV blonde. Holly Madison and Pamela Anderson. Heidi Montag and Anna Nicole. Just for kinship reasons, though. Of the spiritual variety. I’m staunchly brunette, personally.

At night, I’d stand by the open kitchen window, watching the sheer white curtain being blown inward by the cold air and I’d feel like there was an ecstatic glitter in my heart, white hot and supersonic. Painful in its vibrations, in its longing for the next world, or the last one, or one adjacent, or maybe one that didn’t exist at all. And as I stood there, with my thoughts blooming and fading almost instantaneously on the floor of my mind, like cartoon sparkles across a Disney ocean, I felt that it was my life’s purpose to court love, to court fame, and to remain just as I was. To wrap myself in cloud-like spirals of love instead of clothes; the world’s love, the most elusive kind, and to stay there, preserved, encased, like the plastic pots of cheap, swirled lipgloss you used to be able to buy in the mid 2000s; white because I was forever a child, with no fear of a stage, and pink because I was a woman, the softening of blood. The whole world formed in the image of my body, from hills to highways, to the shapes of hearts. All of my faculties and whims dedicated to those who propped me atop that gold edged satin pillow. I could be an archetype, a fairytale, a souvenir, the closest thing to a static image, if I wanted to be, with nothing but soft breaths against the windowpane to give me away.

When I was finally in my 20s, there were times I could sit in my car and feel something promised and delicious rush through me. My bare thighs against the hot, white leather seat. The warm sun dripping down my hair, making the lighter strands of brown glitter red. Adjusting my S/S 2003 baby pink Dior heart lock sunglasses as I gripped the steering wheel with my fresh, square French tips. I had to pick up something to wear tonight and get my hair done. Life was good when I felt perfect. Pretty sun, pretty dress, pretty manicure. If I could just stay in that headspace of immediate sensation, I could bathe the world in my pastel light. And then everyone at the gas station seemed nice and the bougainvillea crept over Pump 5 just for me. Pretty sun, pretty dress, pretty manicure. Repeating it over and over like a prayer.

I just couldn’t think about it too much, or stare in the mirror too long or let a clunky stranger shatter the sparkly plastic of my fantasy. It was one of the best ones, because it was just about real. Those are the fantasies that devastate. It’s never the ones about growing angel wings or communicating with animals in song; it’s the ones you could die clutching, because they’re so close to true. I could stay in that space, that felt like what some people describe as knowing God, until I felt something settling on my skin, mixed in with the humidity; a wet, dizzy feeling. Like rain at the peak of July. I traced it over the diamanté on my sunglasses, in the glisten of my gel manicure, in the smell of ammonia and gasoline. It filled my stomach and my chest and met me at every stop sign and traffic light. It was the apotheosis of all my work. I felt perfect; sugar sweet and marshmallow soft, in a white and pink gingham mini dress and a pair of matching Louboutin wedges. I had laboured for this. I was soaking in it now. I felt myself break down into pieces, petals, pixels. I watched them evaporate into the summer air.

Most of the time it felt like I was making the right decisions. Especially when I was caught up in the plushness of being told what to do and when to do it. But sometimes I felt my breathing getting shallower. I did feel pretty; everything was so pretty, but something was wrong. The sun was going down and variables were starting to shift out of place. My carriage was turning back into a pumpkin. I was never going to feel glittery for long enough.

All my old memories were getting crushed into unbearable cubes, like trash. And I heard the machinery clanking in my mind. That awful metal sound. Tasting blood in my mouth. Night after night. Terrible and beautiful, hungry and so fragile. Hanging on the edge, up and down a student housing block, getting bought single roses from a neon flower shop. It was what my life had looked like before. It was real at the time. Real to me. Right to me. Necessary to me. It felt like living. It was.

But now, it doesn’t. It feels like somebody else’s memories are in my head. It feels like if I lay on my side in bed long enough maybe they’ll drain out, like swimming pool water. What if I’d just never dreamed so hard that my dreams became real? And I’d just been ordinary and had the life I was supposed to have and never have met anyone who tore me open or bought me Chanel dresses at 18 years old? But I was so broken. I needed the silver piped between the fragments of me. I was inconsolable. I needed to die. That was the closest I could get.

In my baby pink faux fur coat in a movie theatre in Brixton. In a neighbourhood bar. Up and down a social housing elevator with mascara running down from my eyes and blood streaked across my cheek. Being someone’s pretty girlfriend. It was like hiding. Behind a big round glass of gin. In Mac Oak lip liner. It was like disappearing to rebuild in secret. And when I finally emerged I was 22 and had so much music in me. But something had gotten messed up, mangled and broken, like someone had set fire to my wires and now I was a knotted mess, and a flame, and I hurt, and now I had to live with all of these frayed edges inside of me, that I didn’t even know were there, unspooling like an expired, weeping mess of cotton candy.