Gone nowhere

Everyone was still in Stu’s room when I got up and there was a mood of shivery exhausted shock even though it was sunny outside.

Mike crashed a car last night while drunk, cleared off and left the scene, and rumour has it the car was stolen too. . . . His nose is swollen and he has bruises and grazes on his lips: he’s morose and obviously depressed. Susie went home today grey-faced and weary with cystitis. Then I think about Rowan with her neuroses, Shelley with her hidden depressions, Russ with his, Penny, Lindsey (her money situation has improved) and me too, with all I keep pent up inside, hidden beneath a superficially agreeable exterior. Inside I’m as screwed up as anyone.

Penny was very pissed off with everything, so she and I decided to take a walk, and just before we set off, Gareth came in to the kitchen (we’ve been relocated to the one at the end of the other corridor) looking white and sickly. He was stoned from a session with friends from Peterborough (one a psychopathic-looking skinhead knife maniac), so while he spewed up too we went out.

It was clean, cold, and bracing outside, clear cirrus-smudged skies and banks of mist down in the valleys and hollows. By the time we were dropping down towards the Teacher Training College the dusk was gathering, the sun a distant cold glitter of gold and red behind dark purple clouds.

This has all been a bit much to take in one night, a weird, unreal few hours. I’ve hated it. Since it got dark I’ve been wallowing in self-pity, feeling claustrophobic, trapped, angry, frustrated. . . I can't speak to people at all and I feel as though I’m being swallowed up by my own inability to communicate.

At Westway Loop Bar I sat like a stone, silent while all around me people talked. I can’t help it. What do I do? None of this is coming out right and I can’t make it come out right because I feel so deadened and zombie-fied. Back in Wollstonecraft I laid on my bed in the dark, wondering if I should be rampaging about outside, smashing and screaming my protest at myself, at people, at this place . . . it's so difficult to articulate my precise feelings . . . blackness all around, the kitchen cold and empty, now a burned and  inhospitable husk. Everything everyone does is always the same; why do they bother with the humdrum of pointless conversations and claustrophobic civility?

I feel so trapped. I’ve left all my work until the last push up again. I haven't achieved anything this week, read no books, gone nowhere. I’m nothing more than an 'animated corpse'. In fact this whole term has been pretty pathetic, my supposed brand new start shattered before I even came here. I knew deep down that I wouldn’t change. There’s no hope for me.