Day 44: Telling strangers personal things

In the morning my sheets have come completely off the bed and are twisted into ropes, my skin is salty with sweat. I don't remember my dreams.

May is my powerful season, my manic month, my birthday. Three years ago on May Day Boris Johnson became mayor of London and my boyfriend moved out of the little flat we shared on Hackney Road. I threw an apple onto the floor and it lay there smashed and rotting for a week until a friend came round and cleared it up. Later that month I lost my job and had nowhere to live. Later that summer, within a fortnight, I was on both side of the law: first arrested as a drink driver and second rescued from a stranger who violently attacked and tried to rape me. It's taken me a long time to unpick everything that happened that year. And everything that happened that year was caused though or drowned in or soothed by alcohol.

I've found this four-day weekend difficult, hiding in my cell reading and sleeping. No one has visited this bedsit to see my circumstances so reduced. But something is happening: forces are at work in the night, helping me to work though and let go. Some kind of 'process'.

I lost my phone - left it on a bus - and my family were unable to get in touch with me. Mum emailed to say she was worried - she thought I'd "had a blip". I was so pleased to Skype her today and say no, I have not had a drink. It was a close one, though, and I realise how near it - the other side - is and how edgy and concerned other people still are for me. I have lived every day of these six weeks, excruciatingly conscious, but it is still not a very long time.

But I've made it though and some things are making me smile: ducking under branches as I cycle quickly along the path by the canal, the way a guy in the rehab keeps a massive can of deodorant in the waist band of his tracky bottoms like a gun, seeing old friends at a Royal Wedding barbecue on Friday, hearing in an AA meeting yesterday morning how glad people were to not have bank holiday hangovers.



INFINITE JEST: Pages 450-489.
- Another seriously gruesome death. I'm getting quite sick of this, DFW.
- Love Don Gately
- Computer-generated fatal pleasure
- Tennis tactics applicable to life in general: "Not 'adjust to conditions'. Make this second world within the world: here there are no conditions."