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It’s been a while since I’ve written. Mainly because I’ve been so caught up in my own thoughts, but also because I have been helping friends and trying to process a lot of changes around me. I will be 23 in 2 months. Still a while but these things catch up with you. I’m getting further and further from being a teenager now. I’m going to Rome in just over a week for my first holiday away with my boyfriend (I don’t think visiting him in Switzerland counts).
This is my 3rd work trip back to Brighton. I got my old job back from during my last year of university and here I am, tired but determined, off to sleep on sofas and live in a suitcase as I have many other times before. But this isn’t a bad thing. I’ve know many a person who lived this way and it doesn’t make you weaker or exhausted with your life. Yes, there are moments. The moments when you don’t feel safe, or life seems relentless, but over all it is something that builds you. I was taught how to pack well from a young age, how to live 2 weeks from a carry on suitcase, how to get the best from my journeys. Relying on myself alone doesn’t frighten me anymore.
I’m doing my masters in London at the end of September, and I’m taking every day as it comes until then. I believe things show themselves when the time is right, you can’t chase everything. If a flat I am drawn to in Brighton calls me, I will answer and do everything in my power to make it mine. But I am also understanding of the hurdles. Should I be back here? There is no real answer to that. The events of the next few months will drive me one way or another as I work towards my next educational step in Sound Arts and Composition. I should try and be excited by the uncertainty.
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It’s time. This is my last evening train journey home as a flat-less girl. After a long weekend of full-time work, I can’t believe this moment is finally here. The sun is so bright as it sets around me. Sets on a tired lost girl, and rises tomorrow on one who has been found. I know I will be up all night packing, panicking, throwing my clothes and belongings about as I prioritise the things that I will shove into my car early in the morning for the drive back down to Brighton. I know that music equipment and my pole come first. Any others are a blessing. Oh, and the microwave I bought myself. My first microwave. God everyone’s heard me rambling on about that damn microwave. Sunsets are so beautiful.
Every pain ends. Time heals, because it passes and so many things change around you that nothing can ever really be the same again anyway. You can’t feel that ache the way you did before. The level of sadness I felt even two weeks ago, the absolute despair over every choice I had made, is almost gone now. There is so much hope, as the last ropes loosen around me and I feel like I’m not choking anymore. There will still be burns but they will fade. It will be fine. I will heal, in this space I can finally call my own. And suddenly, just like that, every voice in my head will be silenced.
Hold on to the decisions you believe in.
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I’m currently sitting on a Virgin Atlantic plane sipping a rum and ginger ale, looking out the window at glorious sunshine and vast ocean. This is a flight back to Florida, probably my most visited destination over my lifetime. Not only do I have family and friends I can’t wait to see, beaches to walk along and intensely hot weather to look forward to, my mother has also just bought a property here.
I must say this trip has come with both terrible and incredible timing. It was such chaos to get my flat sorted and build my life in Brighton back to something sturdy and happy, that it is a shame to suddenly part ways with it for 2 weeks. But there is also something beautiful about throwing yourself into another world when you feel least prepared for it. Perhaps things could’t have come at a better moment. Perhaps there couldn’t be a better start to such an exhilarating summer.
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Of course when you are older and reach adult age like us, this turns into excessive cocktail consumption, loud music, general disorderly behaviour and frantic gossiping/bitching. We are a rather feisty duo when brought together.
So here we are with me visiting Florida again, and Kara and I decided it was only right we had a belated birthday celebration (both of our birthdays fall in April), so Kara booked us a room for 2 nights at Disney's Caribbean Beach Resort.
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There's no feeling quite like the one you get moment you touch a real piano. I know people who have lived on keyboards their whole lives, and the moment they feel the weight of old ivory under their fingers they panic. They find it heavy and unforgiving. But I longed for real pianos as a young girl. Keyboards were lifeless to me and stifled the creativity that flowed so strongly from me as a teenage girl.
I was given an old upright piano by a dear family friend at a time when I needed it most. It bettered my playing, inspired me and was a good friend for years. This upright eventually turned into a baby grand which is what I am lucky enough to play now when ever I visit my parents. A studio flat is just too small for something like that. But I play so much better on a real piano, and today I got to play mine.
AKC x
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