Another sad day.

Nothing decided, nothing gained, nothing nothing nothing.

Mum tried to make me feel better and failed. Her response was that I should stop being so damn self-pitiful and self-centred, that my friends were more successful because they have an idea of where they're going, and I'm flaky. She said, that letter's sat there on the windowsill since last week, you haven't posted it.

She said, you're not shit. So how was it that after our little chat, our little boosting talk, that I walked round the block crying? Thinking about how I am flaky, how I'll never change. Everything seems to be consolidating the fact of my personality- my brother came down and shouted at me to turn the TV down, and I did it. If I ask him to turn his music down, he never does. I make less of a fuss. Today he said I sound stupid when I say things, and he's right. I am just not like him, I will fail, I am terrible, I have failed and I am failing and all those people that say I'm on the cusp don't mean it at all. I'm just going to fail my whole life long. I'm just going to waste. Waste.

At least the letter got posted.

I hate my life.

And the hardest thing is that she's precisely right. I have got no idea. I am clueless. My friends are better at all that other stuff. I'm starting to feel like my friends are just simply better at everything. And I am shit. Mum's right, when I'm in one of these moods nothing's going to pull me out of it.

Dad said, well, it'll be a few days, or weeks, or maybe even a month, but you know you'll feel better again.

I didn't want to say so, but I've been feeling this way since school stopped, in varying degrees of awful. But always like I'm less than other people. Always like I've done the worst with what's been given to me, but I don't know how to do any better.

Alright, I do know. I need to be less self centred and more focusing on other people. More like Lady of the House. She was just aiming to help people, not to be great, and look, now she is great.

I was just sat here with tears running down my face, making no audible sobs. Mum came in and I just wiped my face, and spoke in a completely normal, perky tone. It wasn't even an effort to switch emotional states so quickly. I find it terrifying that I'm so inscrutable and inconsolable. It's not as if I'm wandering round wailing, it's just that I feel terrible and I can't make it better, and neither can anyone else. I feel so sad, and noone even notices. Mum asked if I was using face wipes. That was all.

Then again, do I want anyone to notice? I don't want hugs or special treatment or anything like that. If I'd wanted Mum to notice I'd have left the tears dripping instead of affecting normality.

We had a little interchange about going out on Saturday night. My Mum is fine, and she's not at all hard like I've painted her. She seems it but she's just trying to make sure I can face the world. Like she said, it's a big bad place.

But that's not true. Even in my sorry state, I know that good people exist, and that good things happen.

It's just that they don't happen to me.

I would really like a cigarette at the moment. The act of inhaling and exhaling and the smoke would be lovely.

I haven't got any. I will buy some tomorrow, or better, buy some rolling tobacco and teach myself how to roll.

If I could do anything now, I would put on my shoes and socks, take my cigarettes and matches and go and sit by our canal. I would find a ready made pile of stones, set in the place where I always go and sit, and I'd hurl them at the half-iced surfaces to break and shatter. There's a whole load of bread set on top of the ice for the ducks, who seem to ignore it slipshod skate waddling over the ice slabs on the surface.

There's something brilliant about lighting cigarettes with matches. It makes me feel accomplished. It's something I can, in my little world of can't. Sad, how far I've fallen from mythical discourses to smoking feats.

There's a girl I used to know, I think she still lives down the road from me, and I always wonder what happened to her. She's large and ungainly, with an inbred look to her. She takes after her father, who is similarly shy. Her mother's small and pointed, and I remember going to her house for tea when I was ten, and confusing her by being vegetarian. What did we eat? They lived next door to their grandparents, and the girl and her brother used a potty at night. They had a front room that was kept for best, a foreign concept. We rarely played there.

I wonder if she ever sees me, behind her net curtains. Her house used to be filled with paraphernalia, those dolls you get from Spain in frilly skirts to hide toilet roll, and ornaments and things. It was evident that her mother would have preferred a small, slight girl, to dress in frilly clothes and ribbons. I don't know how I came by this impression, but I knew from the way this girl held herself that she knew she was overgrown.

I wonder if she smokes now, or if she's rebelled or gotten pregnant or done something scandalous.

I am fairly pernicious in my assertions.