Ruby Stark

On Tuesday, I moved into my new place in Kreuzberg. The lesbians were out, and I arranged my few things in my huge room. I have a great view over a little park and out over the rooftops. The two cats are delightful: the older one, Pecadee, taciturn and sober, the younger one, Rocket, dynamic and always wanting to play-fight.

On Thursday, Musk, Vanilla, Vanilla’s mother and I all at supper together. It was nice. Things are so domestic here: we share the shopping and they buy tulips and mangoes and there is beer in the fridge. The apartment is light and airy and has a great view down the street. For the first time in my life, I am living in precisely the area I want.

On Friday, I went to meet Brown for a Vietnamese and then we met some of her friends at a weird hybrid gay/hipster/biker bar. We drank beer and talked about the BBC and Brown’s failed romance with a chap who lives in Cairo. There were quite a few gays in our party, but they were not annoying. We went on to a basement bar in Neukölln that was red lit and full of fairly boring people. I left about two and got home and played with Rocket on my duvet and wrote to Cat.

Today, I went to meet my cousin, who is visiting Berlin, and his girlfriend. We ate an early lunch in a good cafe down the road from my house and talked about the films they make and our family and living in a foreign country and my job. It was really nice.

This evening, I went to meet my boss, Malt, for Capture the Flag. It was cold and raining, and, despite some kind translations, I found it hard to join in properly because I couldn’t really communicate. But, it was great to hang out with Malt. I think I might be falling for him. We have banter and his smiles give me little lurches and he’s tall and a little protective and confident and alpha. Thinking of having sex with him brings a mixture of desire and repulsion and shyness and fear. I haven’t fantasised about him yet. But, this slow growing of attraction is the way it always seems to go with boys.

Malt left about nine to go to a house-warming party. He didn’t invite me, and I’m not sure why.

It struck me that I always give savoury names to the boys I really like: Grain, Dusk, Malt.

I got the U-Bahn back to Kottbusser Tor and walked up through Kreuzberg. I stopped off and had a soul-warming pizza and beer, then came home.

Tomorrow, I am hopefully going for a massage with Canvas.

I’ve just started reading Endgame Vol. 1: The Problem of Civilisation by Derrick Jensen.

I came home from work knowing I needed to do some blasted laundry. I took off all my clothes, packed everything up, slung my bags over my shoulders, set out and lit a cigarette. I bought my disposable lighter when I left England and have had it with me ever since. I don’t keep track, but this is the longest I can remember keeping a lighter.

I sloped through the snow, the bounce of my bags making me feel like a soldier, like Matt Damon in Saving Private Ryan when he says he is going to stay with his company and steps up onto a pile of sandbags and then drops over onto the ground on the other side with a whump and a jangling of gear.

I got to the launderette. All the machines have names and I opened up faithful old Herta and put my clothes in and set her going. I now sit, listening to Sunset Rubdown’s The Ballad of Little Lord and thinking about my Clojure mp3 crawler.

I worked on it all last night, bar a break to make supper and talk to Cat (she sent me a Valentine’s card with a picture of the Queen of Hearts). Usually, I would have rounded off the evening with a bit of a film, or some internet, but I just went straight to bed.

There are certain activities that give me a lasting glow of fulfillment and happiness, but if I do only them, I feel rushed and frenetic. In fact, I could order them from most glowy to most default: going out, volunteering or doing activist stuff, spending time with my friends, spending time with my family, cooking, coding, reading, blogging, making music, going on the internet, watching films, playing video games.

What if i were to only do activities high on that list? Always be producing or setting up potential or creating? I’ve toyed before with the idea of stopping my consumption of entertainment, and that is just a cruder version of this new idea. I wonder if I could do it. Certainly, if I look back at the happiest times of my life, I was spending a lot of my time on activities high up the list.

On Monday, I set off north from my house. I walked up through Kreuzkölln and saw a few squats and went into a record shop. I got to Orangienstr. and went into another, good punk/hardcore record shop that sells CDs for stupideuros. I went to a vegetarian restaurant for a really tasty veggie burger (I had to tip an imaginary glass to my mouth to find out what drinks they have) and read David Foster Wallace on the annual US porn convention.

I was just walking up through the squatting district of Kreuzberg when my landlord called and said they could mend the internet if I came home. I rushed back, they did mending and then I was connected again. I can’t tell you how worryingly normal I feel now I can tweet, research Berlin, email my friends, talk with Cat via Facebook and write Ruby Stark. I was even able to have supper with my step-Dad and little sisters over Skype.

The next day, I went to get my Einwohnermeldeamt, my residence registration. I queued up in the Bürgeramt, a big office building full of long, linoleum-floored corridors that feel like a hospital or like University. I waited and waited, trapped in bureaucracy, and finally got the stamped piece of paper I need. I felt like someone trying to get across the border to safety and having to put my life in the hands of a capricious official.

I came home and hung out and then went to the vokü at a squat up in Friedrichshain. I finally found the right door, went in and nervously asked where the vokü was. An old punk rolled a cigarette and told me that they weren’t serving tonight and recommended a place down the road. I went out and down the road and found a promising-looking bar. I went in and it was like a punk heaven: candles everywhere, a mix of hardcore and crusty and squatter people, red walls, pool, people milling around behind the bar, some serving drinks and some just hanging out. I sat on a stool and drank a Becks and smoked some cigarettes and looked at the tall, skinny, bleach/black-haired bartender. I struck up a conversation with the guy sitting next to me and we talked about squatting in Philadelphia and England. After a while, I slipped down from my stool, put on my coat, said goodbye and caught the U home.

On a whim, I went to find the queer bar near my house. I went in and found myself surrounded by straight looking people. I drank a bottle of Pilsner and asked the barmaid what the place is called and she said something that definitely wasn’t the name of the queer bar. So, I leaned against the bar and pretended to be Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a rent boy in Mysterious Skin. I went out into the street and found the right place right next door. I sat at the bar and drank limonade and then asked the woman next to me for a light that I didn’t need. We smoked and talked about music and Berlin. She was nice.

My little sister texted me to ask if we could talk on Skype. So, I left, and we talked for an hour about her dicksuck ex-boyfriend. Then, I re-read Cat’s letter, then I went to sleep and dreamt about Allure again and I touched her in the hollow between her leg and her hip and she sighed with pleasure.

Now, I’m going to make a lasagne for lunch/supper/supper.

I woke up on Saturday and went downstairs and bade Dusk goodbye. He had a meeting in London. About twelve pm, Archigram, his girlfriend and Jordan arrived. They, Emma and I ate goat’s cheese, Parma ham, home-made bread and sun-dried tomatoes, and drank orange juice and cups of tea. After lunch, we played a game of Cranium with much hilarity. One all-play round had Archigram and Cyp both having to whistle us Say a Little Prayer, and they both started on the same bit of tune in the same key and produced an eerie, impromptu duet and then they couldn’t whistle anymore because they were laughing so much.

We went to the shops to get some last-minute supplies and then spent the rest of the afternoon talking.

In the early evening, Richard, Haz, Dusk, Grain, my Dad, my brother, and my Mum’s friends Sue and Vince arrived. My brother began cooking like a hero and everyone milled around in the kitchen and drank a lot and talked. It made my heart glad to see my friends and family together, and to see my friends who didn’t know each other getting on. I think pretty much everyone talked to pretty much everyone.

Dusk seemed a little withdrawn, but I’m not sure why. My Mum thinks it was because he was older than most of my friends, but I’m not so sure. I think maybe he was tired and maybe he was distracted by his meeting and maybe he was phased by meeting lots of confident friends of mine. He said he has a theory that middle-class families are, fundamentally, articulate and discuss abstract concepts, whereas working-class families don’t talk about things outside their direct experience. He said this results in a higher ability of the middle classes to adapt and aspire.

We did an informal survey, and found that, of the people who identified as a person with a working class background, he, Grain and Cyp thought their families supported the theory. Archigram’s girlfriend felt her family did not.

I had been nervous about showing Dusk where I grew up, because my Mum’s house is big and has a big garden and she and my step-Dad are rich. (At the same time, I was excited to show him off to my family and other friends.) I asked him whether meeting my family and seeing our house illuminated anything about me. He said another piece had slotted into the jigsaw puzzle: the articulate and well-to-do environment I grew up in explains why I can move to a country without speaking the language or knowing anyone there. He might be right.

I wore my red clingy American Apparel dress and Cyp said, “Ruby, if you weren’t a lesbian [his word for me being queer]…” He’s so damn handsome, but I just don’t fancy him.

Three thirty a.m. came and most of us staggered off to bed. Richard and my brother stayed up and sat at the kitchen table and drank a bottle of Amaretto.

I went to bed with Grain. He kissed me on the mouth and said, Goodnight, Ruby, and he asked if I’d like to spoon and I said yes and he wrapped me up in his arms and curled terribly close around me and said I am good to snuggle because I am petite.

I didn’t really sleep that well because I preferred being snuggled to moving so I could relieve my cramp or undead a limb. So, most of the night passed in a strange half-wake half-sleep where I listened to Grain breathe and thought how nice it was to snuggle after such a long time spent with Matte’s dislike of nighttime snuggles.

We slept in lots of different positions: me with my head on Grain’s chest, turned together with legs entwined, me on my back and Grain with a knee around my hips and and our hand together and Grain’s breath on my cheek. I slowly got more and more turned on. He kissed me all over my neck. I kissed his cheek slowly and delicately.

Thing is, though, we’re friends. I feel something very deep in my heartt for Grain. But, whatever it is, my feelings about our friendship and his relationship prohibit further exploration. When I came to the next morning, my desire faded into the deepness.

We got up and I fetched Grain a bowl of Wheetos and a cup of tea. Then, we saw that everyone else was already up and had started building an igloo in the garden. We went out to help. For the next three hours, a few of us gathered snow, heaped it in a sledge, took it to the igloo and shaped it into flat blocks. Then, the others sawed it up into bricks and built the structure. Mum brought us out cups of tea and we drank those. Richard brought out beers and we drank those (I felt fantastic for twenty minutes, then rather ill, then OK). At last, Archigram, his girlfriend, Richard and my brother had a beautifully-curved structure mostly complete. We spent an hour doing the almost and then horizontal roof, and then it was done. We got candles and my Mum took a photo of all eight of us inside. It was utterly joyous: the hard work, the euphoric warmth, the beer, my family, my close friends and the utterly pointless but oh so beautiful house.

I went to the London Ambulance Service with the Moms. As I was standing at reception waiting for the PR guy, a policeman came in and asked for Ruby Stark and I said I’m Ruby and put out my hand and then realised he was going for a hug and we embraced. I took him to meet my Mum in the waiting room and they hugged, too. We got talking and N, the policeman, told his part of the story. He said he was going past with his partner on their motorbikes and he saw a crowd on the pavement. He went to investigate and found me on the floor in the recovery position. He said I had gone blue. A passerby was on the phone with the emergency services and tried to pass the phone, but N shoved him aside and began mouth-to-mouth and chest-compressions. After four and a half minutes, I coughed in his face.

At that moment, he started crying, my Mum started crying and I started crying. Mum and N hugged again. My Dad arrived and we retold the story and he nearly cried.

The PR guy arrived and we went to the coffee room. The paramedics arrived and seemed kind of detached and professionally dutiful. A photographer chap took some photos of us in the back of an ambulance, and then we all shared doughnuts and cookies. One of the paramedics asked me what my plans were and I said I was moving to Berlin. I explained that I’d applied in May and got a phone interview, but then I died and Mum had to explain to them that I was indisposed. Everyone laughed, and I think the ice broke. My sister arrived.

We took some more photos with me astride a paramedic motorbike in my dress and tights and schoolgirl shoes. And N asked if I wanted to take a photo with his Police hat on and I politely agreed and my Mum took a photo that will never ever see the light of day.

One of the paramedics said that the first five minutes after a cardiac arrest are crucial and it became clear that N had saved my life.

We all hugged goodbye and my Mum and Dad agreed to go on an ambulance shift as observers.

Afterwards, my Mum, Dad, sister and I went for supper. I remember when I saw Touching the Void with my Mum and her friend and her friend’s son. We all came out and felt like we’d been through the emotional wringer, but we just couldn’t stop talking and we were all on such a high. Supper felt like that. I felt tired, but very special and loved.

I drove with my Dad to the house owned by his friend, Sapphire, whose lovely and diffident and funny husband died ten years ago and the house was built by Lytton Strachey and frequented by members of the Bloomsbury group (she has photos of Virginia Woolf in the garden). Sapphire’s grown-up children arrived in the evening. Gina is thirty and very beautiful and flamboyant, but caring. Sam is diffident and funny and warm like his father, but slower and more softly handsome. My nascent crush developed into a gentle yearning. I thought quite a lot about having sex with him, and about wrapping myself up in his quiet attentions and feeling him stand behind me with his hands on my shoulders. In true life, we traded quips and smiled at each other. His girlfriend, Heather, also with us, was very nice.

Christmas passed with a walk, drinks, a stubbornly uncooperative log fire, lots of food, a game of Cranium and easy conversations.

Now, I am back at the Mom’s house sitting on the sofa with my little sisters and cousin. Em is being fucked around by her dicksuck of a boyfriend.

Last week, I went to a memorial/celebration for a poet, AM, who died about a year ago. The Moms puts on poetry events for the council and, growing up, we would sometimes have poets staying at our house. Some of them became family friends. The poet we were celebrating was a sort of kind, mucking-in influence around the house. He joined in with our family activities – our friend’s gig, my Mum and step-Dad’s drunken supper parties – and spoke to us kids like we were adults. He was the poet mentioned in this post.

The event itself was a horrendous disappointment. I got no sense of AM at all. It was just all other poets and musicians reinterpreting his work. There were a few successful performances, but they simply succeeded on their own merit, rather than because they were “celebrations”. My Mum and our family friend and my Auntie seemed to love the whole evening, and I was baffled by their choices of favourite performances. My Mum asked me after the interval what I thought of the performance, I forced out a vacant, “Wonderful”, so I didn’t hurt her feelings.

Just as I was leaving the loos, I thought I saw Allure (1, 2). When I returned to my seat, I scanned the audience, but couldn’t see her.

On the tube home, I realised she was sitting opposite me. Fuck, man, this girl just keeps on turning up. A condensed history: we met via friend Hardcore Boy who fancied her, we kissed in front of him (what a dick), we met at least a year later at HB’s party, she pursued me, I had that amazing night at her party, she cut off contact, we somehow got in touch in London, she travelled the world for a year, and so it goes.

We had a great conversation, parted in Brixton and she said she’d Facebook me. We’ll see.

Last night, my Mum and I went out to supper. We ended up talking about relationships: how my sister, Jess, is settling for her boyfriend because she thinks she can’t find someone who challenges her, about how I could have fallen in love with Grain but somehow never did, about how Jess tried to make make up for her own Mum’s detachment by adopting my Mum and how my Mum had to push her away so she could focus on me, about how I would put Matte down by using my superior intelligence to prevail in discussions with her, about how my Grandpa pushed my Mum and Auntie away so he didn’t feel the guilt of betraying them by having affairs.

Last night, I went to a party thrown by my friend, Alice. I took my housemates, Camden and Olivo, and I wore the long, sheer, plain black dress that I got in a free shop at a squat where my friends had a queer cinema weekend and that I left to go an Alice In Wonderland party where palled around with and then kissed Allure in one of those successful nights where everyone is in love with you.

We arrived in the pouring rain and I spent the evening talking to my sister and old friends, Lucie, Richard and Charlotte, casting occasional glances at the pretty, straight girls milling around. I think I might need to just put my dislike of gay people aside and start going to stuff where lesbians go. Lord help me.

I talked to my sister about my worry that I’m starting afresh every two years. She told me she thinks I live an exciting life and that I conquer each city I move to. I was very flattered. I said I worried that I wasn’t having a successful long-term relationship and she said she thought it would happen. She said she has been the happiest ever over the last three “settled” years. We decided that maybe settled equals more happy but breeds wow I’m not cool enough dissatisfaction when you examine your life.

My housemates and I got home at about four-thirty a.m

[Tapped out on my IPhone whilst waiting for The Paper Chase gig to start.]

When I was about fifteen, I used to go to the pub every Friday night with my friends. We would go to The Alma, where it was rumoured that a twelve-year-old had once been served, and where any cabbie who stuck his head in looking for his fare would, inexplicibly, be greeted with shouts of, “Woodward! Woodward!”

We would sit and drink and, when I felt part of things and people were cracking jokes, I would have a good time.

One week, I had been Reading. lesbian-themed novel called Rotary Spokes that was about a motorcyclist and the women she met. I was at a stage where anything to do with lesbians was exciting and, that Friday, I took my book to the pub with me. It stuck out of my trouser pocket as I drank and spoke and my evening sparkled with another-world possibility.

When I was eighteen, I took a gap year and worked a job in my hometown. After leaving the office, I would occasionally go to a cafe/bar and drink bloody marys and read my book. It felt like a secret, possibilitous world that was mine.

At some point that year, I went to a poetry reading that my Mum had organised in the Fitzwilliam Museum. Afterwards, me and my Mum and step-Dad and a lovely couple they are friends with wandered around the medieval exhibition and laughed at the armour until we cried. And I felt so happy because I had a just-started game of Half Life waiting for me at home.

I rang her the day before yesterday and then spoke to her again last night.

I said that I wasn’t happy any more. I said that the distance problem is even worse and I never see her. And so I said I don’t want to go out with her. She said she had been thinking of coming to London for the whole of January and I said that would be a wonderful way to end, but that I didn’t relish the thought of limping through two more months. She finally agreed and said that if we were thrashing through some sadness to get to a new phase then that would make sense, but fighting to get to the end is just silly.

I explained that I would have told her when I came to visit her in the forest, but that it would just make our last time together really weird and horrid. I told her how I had realised that a) I admire her because of her tree warriorship and b) that she understands me. I told her that I thought our second go at a relationship was much better than our first. I told her that I will miss fucking her. I told her that I will never forget the way she supported me when I died. I told her that, though the support of my family and friends was essential, it was her being there that gave me something to look forward to, something to be excited about.

She said she was walking around on some pallets in the forest and the moon was casting halos in the misty sky and making silhouettes of the trees and making the mud glisten. I lay in my bed and cried.

She said she didn’t want to hang up. We said I love you a few times and talked a little more and then said goodbye.

Afterwards, I talked things over with my little sisters in the bathroom and they were very sweet and supportive and gave me hugs. My Mum said she would probably have let things drag on in the holding pattern for a while and Emma said I am very “clear-headed”.

It is weird that I can say to Matte, “I am desperately in love with you”, and then break up with her.

My Moms just sent me this article about a man who had a cardiac arrest out of hospital and survived.

I cried while I read it, I think because I am struggling to find the new purpose that the guy found. I’m not living like every moment is important.

I try to make my life more like how I want it to be. I do something really cool, or have a great time, but I can’t maintain it. I want to have a relationship with someone in London, but I can’t find anyone. I want to write more songs, but they come out of me so slowly. I want to hack on a personal project for a living, but I can’t find users for the things I build. I look for a third place, but can’t find it. I want to play gigs, but can’t find people who will put me on.

On 14th February, two days after my 28th birthday, I wrote this post:

The good: I’ve got a solo music project that is pretty good; I’m spending a lot of time with my family; I’ve got several art projects on the go; I’m reading a lot; I live in London; I’m going to lots of gigs; I’m heavily involved with the tech scene.

The bad: I’m not playing enough gigs; I wish I was in some more bands; I’m not in the US; I haven’t got a girlfriend or a boyfriend or both; I’m not doing any politics; I’m not playing squash; my job is not what I love.

I am trying to sort out the job thing at the moment. I am trying to sort out the squash thing, too. I have a girlfriend, but our relationship makes me sad as much as it makes me happy. [Full disclosure: I think the only relationships I'm into are the ones that make me sad.]

Some people are happy, man. It fucking blows my mind.

I know the boring relationship machinations with Matte have been going on and on. But, as usual and as consolation to the reader for his trouble, there sex at the end.

Matte came to visit on Wednesday.  Our relationship has become so complicated in my head.  And how I feel about it changes: sometimes, I am cool, sometimes, I cry, sometimes, I jump for joy.  I wonder whether how I feel is just based upon how deep into the relationship I think, how far I resolve all of the implications of the facts.  I wonder whether, at the bottom, there is the truth that makes me feel just sadness, and, the less far I go down, the more happy I am.

There are some new facts.  First, Matte’s new bloke is called Abel.  He is an American, in a band touring the UK, very young, a ragamuffin anarcho and probably a nice person.  Second, she is in love with him.  Third, she is about to move out of her house to go traveling.  Fourth, some of this traveling will be with him.  Fifth, at some point, he will return to the US.  Sixth, she is pretty sure she doesn’t want to see anyone else but me and him.

Matte told me these facts in the park near my house.  We went there to eat olives, spelt crackers, houmous and bread.  We lay down in the long grass and talked and talked.

I felt better: her see-saw metaphor made sense (her in the middle and two people on either end stops her tumbling down and turning into the person on one side when it clunks down without any weight at the other), I quite liked the sound of Abel, things would be more stable and so my mind would be able to solidify.

I still can’t bear the idea of someone else having sex with her.  I am still simultaneously happy and unhappy that Abel is totally different from me; really, I want to give Matte everything. I am afraid that her traveling all the time will make it hard for us to have a relationship.

Fundamentally, I feel like non-monogamy is underwater: I dive down and things feel fine, but, after a while, the pressure builds and I have to surface and breathe.

On the night she arrived, we went to see The Time Traveler’s Wife. I preferred the book – especially as it is so wrapped up in my head with the time I went to New York City – but the film was fine and Matte and I held hands. We spent a day with my Dad at the Tate Britain. We held hands a lot. We went out to supper with my brother, sister and some of my friends. Matte didn’t say much. We went to supper at the house of my friend, Archigram, and had a delightful evening of cracking jokes, eating vegan fish cakes, drinking beer and smoking. Matte didn’t say much. I wish she would talk more to the people I love. We had sex in the mornings and afternoons and evenings.

On Saturday, she brought up discussion number two. She said that she wished we could stop filling time. This is actually something I’ve been trying to solve ever since we got together the first time way back in July 2007. I sometimes feel like an events coordinator, trying to think up stuff she will like. Because we don’t live in the same city, we can’t carry on our own lives and projects when we are together; because we spend sections of time together, we can’t see each other and then go about our own business. We agreed that we’d try to just hang out more.

I said I wish we could stop talking about this fucking relationship and start having it.

I have just re-read some of the posts I wrote about the time when we got back together. (They start here.) There are definitely very low points, but there are lots of very high points, too. Are we just getting through stuff before we come to the other side? Were the previous high points because we were in the first (second) flush?

Saturday, her birthday, was pure joy. We went to see a stage production of Peter Pan, her favourite novel, in Kensington Gardens. The actor playing Peter was just the right mix of cocky and vulnerable, and the script didn’t shy away from Wendy’s ambiguous mother/lover role. When the children flew up into the sky, I couldn’t help crying. Flying and motherhood – those seem to be what get me.

After the play, we ate our picnic of ginger and orange marmalade, bread, houmous and crackers, and drank peppermint tea from the Thermos. Then, we walked through Kensington Gardens on the hunt for chips. We found none, but picked a few blackberries that were in range of the fences. Dispensing with coyness, I scaled a fence that protected some particularly laden bushes. After a short while, Matte followed me and we filled up two carrier bags.

We walked to Trafalgar Square and caught the bus home. Matte made letter pasta with garlic, onion, courgette and tomatoes, and an apple and blackberry crumble. I mixed mojitos for her and drank beer. We ate and then hung out on the sofa. I changed into my faded blue and pink cotton strappy dress. We were both quite drunk. My housemates were out.

Normally, when one is in a relationship, sex starts with a few kisses or an insinuating stroke, or before you are hardly even awake. This time, the whole day felt like a first date. I lay on the sofa and our eyes met and she came over and lay beside me and our sex started bashful. The day before, we’d talked a lot about fantasies. Hers include Rachel Stevens in Sweet Dreams My LA Ex, threesomes and switching from being a boy to being a girl. I had told her that I sometimes think about being fucked in a dress in a corridor by a boy or JD Samson.

So, Matte took me into the corridor and put me against the wall and kissed my neck and shoulders and pulled down my dress and kissed my breasts until I skip-gasped into her ear. She put her hand up my skirt and into my underwear and shuddered when she felt how wet I was and then she stroked me round and round. I think I was quite loud when I said, “Oh, fuckkkkkkkk, you’re so hot”, and then I got even more louder when she pushed one and then two fingers into me and fucked me with her hand. It felt so good. I faked coming after a while and whispered, “Will you take me to bed?”

She did. During our fantasy conversation, I’d told her I adore it when she stands behind me and kisses my neck. She had asked if I wanted her to fuck me from behind and I said, “Mmm, possibly.” Now, in bed, I reminded her of this. I lay on my front and she kissed my neck and shoulders and back and I squirmed and squeaked. She took a handful of my hear and yanked around my head to kiss my mouth. Then, without warning, she put her hands on my bottom and pulled me up so I was on my knees and elbows. She pushed her fingers inside me fast and low and I bucked and sighed. After a little, she sat behind me and eeeked with pleasure as she fucked me.

I made love to her and made her come with her sitting on top of me, my whole hand inside her. I took her into the corridor and knelt down at her feet and slid my fingers inside her and ate her out as come ran down her legs. We slept.

The next afternoon, I took her to the train station.

In the morning, we had made love again. She got on her hands and knees and I curled around above and we kissed as I slid inside.

We held hands in St Pancras while we waited.

I fucked her with two and then three fingers and then knelt behind her and moved my hips against her ass and pretended I was a boy fucking her with my cock. I turned my hand 90 degrees and suddenly she gave an explosion of ahh ahh ahhs ahh and came faster than ever before.

When she went through the barriers onto the platform, she kept on looking back at me and waving as she walked away.

My curtains had fallen down, revealing us naked and vulnerable and nowhere near the real world to anyone out there who cared to look.

I’m finding it quite hard to cope with not being dead.

First, there is this awful dissonance between normal, mindless being alive and abnormal mindful being alive.  Normally, a person stumbles around inside life.  Maybe, like me, you think a lot about what is going within life: politically, romantically, anthropologically, morally, physically.  Or, maybe, like I wish I did, you live without analysing.  Regardless, it is very rare to look up and go, “Good Lord, I am alive”, because that almost necessitates trying to use that incredibleness to make you use every second.

The problem is that, because I died, I am having a high number of those, “Good Lord, I am alive”, moments.  So, I rapidly switch between getting on with things and stepping outside life to see that it exists.

Second, I cannot fathom the relationship between other people and the fact that I died.  I know they were all terribly upset when I was in hospital.  In that time, I realised a lot of people cared very much about me.  However, now that I am back in real life – out of hospital, walking around, not very ill, back in London – I don’t know how they feel about it.  I sometimes worry that they’ve forgotten that I was dead.  I wonder why they don’t hug me like it’ll be the last time, or why they don’t focus on me.  I wonder why Matte had spare care to pursue another relationship when she almost lost me.  I do know how terrible this sounds.

Matte has a new chap.  He is an American that she met at the G20 demos and they were friends for a while and then stuff happened I guess in Belgium and then when she went to Brighton after she visited me.  I kind of already knew, but she told me for real on the telephone last night.  I went through precisely the same set of feelings as before.

The difficulties.

First, when she’s not with me, I can’t rely on the constancy of feeling that is assumed in a monogamous relationship because she is sometimes with someone else.

Second, when she is with me, she could be elsewhere in her head.  If that elsewhere is the trees or an action or a festival, that’s OK because those are things.  However, if the elsewhere is someone else, I feel like I’m left with vacancy.  She says that it’s only the former, but we all think about another when we’re with someone, so she probably does, too.

Third, the announcement of these new people strips away any trust I have in her, and makes it impossible for me to be vulnerable.  If she were here right now, I couldn’t imagine being anything other than friends.

Fourth, and this is very difficult for me to admit, the thought of her having sex with other people gives me a feeling of mostly sickness and stomach removal, and a tiny bit of sexual excitement.  I find this very shameful and I don’t really understand it.

Fifth, all I see ahead is occasional sharp stabs of pain when someone new comes along, followed by the slow ebb of sadness and a return to a hands-over-the-ears happiness, followed by another sharp stab of pain.

Sixth, she is considering either moving to a forest eco camp, traveling around a bit, moving to Brighton or staying in Bradford.  The first and most likely two of those four choices will favour her spending more time with this new chap.

Seventh, for her, I am the safe relationship and I am pretty sure I don’t want to be her home base from which secure preparations are made for adventures and to which she returns for rest and recuperation.

She is supposed to be visiting me in London the week after next.  We are supposed to be going to stay in a cottage in Cornwall at the end of this month.  The Moms has suggested doing these things and having a nice time and then thinking about where I stand afterwards.  However, I’m pretty sure that will be impossible for me.  I expect that, within a week, I will have decided to get on with going out with her, or say it’s finished and do that slicing gesture like Al Pacino in Serpico.

For extra bonus fun, I think The Moms and step-Dad are reaching a crisis point again.  This time, when we talked about it, I half counseled The Moms to end the relationship.

The palpitations are back, too.

I hadn’t seen her since she went to Belgium to live in a forest for a week.  I realised that, worryingly, I’ve been waiting to spend time alone with her since I died.  Before that happened, I felt suspended, the same way I feel when I am away from my laptop for more than a few days.  I felt like my life wasn’t going forwards.

She arrived at the railway station and we kissed.  The Moms gave us a lift back home and we hung out.  It was so good to share a bed with her again – that was what I wanted more than anything.  After a couple of days, I couldn’t handle the distance.  As we lay in bed on the third morning, arms around each other, I asked her what she meant in the letter she’d written while I was in hospital that said she felt she should take me more seriously.  I asked her whether me dying had been a temporary aphrodisiac.  Because the things she had said and the way she had acted while I was in hospital felt incongruent with the way she was being now. I said I felt like she wasn’t really here with me.  She agreed and said that Belgium had been a headfuck.  We talked later in the kitchen.  She said she was seriously considering moving into a permanent forest eco camp; probably the one in Brighton.  I went on a very rare tense and even-voiced rant.  I said that I felt like I didn’t know where I stood.  I said that if she moved to the forest, she must know that her and I would be finished and I did that two-handed, palms-down, lateral cutting gesture that Serpico does when he tells Inspector McClain that he’s done waiting for the justice department to contact him about the police corruption.

She said that her feelings for me hadn’t changed, but that everyone around had.  We talked things over and I proposed that maybe things could work if she came and saw me every few weeks and I went to stay with her in the forest occasionally.  Her face shone.

After all that, we got down to spending time together.  We went on a walk through the woods that left me completely fucked.  At the University Observatory, we fantasised about life as a Cambridge academic.  We went out for supper.  We looked at potential new pairs of glasses for me.  We sat on the sofa and read.  We had an awful lot of sex.

Since we started seeing each other again, our sex has been very different because I let her touch me, now.  I lie on my back as she holds me and fucks me with her hand and I buck my hips onto her fingers and moan and squeak and sigh like a slut.  This time, things were even more different.

First, I made her come five times in a row.  I fucked her with my hand and she came.  Then, I lay beside her because I haven’t recovered the strength in my shoulders and stroked her clit until she came.  Then, I did it again.  And again.  I stroked her again and asked if she wanted me to stop and she said no and came again.

Second, on Sunday night, she lay on the bed and I crouched alongside and made love to her with four fingers.  I stopped to adjust my angle and she said, “You could try putting your thumb in as well.” I felt like crying.  I pushed my thumb in a little to make that shape like you’re eating rice with your hands.  I very slowly eased inside, drew out a little, went further inside.  Finally, my fist was in up to the wrist.  I just twisted a little and she made sounds from her chest.  I stored the image of my handless arm in my brain like you’d take a photograph from the top of a mountain you’d just climbed.

She has now gone to Brighton to recce the forest.  She then has a bunch of volunteering to do and will visit me in London in mid August.  At the end of August, we’ll go for a week to Cornwall to stay in a cottage.

After seven weeks here, it looks like I might be getting out of hospital soon.  A couple more scans, one of which will, hopefully, confirm that I don’t need an ICD, then home on maybe Friday or Monday.

I’ve had a few bad days, recently.  On Sunday, the pain of my chest incision and in my back just would not go away.  And, yesterday, I went downstairs to the river to eat supper with Matte, my sisters, my Mum and cousin, waved them all off, came back upstairs and felt so tensely gripped by tiredness, I got into bed and went straight to sleep.  Nights are the worst.  Though it is a huge relief to be free of Monty the heart monitor and Johnny Drip – though not, of course, iPhone – my routine runs: take drugs at ten p.m., sleep, wake at two a.m. going ouch, take more drugs, sleep, wake about five or six a.m., sit up and feel the ouch dissolve from my torso, or take more drugs at eight a.m.

Lots of people have visited.  This is like an injection of real life and is so reviving, so necessary.

Matte has been here since Saturday.  It has been heavenly.  We have held hands and she has given me massages and we have pashed next to the hospital bed and in the lift and she has read to me and she has gone to get us noodles and pizza and we have started planning a holiday in a cottage in Cornwall.  Today, she left London to return home to pack and she will then travel to Belgium for a protest camp.  She will spend a bit of time in Brighton on the way back [heart tug, tears], then go to her Mum’s civil partnership ceremony, then come to visit me in Cambridge.

On Monday, I had a coarctation repair and an arterial bypass.  The operation took ten hours.  I am in awe of the surgeons’ superhuman concentration.  Apparently, it took four hours just to get inside my chest without damaging my organs because of all the adhesions between my organs and chest wall.

I woke up on Tuesday swimming in morphine, ate four yoghurts, and was then transferred to the High Dependency Ward.  I was there for a painful and slow night, then had my drains removed the next day and was transferred to the general cardiac ward.  Today, I had my dressings removed and a delicious shower.

Matte is coming tomorrow.  I am sore, and keep on nodding off in my chair, but I am so shocked and grateful to be here.  I get to have some more life! I get to hang out with my little sisters at home.  I get to play the guitar again.  I get to make love with Matte.  I get to have evenings laughing with friends around a supper table.  I get to go on tour in the US.

So, more visitors today: my sister, Frost (stopped fancying her again), Dusk and Heather (an old, old friend).  We talked about how I refer to the day of my cardiac arrest as the day I died.  Reputedly, there was some confusion amongst my Twitter acquaintances about whether the death I tweeted about was a permanent one.

This was the first time my sister had met Dusk, thought she has heard a lot about him over the years.  I have yet to find out what she thought of him.  Presently, she and Heather left and Dusk and Frost and I went for noodles around the corner from the hospital.

I take a drug called Warfarin which thins my blood so it doesn’t clot on my artificial heart valve.  However, in periods just before operations, I get put on Heparin.  This does the same thing, but is delivered intravenously.  So, Dusk, Frost and I set off from the main hospital entrance.  However, we weren’t alone.  I was dragging along Johnny Drip, an electronic pump mounted on a wheeled drip stand.  The pump very slowly pushes in the plunger of a large syringe which delivers Heparin into my arm via a plastic tube and canulla.

Drippy doesn’t really have off-road wheels, poor chap, so I had to carry him over the cobblestones.  Our party got a few odd looks as we crossed Westminster Bridge, but the noodle bar staff didn’t seem to notice anything odd.

We sat and ate, JD occasionally interjecting with a beep to remind us that he was unplugged from the mains.  Dusk went into full raconteur mode.  He told the story of how he nearly died of food poisoning in the middle of the African rainforest.  He told the story of how he was interrogated at gunpoint by the security detail for a Landless Peasant Movement camp when they mistook him for an intruder.

I fell in love with him, yet again.  He is just gorgeous: his smile looks like the low, sharp sun on a winter’s day; his mouth tastes like malt and his face is handsome and brown and he gives me the same feeling as hugging my teddy.  I could listen to him talk forever.  I make him laugh.  He says interesting things, unlike most people.  He knows way more than I do.

My sister told me that the second or third day after I was brought into hospital, she and my family and some friends of ours left me on the ventilator in intensive care and went to get a pizza around the corner. My family had been awake for a couple of days, and they ordered a lot of wine and the evening descended into desperate hilarity and the worry was be transformed into a kind of volatile, anerobic happiness.

I sent the following email to my Dad this evening:

“Hahaha. Thanks so much, Dad. Mum said she will ring you with the latest. In short. cardiac catheter to get more pictures of heart, mend bulging aorta with covered stent and try and stimulate arrhythmias; bypass to sort out probably poor oxygen supply to a bit of my heart; subsequent second attempt to stimulate arrhythmias that, if successful, means that problem not fixed and, thus, defibrillator will be fitted. Aorta mending with covered stent may fail. In this case, it will be mended surgically: one end during bypass, the other with another incision.

All my love,”