Alexa's Journals

23rd September 2011

Tomorrow I leave for university. My room is packed into boxes now and it doesn't look like my room anymore. It looks like a storage unit with curtains. The walls are bare, the shelves are empty, and there's a rectangle of paint where my corkboard used to hang. It looks like a wound the room hasn't healed from yet.

Everything that made it mine is inside cardboard, labelled in marker pen that Mum insisted on. She says I'll forget what's in them and she's probably right! She's...

18th August 2011

I got my results. Three As. The actual letters, printed on real paper, handed to me by Mrs Patterson in a brown envelope that somehow contained my entire future and also smelled faintly of the school photocopier. She smiled in a way that said, “I always knew,” which, respectfully, she did not. Mrs Patterson teaches Geography and has never taught me anything. But she looked genuinely pleased, and I decided that counted for something.

Mae got hers too. Two As and a B - she...

4th June 2011

A-levels start Monday and I have written the word "BREATHE" on a Post-it note stuck to my laptop and it's not working - the word just sits there, breathing, while I don't.

Mae and I have been living in the library for the past three weeks as we have a table near the window that we consider ours, even though a boy called Oliver sat there once on a Wednesday and we spent the entire afternoon radiating hostility until he moved. We didn't say anything and didn't need to. Mae and I can...

9th April 2011

Mum and I had a fight today, not the kind where people slam doors and storm out of the house but the kind that just sits there in the kitchen and will not go away like a bad smell that you cannot find the source of - it was about university. Mum wants me to study something that will get me a job, like business or economics something that has a job at the end of it like a car with a trailer attached to it. Something that will lead to a desk job and a salary and a life where I do...

5th February 2011

It is six on a Saturday and I am the person awake in this house. The heating has not come on yet as I walk into the kitchen. It is mostly dark except for the light, above the cooker because Mum always leaves this light on because she thinks a dark kitchen is depressing. I think Mum is right a dark kitchen is depressing.

I am sitting here with a piece of toast that has a lot of butter on it and a cup of tea. This cup of tea is still too hot for me to drink, and I do not care...

12th November 2010

Something happened in English today and I can't stop thinking about it, which is annoying because I have an Economics problem set due tomorrow and my brain has decided that critical analysis of fiscal policy can wait while it replays a forty-minute conversation on a loop. Brains are terrible at priorities, mine especially.

Mr Calloway kept me after class. Not in trouble, just, he wanted to talk about my essay on Othello. I wrote about how Iago isn't evil in the cartoon...

18th September 2010

Right, so Mum gave me this notebook for my birthday and said, “Write things down. You’ll thank me when you’re older.” Which is such a Mum thing to say that I almost didn’t do it, purely on principle. But here I am.

I’m sitting on my bed with the window open because September still thinks it’s summer. The notebook smells like new things, which feels important, somehow.

I don’t really know what I’m supposed to write. Mum says there are no rules, and Dad says diaries are just...