The Warehouse Of My Life

 Lately I have been really struggling with the amount of stuff I own. It is overwhelming. I have heaps, and heaps, and heaps of possessions.

LEIA #11: New Relationships

Sometimes it starts inconspicuously enough; a sudden interest in a new band or a brief case of Mentionitis. You’ll wonder why they’ve stopped the weekly pub outings and yet, are suddenly, suspiciously more broke than usual. Then a friend will drop off the radar for weeks at a time with a hasty “yeah, things are great”, only surfacing for air for once a month. They can spare just a few distracted minutes after your show, leaving after the first round of drinks, back to spending every night at their beau’s pad.

LEIA #10: The Person We Should Seek

Settle for somebody who will bring you flowers: not just for birthdays and anniversaries, but also, just because. Somebody who will move all your spiders. Somebody who lends you books with the page corners folded down and scribbled notes in the dust jacket like a portal to their thoughts. Settle for a person who will hold a constant umbrella over your parade.

Brexit: confusion, fear & shame

If you'd told me a year ago that I would cry over Cameron resigning I wouldn't have believed you for a second. And yet: here we are

— Laila ♻️ (@tapeparade) June 24, 2016

On Friday morning I woke up at 7:02am and in my first few waking moments, blinked at twitter. No. Surely not. Tears sprang into my ears before I’d even fully processed the information, both the shock and the doubt merging with the disbelief. The UK has voted to leave the EU. Even as I read the facts through blurry, angry tears, my mind was refusing to accept the information.

To Remain.

Hey! It’s me. Laila. The author of this blog. The girl in the photo. The editor and the scribe. The immigrant’s daughter.

LEIA #9: An Army Of Exes

Those who have been single for a long time will know that you gather up exes. The significant others who actually, in the grand scheme of things, turned out not to be so significant. Things didn’t get serious for long enough to cause a full-on heartbroken split from when things end, and most of the time you don’t meet the prerequisites to be banished from each others lives.

LEIA #8: The Sidelines Of Friendship

You don’t hear about the hours they spend memorising freckles. You don’t hear about the time they bought a pair of socks from Joy The Store at the train station – full price! £8 on a pair of socks! – so that you wouldn’t have to re-wear a pair. You don’t hear about the picturesque night they practised slow dancing when they got in from the club, an endeavour that ended with their first perfect kiss timed miraculously with a Bright Eyes chorus at sunrise, a moment so utterly cheesy it could have been a scene in a John Green novel.

LEIA #7: You Are Not My Art

I sometimes feel as though my life is like a parade of people I used to know. Most of my friend pool has been in my life for quite some time, and at this point I have a fair number of exes to run into; friends of friends; other peoples housemates; ex-colleagues; a pal from “back home”, somebody’s cousin who was in town for the weekend. The list goes on.