Yesterday I mopped up the tears of a girl I barely know. I catch her flicking glances over at me in every class we have together. She wears black fitted tops and black and white striped tights and long floaty skirts, which she tells me she buys for two pounds at a little store called Dignity. When she speaks, she becomes painfully conscious of own words. She winds up every time with, sorry, I’ll shut up now. I teased her about it gently as we sat in the office of a lecturer, and she gulped down big sobs and laughed a little at the same time. I was tired. My legs shook, and tears of my own hovered threateningly behind my lids. I turned to the row of Eiffel Tower ornaments above the desk, and picked one up to show her. It came off the shelf with a resisting rip of bluetack. I have no idea why, when the lecturer asked, can I get you someone from the class to sit with you?, she gave her my name.

When I left her, make-up smudges above her eyes which everyone mistook for bruises, my film project had deleted itself from the apple mac, and nobody seemed to care much. I worked through lunch, and it gave me an excuse to forget my growling stomach. Trevor’s disjointed History notes in black marker pen on the white board made me cry and for a while I thought I might never stop. Judith put her foot down twice; chased off the girl with the ludicrously straight bangs staring curiously past her own reflection in the mirror at mine, and forced me to struggle up the hill to huddle under the duvet with her on the couch watching badly-made chick-flicks. It was painful, later having to avoiding the flawless bodies of her and her sister prancing around the bunk beds, and I wished desperately I’d stayed at home.

Ghostly pale and spect’r thin, Judith’s father expounded poetically with an academic’s laugh as I walked past this morning , and I left feeling like the white bin bag I caught dancing in the wind down the road, five giggling grown men hounding it eventually into the gutter.