My first day of freedom begins with a drip of ice-cold water from the leaky attic window. This is number one on the list of things to sort before Thursday. It’s not so bad a way to begin a day, especially it being not at the beginning of the day at all, really, but past midday. This is the first time I have slept so long since last summer.

This drip stamps out the bizarre mix of slug and weasel which I’m stepping over in dreams. Me and Chrisie, we end up cowering on a double bed screaming as they scuttle up the mahogany wooden legs of the frame.

Three cups of tea, soup in a mug, an apple sliced painstakingly into quarters and then eighths, de-cored. My token peace offering to myself the Snickers Celebration Brother waves in my face. He says you’re fit. He thinks for a minute. Not that kind of fit. His eyes say stop with the goddamn obsessing.

These past eight weeks: Modest Mouse and The National and John Legend and The White Stripes and the Pixies and Jack Kerouac have made up my days, and if my life were a film, these would be the artists playing as I walk over cracks in pavements, yawn myself awake, watch little dramas play themselves out without much help from the actor, or even the lights guy behind the scenes. Spilling carrots from a plastic bag, tea on the carpet, discovering bitterly that cranberries taste nothing like I’d imagined them to after listening to the music, discovering, embarrassed, that they’re not supposed to be eaten raw.

1. Jack Kerouac’s reading of San Francisco Scene the soundtrack to my first half an hour, weaving me back under the white snow of my king-size duvet with groans of wanting back semi-oblivion. My mother bubbles cheerfully in the kitchen in time to the boiling kettle and asks what time I’m back, and while my mouth snaps half-seven, the rest of me thinks of this trumpet player, of the twelve year old prodigy drummer, of the beat.
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2. Modest Mouse my walk-to-college-in-a-funk music, I’m the same as I was when I was six years old and oh my God, I feel so damn old, missing boyfriend hanging heavy from my feet, oven lighter rattling in pocket. There are these windows, about eight of them, on the side of the road I always walk on. Each window has three sides. I see myself approaching, a full-on front view. I see myself passing when I look out from the corner of my eyes, every aspect of ‘profile’, and if I twist my head back as if someone’s shouted me, I see myself walking off, exactly how someone walking behind me would. Albeit with my head at an unnatural, almost owl-esque angle. One resolution I’ll be keeping is to walk on the other side of the road.
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3. Icky Thump was my driving to Cambridge with my father song, nerves strung out not unlike the handwash-only clothes my mother pulls between two hands, twists into long threads of dripping delicate spirals of colour and hangs over the tub to bleed reds and purples and blues into the white tub. Like water torture. It is also my manic washing up and cleaning song, my baking a cake and eating half the mix song, my running to nowhere song, my sitting in the car-park of Sainsbury’s after the gym with endorphins dancing through my bloodstream song.
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4. The National and John Legend, both writing essay songs. I’ve worn them out with my listening, and what remains is threadbare and predictable and old and boring, and for a while I don’t want to hear another strain of any one of their songs, whatever magic effect they may have on my fingers when forced to make contact with the computer keyboard.
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5. The Pixies and Winterlong and Bone Machine I never share with anyone. They appear on no mix CDs, they don’t have my sister banging on the wall in sleepy anger. Chrisie’s friends say, your sister is so mysterious, always floating around college with her music. Better enigmatic than totally transparent, I guess.

I have less than a week to restore my sanity, to fix that leak and to find myself a new soundtrack of new things not involving biscuit crumbs, cranberries, carrots, also a week to say yes to everything, Elisabeth’s answer to the question of The Lost Art Of Doing Nice Things.