On one cold winters night, something mysterious and magical happened. A loving family consisting of a young boy, a young girl, and two middle-aged parents lay fast asleep, with their minds corrupt by dreams of excitement and happiness. However, downstairs in the front room, there sat a Christmas tree. This Christmas tree was the same one which sat in the front room every single year, covered in tinsel which made the tree itchy, fairy lights which blinded the trees eyes, and candy canes and baubles and all sorts of things which the tree was reluctantly covered with year after year.
But this year he decided that enough was enough. His green arms burst out from beneath the tinsel, his eyes glowed red, and a huge dark gap forced apart the leaves and baubles and tinsel and candy canes, which formed a large and aggressive mouth. His long hairy arms viciously grabbed the presents which surrounded the pot in which the tree stood in, and one by one he stuffed them all into his mouth. The more the tree ate, the more hungry he became, and he started to eat everything in the room. He ate the television, the family computer, the sofa, the telephone, everything. Eventually, all that was left was him. “Oh no!” thought the Christmas tree. “They are bound to suspect that it was me! They will chop me up and make paper out of me!”. So he desperately ran out of the front door as fast as a tree possibly could, with baubles falling off his leaves. Finally he was free from repulsive Christmas decorations, and disgusting pets who couldn’t tell the difference between a tree which you were allowed to urinate on, and a tree which you were not allowed to urinate on. The eager family woke the next day, and ran down the stairs, to find an empty living room. After a lengthy police report, it was concluded that their house had been burgled, but we know different, don’t we…
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You know what it’s like. There’s a whole pack of iced doughnuts sat innocently staring at you. The temptation grows and grows. You try to look away and you desperately try to resist but you finally give in and take one huge satisfying bite. As you tear into the crisp pink icing your taste-buds scream out for more. You tell yourself that you won’t give in to your unhealthy craving whilst happily licking your sticky fingers. After all, who is in charge of your body? Your mind, or your taste buds?
A few moments later you’re sat on the sofa with a sickly sweet taste filling your mouth. Could it possibly be? OH NO! Your eyes fixate on the empty pack of doughnuts sat on the table beside you. They’re all gone. Every single one, gone. You nervously place your hand on your bloated belly and you can feel the doughnuts angrily swimming around, mixing with the stomach acid, colliding with all the other scraps of disintegrating food. You feel your stomach churning. You suddenly regret every bite that you ate. You drown your throat with orange juice to get rid of the taste, but every time that you swallow you vomit inside your mouth. It isn’t long before your favourite shirt is covered in regurgitated food and your head is crammed inside a dingy, disgusting toilet. Whoever said that there’s no such thing as ‘too many doughnuts’?
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If you’ve never been to a concert where (within ten yards) there are fifteen intoxicated moshers spewing their guts up around you, then trust me – you have never been to a concert. Yes it was once deemed ‘cool’ to be seen at a Spice Girls tour calmly singing along to ‘Wannabe’ and ‘2 become 1’, but nowadays it’s all about mosh pits, deafening amplifiers, and stage dives (depending on what music you’re into of course).
If somebody plummets on top of you at an astonishing speed then most people would move out of the way, not raise their arms in the air ready to catch the daredevil who (rather impressively) had the balls to jump into the usually quite scary crowd. Not these people... If you like bands such as Slipknot, Machine Head, and The Offspring then you’ll know what I’m talking about (and so will your poor bruised bones I’d imagine). But have you ever wondered what it’s like to surf a sea of devoted hands? It’s an extremely exhilarating feeling, unless your music sucks and the crowd hate you and let you fall flat on your face. If you like to spend your time listening to aggressive and angry music or if you like to violently barge into your surroundings without a moments thought for all the overworked paramedics working in A&E then show those Girls Aloud fans what a real concert is, and get yourself down to the nearest mosh pit today.
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It all started years and years ago before you or I were born, in a place not so far away from here. It was a young boys fifth birthday, and for weeks he had been practically begging his parents for the latest trike which every boy his age wanted. Fate (or more appropriately – the calendar) had not been on his side that year, and he reluctantly had to go to school on his birthday. He spent the whole day anxiously running and jumping around, his little head filled with excitement and anticipation. He eagerly waited for the bell to declare victory (aka hometime) and he ran as fast as he could with a huge beaming smile spread across his face, and he met his parents at the school gate. Ten minutes later, their spacious family car pulled up in the drive, the boys mother helped him out of the car and he happily skipped to the front door.
As soon as the key turned in the lock and the door creaked open, the boy raced inside and his eyes gleamed as he saw a large poorly wrapped present stood in the middle of the living room. “It must be a trike! It HAS to be a trike!” he thought whilst tearing away the wrapping paper. He turned to his parents with a sweet toothy grin on his face as he politely asked them whether he could go out in the street and play with his new toy. His mother stood outside and attentively watched him slowly make his way down the street. As he got to the end of the street she shouted and told him to turn around and come back which he did. He started to get faster now. He zoomed past her and she waved at him with a proud smile filling up a large majority of her face. He continued to cycle down the road and he was approaching the end of the street when a speeding car quickly turned around the corner – but did not manage to manoeuvre around the boy. Many residents of that road still say that he haunts the streets on misty winter nights. Zooming through the fog on his trike, with decaying skin and small brittle hands clung tightly to the handlebars, still bitter, envious, and hungry for revenge. If you can’t remember far back enough to recall the first time you rode a tricycle, then be thankful, because he will never forget.
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The funfair is the most exciting and exhilarating place to go (apart from the Bermuda Triangle). A dangerous and deadly mixture of too many sugary sweets and super fast rides make it the best place to go when you need a break from the rest of the world. With haunted houses, hotdog stalls, hook-a-ducks, and what seems to be a hundred megaphones calling out: “PRIZE EVERY TIME!” it’s the perfect place for a day out. There is always a large variety of rides and stalls which cater for everybody’s needs, but you’ll have to save your pennies first! Nowadays, you can expect to pay an extravagant £2 at least to go on a decent ride! But now, after many failed attempts (and quite a few unnecessary deaths) there is a new revolution in roller-coaster technology.
Why pay a good hard-earned £1.50 on candyfloss when you can eat as much as you want on a ride? Yes, it’s none other than the ‘Candycoaster’, a beautiful concoction of a rollercoaster which can reach a whopping 100 miles per hour and a limited supply of gorgeous candyfloss. This is one ride that you will never forget; even when you’re old and the amnesia starts to kick in! The tracks weave in and out of a huge pile of baby pink candyfloss, which allows the people inside the kart to eat as much as they can! As long as you are prepared to pull bits of sugar out of your hair for the rest of the day then this is the ride for you!
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Here is a story that your history teacher didn’t want you to hear...
A huge battle ship was out in the ocean, gracefully gliding along the waves with about two dozen men on board – each of which had loving families back at home, loving families who shudder whenever they are reminded of the terrible event that occurred that night. It was a moonless pitch-black night, and a bed of fog and mist lay on the surface of the freezing cold water. The sky was patterned with stars and the night was so silent that even with the powerful oars that were continuously being pulled to and fro, even with all the men running around on the wooden deck, the beautiful ripples of the ocean could still be heard. The men all agreed that it was time for a rest and so decided to go to sleep on their uncomfortable hammocks in their tiny rooms below deck which smelt of damp and sweat. The anchor was lowered and the whole ship shook as it hit the ocean floor with a huge thud – startling hundreds of sea urchins and fish around it.
But there was something mystical and powerful beneath the water, lurking through the seaweed and floating amongst the starfish that desperately clung onto rocks. Something mystical, powerful, and envious. This monster grabbed a large rock and began to angrily pound at the chain of the anchor. The monster was so strong and determined that each time the stone hit the metal chain the entire ship rocked violently, which made gigantic waves and splashes of water. Everything inside the ship was thrown around and tipped upside down. Bottles smashed against the ceiling and men were viciously flung from one side of the room to the other. The huge metal anchor was to remain at the bottom of the ocean forever more, whilst the ship wandered off into the distance, with all of the crew inside battered to a pulp, bleeding to death. If you’re ever out in the ocean at night, look out at the ripples of water and you can sometimes still hear the chain rattling beneath the calm and peace of the waves.
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They aren’t so popular these days, but go back fifty years or so and I can almost guarantee that every child would have a Jack-in-the-box somewhere in their toy collection, along with yoyo’s, cats cradles, and other old-fashioned games that kids these days are too shallow and materialistic to appreciate. But did you ever wonder why little kids don’t tend to play with Jack-in-the-boxes anymore? It’s all down to a toy factory, a chemical leak, and a lot of mysterious disappearances.
All those years ago, there was a huge warehouse in the countryside situated right next to a nuclear power plant, and in that warehouse there was a coal-powered machine which produced hundreds of Jack-in-the-boxes every hour. Sweet, little clowns stuffed into beautifully decorated boxes. Every child wanted one, and come Christmastime every child DID have one, but they weren’t half as innocent as what the adverts on the black and white televisions described them as. One day there was a mysterious chemical explosion from the nuclear power plant. Toxic waste leaked into the warehouse which contaminated every toy in sight, turning them evil and malicious. Somehow, these toys were sent out to every popular toy store in the country, and some were even shipped abroad, without anyone noticing that they weren’t what the seemed. Children soon started to disappear, but nobody suspected a cute little toy sat in the corner of the room. So if your grandparents (or maybe even your parents) keep banging on about ‘the good old days’ then just remind them of the fact that there are (hopefully) no killer toys running around these days.
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If you fell in love with aliens after watching ET, then prepare to be amazed. Not all freaky little dudes from outer space are cute, wrinkly, and adorably sweet like our favourite extra terrestrial. Some are slimy, ugly, and pure evil. One night, a thousand bright blue lights flickered in the dark air. The smell of rotten flesh passed through the towns and cities, repulsing everyone that didn’t happen to have a cold and could smell the awful stench. Powerful gushes of cold air blew out from underneath disc shaped spaceships as they landed on the ground. Terrified children who were playing outside hid behind bushes and some even climbed up to the top of trees to hide from whatever awaited them inside the large flying saucers that were no further than fifty yards away from where they hid. Residents of local houses looked through their windows in astonishment, taking pictures that they planned to send in to the newspapers in the hope that they might get a nice lot of money for them. A rectangular door opened up and out came a large and rather unfriendly looking pink monster. He looked much like a Squid, only he left disgusting trails of jelly behind him as he slithered across the floor and he had one huge intimidating eye which just stared ahead blankly. One by one, each spaceship opened, and more of these hideous beasts emerged, and pretty soon there were over a hundred of them crowding around.
They seemed to be communicating and were making a lot of loud high-pitched sounds - that had anyones windows been open, everyone inside would have been deafened by such a pitch. They were up to something, that was for sure. They all slowly made their way towards the city centre leaving humongous piles of pink gelatine behind them. They trampled over cars, tore down lampposts, and instantly killed anyone in their way by one single laser beam which emitted from the pupils of their eyes. They eventually got to the city where they caused nothing but havoc. Tower blocks were knocked over, shop windows were smashed, and cars were thrown around in some sort of game that a few of the aliens were playing. Some made their way to the parks where they crushed hard metal slides flat and some went to the beach where they screamed and screeched as they sank into the sand. Petrol stations were set alight, power stations blew up, and supermarkets were torn to pieces. The whole city was flattened, smashed, crushed, and burnt down within a matter of hours, and the aliens sadly returned to their spaceships and disappeared into the darkness, leaving nothing but fierce flames and sticky slime. If you thought that all aliens were nice and peaceful like that one who can miraculously make a bicycle fly through the air in that film (just good visual effects I think), then you should have been there that night when aliens unexpectedly landed in a popular well-established city, and left it a flattened dumpsite of smoke, bricks, and broken glass. Maybe one day, they will pay your town a visit, until then, don’t assume that all guys from outer space are friendly enough to heal people with a single glowing finger.
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A seemingly never-ending queue full of excited and impatient teenagers stretched across the street. Slushies were being sold by the dozen, annoying novelty hats were everywhere you looked, helium balloons gracefully blew amongst the clouds, and the sickly sweet smell of donuts floated through the air. This could only mean one thing – the carnival was in town. The carnival was only around for five days at the most and then it was gone for another six months at least, so every kid looked forward to the next time the soothing loud music and blinding lights came to their hometown. Thousands of people flooded the park in which the carnival was held everyday, and the once beautifully green grass soon became nothing more than a disgusting pool of mud and popcorn which unfortunately dropped onto the floor. There was a little ticket machine which stood proudly beside the main gate going into the carnival. Tickets were cheap (after all, they’re only small pieces of coloured card) so the machine was constantly dispensing tickets to eager children, and then there would be another child with pockets full of coins, and then another, and another… This carried on throughout the day, from early in the morning til late at night, and the machine faithfully spurted out little pink tickets one after the other, until the last day of the carnival that is.
If you can honestly tell me that you could work constantly for days on end without collapsing then you would have to be The Terminator. The ticket machine started to malfunction, letting out hundreds of tickets at a time whenever some extremely fortunate person put £1 into the coin slot. Young children were running around with huge disbelieving smiles on their faces, clutching streams and streams of tickets in their hands. At first it wasn’t realised by the carnival workers, and they had no idea that the ticket dispenser was broke, but very soon there were no tickets left in the machine so nobody could go on the rides which caused an unpleasant uproar with infuriated clowns, rollercoaster owners, acrobats, and talented fire jugglers. The carnival was closed early, leaving hundreds of disappointed children spending their weekend at home again, desperately waiting for the next time that the carnival comes to town.
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You could be possessed by demons right now, and you wouldn’t even know it. And even after being exorcised, you would still have no recollection of any of it. So for all you know, there could be a demon inside of you at any moment. Even now whilst reading this, you could be laughing at the thought of a demon invading your body, if so then read on, you may have a nasty surprise. Demons can take over anybody’s body, at any time. They lurk in the shadows, hunting for innocent people who aren’t currently possessed, and they anxiously wait until it’s dark. You stand no chance. You’re as vulnerable as a pack of chocolate digestives in the presence of an obese teenager.
Look down at your torso. If you look carefully, there should be a demonic face tearing through your skin peering out of the darkness. If there isn’t then you’re one of the fortunate ones, but you need to protect yourself from any future attacks. Imagine if you were wearing one of these wonderful t-shirts. Any demons out there prowling around looking for victims would take one look at you and miserably mutter: “She’s already possessed…” and would slither away to find somebody else. You could be saved from having people accuse you of being a Schizophrenic or a sufferer of Tourettes Syndrome. You would never have to worry about being tied to your bed with a vicar screaming: “The power of Christ compels you!” and you have the biggest migraine the world has ever known when you gain consciousness. All you need is a t-shirt and a body. So what is there to lose? Just click a few buttons, and you can have your own protection from evil spirits delivered right to your door!
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If you’re the Paris Hilton of America, or the Che Guevara of Cuba, or just possibly the Boris Johnson of Great Britain, and you’re fed up of boring old doughnuts that only cater for the less fortunate working-class citizens, then worry no longer! This is a doughnut that will no doubt deduct a small percentage of your bank balance, but it’s definitely worth it! It’s the craze that has caused uproar in Japan, Australia, Germany, Spain, and any other countries that you can think of, and now it has finally come to England! It is basically a ring doughnut covered in pink luxurious icing, gold plated knuckledusters, and expensive diamonds. Any gourmet chef will guarantee that this is one doughnut that will go down a treat (but it’s best to take the diamonds and knuckledusters off first – your throat will not appreciate those zooming down it).
The real thing comes at a hefty price, but remember the saying: “Been there, got the t-shirt”? If your bank balance isn’t as healthy as Michael Jacksons then you can always buy the t-shirt which is almost as tasty as the real thing! And besides, you never know. All you accident-prone people out there could just get hurt by the knuckledusters or get scratched by the diamonds, which wouldn’t be very nice at all (and it would be hell as far as insurance claims are concerned). So go ahead and grab yourself a Designer Doughnut (or preferably a Designer Doughnut t-shirt) today!
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This is the alternative and extremely unique brand of clothes which is none other than the infamous Hands On Clothing! A talented bunch of people (with strangely vivid imaginations) are to blame for this company, which allows many hyperactive teenagers throughout the UK to express their flamboyant personalities – in the form of random clothing! If you like one t-shirt done by this brand, then more likely than not, you will like the rest of them too, so watch out if you’re an uncontrollable spend-a-holic because you could soon be showered with cool t-shirts, so much so that you might not even be able to breathe! (An impressive way to die, but we want you to get a bit of wear out of the clothes before you pop your clogs).
Every item of clothing is original, inspiring, and great value for money, so if you haven’t already, then I suggest you drag your parents over to the computer screen and get them to type in their credit card number. Bribe them if you must, which can’t be too difficult as every parent has had a few embarrassing incidents which include a microphone, a Madonna karaoke track, and an excessive amount of alcohol! Grab yourself a few t-shirts today, and see your popularity soar!
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You may not have heard of this clothing line, but I would strongly advise that you follow this link: http://handsonclothing.net/ and get your hands on some of the awesome t-shirts that they have on offer!
I would just like to add, that my little enrolement in this local-run buisness is to write short stories that relate to the items of clothing. I'm pretty impressed with this, as it's perhaps the most recognition I've ever received from my writing. I also get a lot of enjoyment out of writing for a purpose. I write a lot anyway, and most if it is just left as a lonely file stuck on my computer not doing anything. But I get severe pleasure out of knowing that I'm wasting a good twenty minutes of my life on something that will actually matter.
Well seeing as this is maybe the most significant thing to come out of this year (for me anyway), I'm going to put all of my little stories on here for you lovely lot to read. I might as well, eh? It will make this blog seem more impressive anyway, seeing as I have about two posts now and it's looking a bit pathetic.
This is definitely one of Blurs most underrated songs - beautiful, emotional and meaningful. It could only be that heart-stopping dream of a song: ‘The Universal’. If you are lucky enough to remember the bitter rivalry between Blur and Oasis back in the 90’s, and if you were torn between the two, then this is the only song that is sure to convince you that Blur are much more original and versatile than Oasis. Blur created a whole new genre which was to change music forever – Britpop. Everything that they did was music that could have been written in the 60’s, but thank God it wasn’t. The deteriorating music industry was completely revamped the minute that Blur songs were first belted out of the radio. Catchy tunes and poetic lyrics started to dominate The Top of the Pops instead of the retiring garbage such as Meatloaf, Cher, and Celine Dion which was getting old, repetitive, and boring. Soon after Blur became well-known there were dozens of successful music artists that followed. The mid 90’s was a great time for music. A wide selection of talented musical genius’s who actually played and wrote their own stuff – unlike the computer generated noise that has unfortunately crept into today’s mainline music industry.
‘The Universal’ is by far my all-time favourite Blur song. With a mixture of interesting romantic strings and Blurs usual ensemble of guitars, drums, and Damon Albarns soul-shattering lead vocals, I find it hard to listen to this song just once at a time, and I always find myself clicking that beloved repeat button on Winamp every time that it comes on. Brass fills and an annoyingly catchy rhythm create a very effective optimistic feel which is essential for this song because it gives a calm and peaceful backing to Albarns strong and emotional vocals and helps create a soothing and uplifting sound when it comes to the chorus.
‘The Universal’ has brilliant lyrics which are quite confusing and at first glance seem to be random sentences strung together, but they are actually very meaningful and poetic. The lyrics are optimistic and thought-provoking, describing how the future will eventually get better. ‘The future has been sold’ explains how there are solid plans for the upcoming years and it also suggests that the future has been priced up and sold to the highest bidder and technology will improve over time and the future is in safe, reliable hands. ‘It really really really could happen, when the days they seem to fall through you, well just let them go’ is optimistic and positive and is saying that even if the world seems to be against you and everything is falling apart, you might as well carry on and let your worries and troubles go, and if you are determined enough then you can do anything. ‘Satellites in every home… yes the universal’s here, here for everyone’ suggests that there will soon be a vast improvement of technology where everything will be electronic and modernised and it will affect everyone in some way or another and will generally make peoples quality of life much better. ‘Every paper that you read says tomorrow’s your lucky day, well here’s your lucky day’ is saying that every horoscope in every paper will claim that tomorrow will be a good day and that even if today seems bad, tomorrow will be better – which also links in with the chorus line. There is also a subtle hint of sarcasm in the line because it is saying that yesterday’s paper claimed that today would be a lucky day, but if days seem to fall through you then obviously not every day is a lucky day so therefore the papers are lying.
No matter how much you love the song; there is no getting over the music video that accompanies it. It’s enough to scar an impressionable teenage girl for life, with the completely gorgeous close-ups of the once extremely attractive Damon Albarn; one comment on YouTube describes the video as: ‘Sexier than sex itself’, and after having watched the video literally hundreds of times, I couldn’t agree more. The video is based on Stanley Kubrick’s ‘A Clockwork Orange’, and is an incredible tribute to the disturbing but brilliant cult classic. Blur are dressed up in white costumes similar to the costumes which Alex and his Droogs wear in the film, and Damon is wearing heavy eyeliner on one eye like Alex De Large. Colourful cocktails, naked mannequins, and a limited selection of complimenting colours (orange, red, and white) show an obvious resemblance to A Clockwork Orange. The main colour in the music video is bright white which makes the whole bar look heavenly, retro, and peaceful. During the video there are subtitles which indicate what a man is saying about the bar which he is stood in, and he says: “This can’t be heaven – I recognise it!”.
The whole science fiction theme fits in with the lyrics which are about how technology will improve the future and make everything better and easier. There is an element of purity and innocence about the video which creates an elegant and sophisticated feel. The illuminating white walls and the even whiter suits that the band are wearing make them seem to blend in with the background which makes an eerie and artistic appearance. Damon magnificently pulls off the ‘guyliner’ image and his creepy yet incredibly sexy stare is a rather impressive imitation of Alex De Large’s blank stare in A Clockwork Orange. At the very last second of the video, the priest sitting on the left side of the band goes to passionately kiss the man sitting next to him which links in with the perversion and sexual nature of A Clockwork Orange. The pure beautifulness of the video and song itself never ceases to amaze me, but please, someone put some clothes on those mannequins!
Damon Albarn is what makes this song so effortlessly creative and different. He has an incredibly unique skill for writing lyrics that even the most stubborn and opinionated philosophers could find no fault with. And even now that he has hit the big forty he still continues to produce outstanding music. He is currently the lead singer of an extremely popular virtual ‘cartoon’ band ‘Gorillaz’, and is only slightly less attractive than what he was twenty years ago, without a single sign of Botox or corrective surgery anywhere in sight. And now after years of anxious waiting, they’re coming back again, only now we will be blasting their tunes on Ipods, Mp3 players and God knows what else, instead of those hideous CD players back in the good old days. Expect a tasty reunion, seeing as Oasis made their comeback a couple of months ago… Is this the nineties all over again? If only…
Overall, this video alone is much more unique and inspiring than anything Oasis ever did. I didn’t pick up a guitar after hearing the famous and unbelievably popular Oasis tracks ‘Wonderwall’ and ‘Don’t look back in anger’. However after first hearing the individuality and wit of Blurs ‘Country house’ and ‘Song 2’ only then did I take a severe interest in music. With the trashy R’n’B and despicable kiddy pop tunes that are now piling into the music industry, is it possible that a truly deserving, half decent band will ever save our sorry ears from Rhianna, 50 Cent, and a countless number of untalented X-Factor finalists? Now that Blur are back, it really really really could happen.
It was as usual a terrible day in Crewe the day Alex died. All day kids were making fun of him, calling him names, throwing bottles at him as he walked along the road on his own. I knew him much more than anyone else knew him, but I didn’t know him half as well as I had hoped to. I knew how hard it was for him to hold back the tears as the glass bottles burst as each one violently hit his back.
He was always the odd one out, the loser, the freak. And for those reasons alone he was regularly beaten up and left in the corner of the playground, half alive, half dead. He would often run out of school with teary eyes and he would carry on running until he got to his front door. He never dared stop even to catch his breath, because he was terrified of the kids who beat him up, for he knew very well what they were able – and willing – to do to him.
He had the most beautiful wide eyes which glittered in the sunlight. It was just a shame that the bullies had converted him into a totally different person to what he once was, and over the years his mind had deteriorated to such an extent that in the end, his beautiful eyes just bore straight through you when he looked at you. I used to find him unconscious on my way home from school, draped over a bush with the entire contents of his schoolbag either in the nearest rubbish bin or just scattered all over the ground.
Things like that happened to him everyday. He had a hard time at school. He got bullied because he was different. He decided who he wanted to be, which was what I loved most about him. He never changed just because his mates wore different clothes. To be honest, I don’t think I ever saw him with any other kids. He never spoke to anybody and communicated only through his music which he played so well. He seemed to have no social life, nobody knew anything about him. If anybody spoke to him then they would expect a muffled whisper in response or a shy nod or even just plain old ignorance and utter silence from Alex. In class, his head was always kept down and he never raised his hand to ask for help. Maybe because he was too proud. I guess nobody will ever know now.
He never fitted in with anybody around him. He wore gothic clothes with depressing slogans on them, and because his trousers were always so baggy his classmates always pulled them down, embarrassing him in front of everyone including me. I tried to introduce him to some of my friends but it always ended up with Alex getting humiliated in some way or another, and he would walk away and sit on his own somewhere else. He never did get along with other people. He was one of those people who miraculously manage to get along in life without any help at all. This worried me sometimes, because I knew he was unhappy but he refused to let anyone help him.
At first he was too different for them to accept. Too macabre, too unique, too unlike them. But after a while he completely transformed from an angelic vegetarian who wouldn’t hurt anybody, to a twisted loner with a criminals mind – seeking revenge on all those who had ever treated him badly. He soon became just as capable of murder as they were, which was the only similarity that he could ever share with them. When he walked around, he always stared down at his converses, his pretty eyes hidden by his long fringe, his face looking blank and his whole body seeming tiny compared to his heavy messenger bag. The only small sign of emotion he ever showed was the
heart-o-grams that he drew on everything he had.
Every time he drew a heart on his hand, I wanted my initials to be written underneath but they never were. His emotions were kept locked in his heart and his thoughts were always left inside his head - floating around aimlessly. I was the only person who could remember his voice as he hardly said two words to anybody else.
He always sat on the bench outside the English block, with his hands in his pockets, staring down at the muddy concrete floor, throwing little stones into puddles. I sometimes sat next to him and talked to him, but he didn’t make much eye contact and fiddled with his beautiful hair, so I realised he mustn’t have wanted to talk to me. My mates commented on my relationship with Alex and said that I fancied him but I didn’t. I felt sorry for him more than anything. He reminded me very much of myself. There was a time when I never spoke and hid my emotions from everyone. I saw what was becoming of him, it had happened to me a few years before. But thankfully I was taken to a specialist clinic where I was helped a lot. I offered to give him Prozac which I had once been prescribed, but he didn’t know what it was and thought it was a type of class A drug. I felt bad for him, he was obviously unhappy. I needed to help him now, and there was only one way to get close to him.
I decided to hang around with him whenever I could. I waited outside his classes for him to come out, and I walked miles past my school in the most brutal of storms every morning to call for him, even if I was already late. If for some reason he wasn’t coming in, I would stay at his house with him to make sure he wasn’t lonely. I couldn’t bear being without him, so I gladly stayed at his house with him all day, playing on his X-box and messing about with Mento’s and Coke.
We soon became good friends, and his deepest, darkest secrets soon spilled out. I always panicked whenever he asked: “Can you keep a secret?” because his secrets were always quite painful to listen to. I think I started to like him a lot... More than a lot. I suppose I would have died for him. I probably would have jumped off the highest, most rocky cliff in the world if he asked me to. But at the time I either didn’t realise this or refused to act on it. I believe that I was the only person he ever shared these secrets with as he very often burst into tears after telling me something that had happened in the past. His stories shocked me and his presence made me feel uncomfortable because of some of the things I knew about him.
As the trust grew between us, so did our feelings for each other. As the months went by I became less and less in control of my emotions, and every time I went near to him all I wanted to do was kiss him and it soon became clear that he felt the same way about me. One day after school I knocked on his front door and he opened it wearing nothing but a Metallica t-shirt and his boxers. I started to panic when he told me that his mum was out shopping as we had never been alone in such a private place before. I wasn’t worried because I didn’t trust him – more that I didn’t trust myself. Would I be able to control my feelings for him while he was sat there in his underwear?
The first half an hour or so of me being there was fine. We were sat on the sofa in his bedroom playing Halo on his X-box, drinking Coca Cola, and eating Ben and Jerrys ice cream. I felt silly for doubting the situation, and I felt guilty for thinking that anything bad would happen. It was harmless. It was innocent. Just two friends sitting on a sofa together, alone, shooting aliens on Halo 3. But then he paused the game and turned his head towards me and looked me deep in the eyes. And at that moment I realised that he was the most beautiful person that I had ever known, and my heart sank inside me. I’d never properly seen his face before because I never got much chance to. A lack of confidence and low self-esteem meant that I only ever got to see him properly on two occasions because he always had his head down with his stupidly long fringe hiding a large majority of his face. He was gorgeous. He was something out of a dream. And he shuffled closer to me, and closer, and closer, until all I could see was his perfect face, and he kissed me.
Out of confusion more than fear I pulled myself away from him and there was an awkward moment for a while. I was sat there staring at the ground in amazement, and in the corner of my eye I could vaguely see his heart-broken wide eyes fixated on me. He then put his hand underneath my chin and forced me to turn my head towards him, and he kissed me again and pushed me down onto the sofa. It was then that I started to panic. What was he going to do to me? He had a crazed look in his eyes and an evil smile on his face and he looked possessed and wild. He put one hand up my top and the other up my skirt and everything instantly started to go blurry and the room started to spin. I knew it wouldn’t be long before I passed out and he could do whatever he wanted to my unconscious body. So I screamed… I grabbed his head and screamed in his ear as high pitched and as loud as I possibly could, and I fainted there in his arms.
I woke up tucked up in his bed ten minutes later wearing only my underwear, with him sat beside me smiling. Something seemed different. I looked around the room and everything was the same as what it was before I passed out. Even the game was still paused, and the two spoons were still stuck inside the Ben and Jerrys exactly where they were before. But I noticed one little, tiny, miniature, but terribly significant thing. His Metallica t-shirt was there lying on the floor. He was sat beside me wearing nothing but his underpants. I didn’t stop to ask questions, I just ran out of the house with my eyes exploding with painful tears.
I tried my best to avoid him after that. We would pass each other in the school corridor and I would look the other way. But although I despised him for what he may or may not have done to me, I still loved him. I loved the way he would walk up from behind me and wrap his arms around my waist and say sorry over and over again and tell me that he never meant it to go that far. I loved the way he stared at me from across the room when we had classes together, and I loved the way he wrote apologetic notes and he would leave them on my desk. I felt cheated, and I felt as if my self respect and dignity had been stolen from me. I felt unclean, worthless, and dirty, and so I became spiteful and dangerous. I told all of my friends about what happened. I just wanted to tell somebody and let them all know how vicious and disgusting he was.
A rapist. I loved a rapist. And everyone else hated him, especially after his dirty little secret was fully exposed. The words: ‘DIE RAPIST DIE!’ were spray-painted onto the side of his house and his windows were smashed in on a weekly basis. But there was no proof, there was no evidence. Did he really do it? One question that has never ceased to haunt me. All I know is that he pinned me down on his sofa, and I woke up in his bed. That’s it. That’s my unjust proof. He might not have done anything. Maybe he spilt ice cream on his top and so decided to take it off? Who knows? I might have been vengeful and vindictive, I might have been callous and cruel, and I may have been wrong. But one thing is for sure, that I ruined his entire life just because I was a spiteful bitch who mixed up two very important and very different words – justice and revenge.
He then of course, hardly ever spoke to me again, and I began to feel increasingly guilty for all the horrible things people were doing to him. I couldn’t help but think that he got the worst end of the bargain. Yes, what he did was disgusting and there’s no excuse for what happened, but did he truly deserve all of the broken bones he got afterwards? Was that justice? Did that make it all better? Were we equal if he got beaten up to such an extent that the local emergency services number was number one on the speed-dial on his mobile phone?
I soon realised that all I cared about was Alex and no matter how many times I apologised to him he refused to say a word to me. I often heard him utter words such as ‘cow’ and ‘traitor’ under his breath as he walked away from me, and I didn’t blame him. The disgusting things which the bullies did to him were disgraceful, undignified, and degrading, and it was all down to me and my big mouth.
One day he walked out of school half an hour before school ended. He very often did if people were upsetting him. It was easier that way because he had asthma and it didn’t do him much good having to run all the way home, so he was let out early so he could avoid confrontation with the low-life scum which were his peers. I could tell he had been crying because his eyeliner had run down his pretty face, and the learning mentor was walking beside him. He didn’t turn left at the gates and instead, carried on walking straight forwards so I knew he mustn’t have been going home. I was still in a science lesson, so I asked the teacher if I could go to the toilet and he gave me a hall pass and I ran down the stairs as fast as I could and sneaked out of the school gates. I decided to follow Alex, but after a while somebody I knew stopped me to talk and Alex turned around a corner and out of sight.
That night he didn’t go on msn and didn’t reply to my texts. None of my mates had seen anything of him, so I went to his house and knocked on the door. His mum answered and I asked her where he was, but she said she hadn’t seen him since he set off to school that morning. I went back home and sat by my computer waiting for him to come online, and changed my phone settings from silent to vibrate in case he rang. I anxiously waited all night for him to come online, and my eyes were fixated on the computer screen for so long that my eyes started to burn after a while. But I refused to move away from the laptop even for a second, just in case he crept on msn whilst I wasn’t there. I kept going to his house to see if he was there but his mum started to get impatient with me and shouted at me and called me a stalker. The real truth was that I just cared more than what she did, and she didn’t like it.
Going to sleep that night, I left the hall light on and stared at a crack in the wall for what felt like hours. Something felt different; there was something that wasn’t quite right. I struggled to get to sleep and I ended up lying awake trying to figure out where he may be and what he may be doing. I shouldn’t have cared, I should have wished him dead, I should have gotten the police to take him away and I would never have had to see his face again, but I didn’t. Justice would have been to phone the police and let them deal with it in a civilised and appropriate manner, but instead I decided to let a whole year of schoolchildren create their own justice, by defacing his walls and beating him to a pulp. As every minute went by I got more and more worried. It’s strange what you notice when it’s dark. There are no colours, just shades of black, grey, and white - as if all of the colour is drained out of everything. My colourful and vibrant bedroom suddenly looked like a set from a Tim Burton film, with silhouettes and shadows and the moonlight piercing through the curtains.
It was then that my phone went off. I bent down and picked my phone up off the floor, surprised when I recognised Alex’s number show up on the call ID. I answered the call and said hello. There was an uneasy silence for a while and then he replied in a deep, emotionless voice: “Hey Danni, tell my mum I love her won’t you?”
I asked if he had been drinking, he said the only thing he had drank that day was his own blood. By this time, I was growing very concerned and asked where he was. He cockily remarked back: “I’m at the bridge but my mind is somewhere else.” The bridge was where we used to hang out after school, and Alex was obsessed with the fact that many teenagers had committed suicide by plunging to their death. His father jumped off the bridge when Alex was young and he wasn’t told about this until a month before he jumped himself.
The bridge was a beautiful place to die. A wide motorway, surrounded by dim orange streetlights, with dark green trees either side of the road, and another road crossing over it. At night it looked so peaceful and pretty. I remember a conversation I had with Alex a while back, and we were laughing and joking about the bridge, and he said that if he was to die then he would like to die there. Now that I come to think of it, he actually mentioned the bridge in one of his songs. ‘The blackness absolving each small glimpse of light, permanently sleeping beneath the nocturnal night’… Once he had recorded the song on his laptop he gave me a copy of the CD, and I listened to it every single morning as I got ready for school, and every single night before I went to bed. But now I can’t even bear to look at it, and it hides within my CD collection wedged between The Cure’s ‘Pornography’ and Radioheads ‘Pablo Honey’.
The bridge! Of course. Anyone would have realised that this had been inevitable for weeks. Halfway through the phone call I decided that once he put the phone down I would contact everybody and get them down to the bridge so that they could make sure Alex didn’t do anything stupid. My plan didn’t really work out as I had hoped. My whole body froze as he said goodbye in a stupid, sarcastic tone of voice and I heard the phone fall onto the floor, and from then on, all that could be heard was the traffic passing by.
I panicked. I struggled breathing. I couldn’t shout for my parents because the words couldn’t come out. I tried texting a friend but my fingers kept pushing the wrong buttons. I tried phoning 999 but when they asked what department I wanted to get through to the words just seemed to be stuck inside my throat – blocking my airway. I truly was mortified. I couldn’t even cry because my whole body seemed to have given up working, and I just sat cross-legged on my bed shaking, staring through the bedroom window. I felt sick with worry and feared the worst.
Everything suddenly became clearer. I then felt angry and cheated, because he had planned this all the time, and to feel the need to do something like that you must know you need help. I tried to help him but he wouldn’t have any of it. He just sat on the bench day after day feeling sorry for himself. And look where it got him. Look what it made him do. Everything everybody had done to him, ruined his whole childhood and made him feel like he was nothing. And when people called him names, when people hurled glass and bricks at him, when I turned to him and asked him why they did it, he said nothing, he did nothing. All the times I watched him cry and saw him run to the boys toilets. All the times I asked why he had deep, horizontal cuts on his wrists and up his arms and why his eyes were swollen and bruised. All the times he handed a note to the P.E teacher, and slowly limped towards the corner of the sports hall and sat alone for the whole lesson. He did nothing. He said nothing. He could have stopped it all but he didn’t even try to, as if he just didn’t care.
I saw his whole life from the best seat possible. I remembered when he was actually happy. He used to smile and laugh and have fun like a child should. He was beautiful and had lovely hair and wore nice clothes. He made his friends so happy and never had a bad word to say about anybody. He was talented and his main love was his music. I suppose he could never love anybody more than his guitar. He wrote songs for his friends and he was extremely artistic. His future was looking bright. He could have been anybody he wanted to be. He could have had anybody he wanted to have. Everyone loved him and he was extremely popular. His friends were always kept close to him and nobody ever saw him cry. I remember how he used to make us all laugh and how he acted crazy after eating candy and how he wrote happy stories and poems.
But things started going wrong in his life and he soon became depressed. He was no longer fun to be around and all of his friends quickly abandoned him, including me. Every song he wrote was about suicide and hatred and his art looked horrid and evil. He got his hair cut ‘emo’ style and hid behind his fantastic fringe, which hid one eye so nobody could really tell when he was looking at them. His art was still his main hobby and he drew lines on his arms which worryingly looked like he had cut himself. My friends who were once his too pointed at him from across the playground, making remarks about him and making fun of him. And I knew how much it hurt him. I saw him change so much.
Unable to contact anybody about what had happened, I somehow managed to make my own way to the bridge. I was still in my pyjamas, and I left the front door open because I didn’t have enough strength to close it, and besides, every second was crucial. His safety – his life – meant more to me than anything else in the entire world. The house could have gone up in flames for all I cared – as long as I got to Alex as fast as I possibly could have, then nothing else mattered. If I had spent five seconds closing the door then I would have regretted doing so afterwards – and would have spent the rest of my life wondering; if I had gotten to Alex five seconds earlier, could I have saved him? The short five minute walk felt more like half an hour and I kept thinking my legs would collapse as they were shaking like mad. I couldn’t leave him, I had to carry on. As I nearly got to the bridge I had this image in my mind of him lying on the motorway, with the phone in his hand, but to my surprise, he was nowhere to be seen once I got there.
I felt stitched up. I thought he had played a prank on me, until I heard a male voice desperately screaming: “Help” coming from behind me. A man was kneeling by Alex’s side, with Alex lay face up by the side of the road. I nervously walked over to him and felt my heart sink when I saw a huge pool of thick red blood surrounding his head. The man claimed that Alex was already dead before I got there, so I lay next to him with my blonde hair soaking up his bright red blood. I joked in a shaky voice: “You wouldn’t be seen dead withyour hair like that”. Then I realised what I had said, and a single tear trickled down my cheek, and fell into a puddle of his blood. The man explained to me how he had been driving past, and saw Alex jump off the bridge, head first down onto the motorway below.
I literally wanted to be sick but my entire body felt numb, I couldn’t even feel any true emotion. I just felt emptiness, as if part of me had been taken away suddenly, which in some respect was true. I loved Alex dearly, and although I was a naïve twelve year old, I knew what love was. That strange feeling which not even the most imaginative of poets can describe. A sudden change in the pattern of your heartbeat whenever you think of that person. A sort of fluttering of butterflies floating around violently inside your torso. The butterflies darting around as fast as they can, dancing from one organ to another. And sometimes the feeling is so strong that it’s more like a little rodent piercing through your skin, digging its way through to your stomach, and sitting inside your belly fidgeting around, trying to make itself comfortable. But that was how I felt each time I thought of Alex, and it was even stronger when I was with him. Sometimes it got so much that it felt like my heart would miss too many beats and I would collapse. And my heart at that present moment honestly was beating faster than it ever had before, and I was certain that my heart would give out at any minute. I just couldn’t believe that Alex could willingly go through that same, painful death that his father had endured.
As I lay there, I wondered what the last thing to go through his mind was and I wondered if it was all because of me, because of the bullies, or because of the guilt. I can’t control what people pass around although I do admit that it was wrong of me to assume the worst of him. He looked so beautiful. His eyes were closed and he looked as though he may have been sleeping. I lay there until I heard the siren of an ambulance and I got up and the light almost blinded me. At first they called Alex by his name: “There’s quite a lot of dirt inside Alex’s wound on his cheek, do you know when he last had a Tetanus jab?” And then, just when things were starting to look bleak, just when the paramedics desperately started pumping oxygen into him - as if he was a balloon with a hole in it, they started to refer to him as: “The body”. “We are going to move the body into the ambulance now, ok?”… The paramedics confirmed what I had feared most there and then and told me he was dead: “I’m sorry to have to tell you, but Alex has passed away”. They tried to let me down gently, which made it harder to accept. I kept thinking: just tell me he’s dead, not passed away, not deceased… Dead.
For the next half hour or so I just sat on the cold, wet ground staring at the puddle of thick red blood. I couldn’t get up, I could hardly move. It felt like every cell inside my body had given up completely. As if my whole body was dead, and only my mind could feel any emotion at all. I felt like my entire life had collapsed right there and then as the paramedics placed a white sheet over Alex’s lifeless body, and carried him into the ambulance on a stretcher. At that moment - as the ambulance started up and drove away, I realised that I could not possibly live with the guilt that was tearing my heart into pieces. The distraught, confused look on my face had suddenly turned to pure anger. I screamed at the ambulance, I yelled so hard and so loud that it felt like my throat had been slashed open. But I carried on shouting as the ambulance got further away. And as soon as the ambulance had turned around the corner and was out of sight, I ran down the road after it.
My heartbeat had been so inconstant for the past few hours that my head was spinning and I was completely exhausted. But as I staggered down the road all I could think of was him lay there on the hospital bed, with blood being pumped into his pale arms. My eyes were streaming with salty tears that trickled into my lips and I kept vomiting inside my mouth as I ran but there was no option of me staying there on that cold, dark motorway. So I ran until my legs could no longer carry my weight and I fell to the ground.
I panicked as I heard the sound of high heels running desperately towards me. I turned my head around and saw Alex’s mother approaching me with her hands covered in blood. She sat next to me and apologised for all the times she had questioned my friendship with Alex. She never approved of me being his friend. I even got the idea that she truly despised me sometimes. I think she blamed me for his death. When she found out that Alex had phoned me as he jumped her face turned sour with envy. I think she hated the fact that he could love another female other than her, but he didn’t love me, he just thought he did.
She seemed relatively calm, as if she expected this to happen. I started to idolise this woman. She had lost everything that had ever meant anything to her. She had lost her husband and her only child yet she kept her cool and hid her emotions behind her thick rimmed glasses that reflected the streetlights. This woman was obviously mentally strong. She just seemed to accept the fact that she now had nothing to stop her from going over the edge. She now had nothing to live for apart from her job working at the local pub. She made me feel stupid in a way. She was his mother; she was supposed to be at breaking point. She was supposed to be shattered right now but she wasn’t. And what was I? I was his best friend who just happened to mess his life up for him. Yet I was the one who was breaking down in floods of tears. It seemed like my entire world had ended. But I was the reason why he was in the ambulance. I was the reason why there was blood splattered all over the motorway. I felt fully responsible for his untimely death and no matter how much she tried to comfort me and tell me that it wasn’t my fault, it still didn’t make me feel any better. I just thought: “How would youknow?”… I was just a stupid girl who had made the awful mistake of wrecking someone else’s life. It should have been me who jumped over the edge of that motorway. But it just happened to be the most amazing person in the world instead.
His mum offered to take me home in her car, but I said I would like to walk home alone but thanked her anyway. She seemed quite adamant that I should go with her because it was freezing cold and I was only wearing my pyjamas. But I didn’t care about the cold. Even if I died of pneumonia, I felt like I deserved it. I wanted to get a cold, just so that whenever I coughed or sneezed it would remind me of Alex. Plus, my head was boiling up inside, and the freezing breeze was soothing on my forehead which felt like it was about to explode. So I refused to have a lift and she eventually drove away, and I walked the same way that Alex would have done earlier that night.
As I walked down an alleyway I found a crumpled piece of paper lying on the pavement. I picked it up and instantly recognized Alex’s handwriting. Unsure whether to read it or not, I read it anyway and ran straight to Alex’s house to give it to his mum. I knocked on the door about ten times but there was no answer. I thought it was strange that she wasn’t in because it only took five minutes to get from the bridge to her house in the car. So I went back to the bridge with the note and opened it up and soaked it in the pool of blood until the ink had run so much that it was more or less impossible to read, and I left it there to disintegrate in the rain.
The next day, rumour went around that Alex’s mum had gone missing. There must have been at least a hundred people searching all over Crewe for her. For hours there were people running around sticking posters on any flat surface they could find, and shoppers had to be locked in stores as we looked for her, but she was nowhere to be seen. After a few hours, the police had produced a warrant which they could use to get into her house. I went along with them, because she had no family left, and not many friends that were willing to identify her seeing as most of them only pretended to like her, possibly because they felt sorry for her. After her husband died, she was like a different person. In fact it’s possible to suggest that she wasn’t a person at all. More like a robotic emotional cripple that took several pills every morning just to stop her from hurting herself or others around her.
The police loudly knocked on her door with severe authority. Nobody answered it. They knocked again, but still, nobody came to the door. One of the policemen then noticed that there was a little button beside the door so he pushed it down. A hopeful silence kept us all in suspense, but there were no signs of life coming from the house. One of the men turned to one of the others and regretfully said: “Alright then, are youready?” and they counted backwards from three to one in unison and violently kicked the door down.
The policemen went straight inside the house and split up. Each one searched separate rooms and raided the whole house as if they were looking for drugs. No small area was left unsearched. A few of them went upstairs and all you could hear were doors slamming and tables banging as they were turned upside down. I stood by the door in disbelief. I didn’t want them to find her. I didn’t suspect for a moment that she would be sat in her living room innocently drinking a cup of tea, and a haunting image of her hanging from a tree somewhere in a shadowed woodland kept sending shivers down my spine. And then it happened… A policeman emerged at the top of the stairs and stood there with his face tormented with horror. He looked me deep in the eyes, and I hesitated to ask: “Have you found her? Is she up there?”…
He quietly mumbled like a small child: “She’s up here, in thebathroom”… So I slowly made my way up the stairs, and as I approached him, he refused to move out of the way to let me past. “I don’t think that’s a sight for your eyes, love”. My heart twisted inside my torso, and it felt like all of the blood was being drained from it until it was left dehydrated and lifeless. “This week, I have seen some awful, terrible things. The worst of which were the dreams that I have had for the past few days. Nothing that I see in that room can be more ugly than the nightmares”. And as I said this, he reluctantly moved out of the way, and I cautiously walked up to the bathroom door, and opened it.
The first thing that I noticed was the smell. It was one which you would only expect to find in a morgue or in an ancient Egyptian tomb. It was repulsive. Flies were buzzing around everywhere. Then I noticed the walls. The perfectly white tiles were covered in rotting, red blood stains and hand prints. The walls were literally covered. It was grotesque. It was horrifying. There were dried drips of blood running from the ceiling to the skirting boards and the floor was soaked with a mixture of water and puddles of blood. The next thing I noticed was the bath. It was full of a painful red liquid which was overflowing and spilling over the sides of the bathtub…
As all of this pieced together in my head, my eyes grew wide with terror. “She can’t be, she wouldn’t have”… I crept over to the bath, trying my best to avoid walking over the blood stains. Her fully clothed body was slumped inside the bath, with her normally porcelain white skin tinted red. She looked as if she was in one of those rooms where photographs are made, with the piercing red lights and dozens of photos pegged onto washing lines. A number of gruesome weapons of self mutilation were also floating in the bathtub, such as razor blades and kitchen knives and blades taken out of pencil sharpeners. I couldn’t take it. It was all too much. I almost passed out as I immediately made a dash for the door and I stood outside the room throwing up until all that was coming out was my own stomach acid.
A few moments later, I bravely re-entered the room to grant Alex’ last dying wish. I walked over to the bathtub once more, and knelt down by the side of his mothers corpse, and a tear trailed down my cheek as I whispered: “Alex loves you”. And I looked into her glazed-over eyes once more, and I left the room once more, and went to sit in Alex’ room – the same room in which the terrible chain of disasters started, and I hysterically laughed at his Metallica t-shirt which was hung on the door of his wardrobe until the police took me away to the police station to make a statement.
After the vicious events of that week, I quickly became a completely useless and shambolic mess. At first I just refused to talk or make eye contact with anyone and I blocked it all out. But soon it became virtually impossible to do anything without crying or deliberately smashing something to pieces. I would cry in the middle of lessons if I couldn’t do a question and everyone would turn around to stare at me for a few seconds, and then turn back again and a dozen whispers would fill the room. “She’s a murderer, leave her, she’s probably just having a flashback of when she killed her first victim!”. It got to a point where I couldn’t go to school because I just didn’t have enough energy to walk despite my school being right around the corner from where I lived. Everything became ten times as hard as what it would normally be, so microwaving a frozen pizza was like having to cook a gourmet dinner. My hairbrush became as heavy as a garden hoe, the depression tablets that they gave me seemed to be ten times as big as normal, and I always struggled to swallow them because my throat didn’t seem wide enough and my gag reflexes would force me to either choke on the tablet or violently spurt it out.
Nothing has really been the same since. I still lie awake some nights and see his face above me. But he isn’t mad at me anymore, he’s smiling. I hear his voice and I follow it. I sit on the stairs and can picture him standing at the door. I try to talk to him but I guess ghosts can’t communicate like that. He looks even more beautiful as a ghost. With his opaque skin tinted pale blue, glowing in the pitch black night, floating around with a vague expression on his face. He looks so calm and peaceful now. I can only get to sleep properly if he’s there. I was the only one who knew exactly why Alex died - even the police didn’t know the total truth. I was the only person who knew that Alex died the way that he always wanted to, there underneath the glowing streetlights, sprawled across the motorway underneath the ‘nocturnal night’.
After the incident, I was put back into a clinic for a while, and the doctors prescribed me Prozac again to make sure I didn’t become depressed like I once was. I refused to take them at first, because I wanted to make myself suffer for what happened to Alex. I hated myself for allowing it all to happen. I destroyed not only Alex’s life, not only his mothers life, but also mine. I used to go out and get lost and come home paralytic. I slept on pavements, stopped eating, and cried myself to sleep and woke up each morning surrounded by salty damp pillows. The worst year of my life was the year after Alex died. I couldn’t accept that he was gone. Everyday after school I would go to the graveyard and kneel by his tombstone and it was only then that everything seemed real. I lost everything the day Alex died. I was left with nothing but a ghostly hallucination of the boy of my dreams, a blood stained hall pass, and a vast supply of depression tablets. It only took one terribly eventful day, one incredibly amazing boy, one foolish mistake, to destroy every minute of the rest of my life. I would have broken through my ribcage and torn out my own heart if it would have made Alex happy. I guess love makes you do messed up things. One day a few Prozac tablets went missing and I told myself with a smile: “Alex has had them”.
God knows I tried my very hardest to remove all evidence of his existence from my life. I tried my absolute best to forget about him. I violently tore the photos of him from my bedroom walls. I scribbled over his name in my diary over and over again until I ripped right through the pages, leaving nothing but scratchy pen lines and little pieces of paper, which would float out of my journal each time I opened it. I would open it now and again, and admire the fragments of ripped paper which used to be covered with a complete record of my hopeless infatuation with Alex. My bedroom suddenly became a shrine to him. Photos stolen from his MySpace page covered my bedroom floor, because I couldn’t bear to put them in the bin. I bought the same aftershave that he used to use and I would spray my room with it everyday. And as I sprayed it into the air I would see his face smiling at me in the mist for a split-second, and then the particles would spread around the room and he would be gone.
I sometimes go back to the bridge when I need to think things over. I give Alex birthday presents every year and leave them in that exact spot where he died, and I would go back a few weeks later and they would still be there, teddy bears with matted fur and decayed flowers drooping and dying. I write valentine cards and love letters for him and I sit by the side of the road and I read them aloud, hoping that wherever he is, he can hear me. When I sit there I feel so close - yet so far from Alex. It feels like the bridge is a secret vortex, which allows people to travel from one universe to another. A black hole which absorbs people and sends them off to wherever lost souls end up, and it only takes one jump – just one jump – to travel through space and spend the rest of eternity with Alex.
There doesn’t have to be cuts and bruises for someone to feel pain. Even if somebody is smiling, it doesn’t mean they are happy. If you find someone who you would die for, then you should try and do everything in your power to keep that person. But if they don’t feel the same, then should you let them go? Does it really matter what other people know or think? You shouldn’t change just because other people don’t like who you are. If you aren’t who you want to be, then you can never love yourself, and if you can’t love yourself, why should anyone else?
Well, this could prove to be pretty interesting. I'm Danyel.
I personally believe that my unique fondness for grammar and punctuation might be a little dangerous and unhealthy, but we'll see. I'm only sixteen, so there may be a few slight errors here and there, but other than that I would say that my english skills are pretty spot-on (most of the time!).
I'm currently in my final year at high school, and I literally have my GCSE exams in a couple of months and then I'm off to sixth form. You may hear/read more about thise as this silly old blog progresses, but I'll leave the nitty-gritty details for now.
I'm not witty or exceptionally intelligent, I'm just an average student. I'm predicted to get B's in my exams, however, I have my first exam in as little as two months and have I revised? Not at all - nor do I really intend to, seeing as the first exam is RE. My main areas where I am most confident are English and Art. I'm currently at an A grade in English, but if I don't leave later on in the year without my beloved A* which I have always dreamt of achieving, then I fully pledge to remake 'Quadrophenia', without the drugs, sex, or the 'Mods' and 'Rockers' thing, and just do a Phil Daniels, over the edge of the cliff.
Anyway, back to the point, my mind tends to wander sometimes as you will find out (or as you may find out, depending on whether you are strangely impressed by this shambolic mess of an introduction to this blog and continue to read it or whether you immediately close the page in disgust and make a Voodoo doll out of scraps of potato sack and strands of my hair.
Here, you wil find short stories, reviews, poems, and other crazy things to read. I'm also hoping to get the opportunity to write reviews about small 'garage/bedroom bands' and give them some much-needed publicity and give me something to write about besides my usual concoction of 'Emoism' and well, more 'Emoism'.
Please pester me if I don't post stuff on here for a while, I want it to stay active (unlike my last account which was a huge catastrophic disaster if I do say so myself). Tell your friends, tell your teachers, tell Boris Johnson if you must. Come on, there's probably a good five-hundred fathers in the UK alone who would like their garages back.
I hope you like everything that you read here. If you want to, write to me at my email: ComaStupidity@hotmail.co.uk I promise I will reply to all emails (as long as I don't get stupidly popular and get twenty emails every second - which I severely doubt but still...)
Also, email me if you hear of a good band that deserve a bit of recognition, whether that be a small group of friends in your year at school or an impressive band on YouTube. Thanks loads.
Signed Danyel (well not literally because I could get into a lot of bother if I randomly signed my name on my computer screen). x
Hey I'm Danyel, and this is my blog thing.
I love writing and am hoping to do something to do with writing when I leave school next year.
I look a lot younger than what I actually am - apparantly... As I need ID for a film rated twelve at the cinema and have been told on numerous times that I look about nine. Great...
Punctuation means a lot to me, I haven't got it spot on just yet, so before you bite my head off online style - please note that I do make the odd mistake now and again. But I do like my punctuation, and only ever use that dreaded 'text chat' when it is absolutely vital. I.e when I am posing as someone else on msn :)
I hope you like my blog and all the stuff I put on here!
Bye x
