Page 5 of Sad Girl Hours

Chapter Five

Nell

“I have HUGE news!”

Jenna startles awake, bleary eyes blinking to focus on me as I burst into her room. “Can you knock?” she says grumpily.

“I’m not sure – let me check.” I knock twice on the wood of the door frame. “Yep, it would appear so.”

“I honestly despise you sometimes,” she says, shuffling over in her bed to make room for me to snuggle in next to her, rather ruining the sentiment of her words.

I tuck myself in under the duvet, wriggle my toes and wait.

There’s a lengthy pause before…

“OK, you woke me up from a dream about being the first Black woman in history to win a Tony for a show she both wrote and starred in – are you going to tell me this news or are you just going to enrage me further by preventing me from closing my eyes and making my acceptance speech?”

“As fun as enraging further sounds, I would like to tell you the news. LOOK.” I wriggle my butt slightly into the air in order to produce a pamphlet from my back pocket.

“ Poetry Chapbook Competition, in affiliation with Stanza Press ,” Jenna reads. “Neat.”

“Neat?” I say incredulously. “This is an excellent chance to begin my plan for world poetry domination. It’s more than neat .”

“You’re going to enter?”

“I’m going to win ,” I clarify. “I have to. Becks, my new tutor for my poetry modules, told us about it this afternoon and I didn’t hear a word she said afterwards. I’d be published, actually published , by a real publisher.”

“As opposed to a real fishmonger.”

“Correct. It’d be my first step to achieving poetry greatness. I have to win .”

“Respectfully, Nell, you’re giving real Amy March vibes right now.”

“Aww. Thanks.”

“It wasn’t necessarily a compliment but you’re welcome.” I feel her eyes on me. “OK. Tell me more about the competition.”

I kick my legs under the duvet in excitement.

“OK, so all the undergrad creative writing and English students can enter, but those of us on the poetry modules have to enter because it’s going to be our main project for the term.

We have to write a collection of about thirtyish top-notch poems that all fit together in some way before the deadline at the start of January. ”

“That sounds great.” Jenna’s woken up just enough to be sincere now instead of just snarky. “I’m sure you’ll have this in the bag – you’re the best person at the whole word thing that I know. What are you going to write about?”

“I’m not sure,” I say. “I’ve been thinking about it all the way home and I’ve not come up with anything prize-winning yet.”

“Not that you’re putting a lot of pressure on yourself or anything.”

“Me? Pressure? Absolutely not. I’m famously chill about everything.”

Jenna cackles. “Good one. We can workshop themes, though. It’ll come to you.”

“It had better. Because I—”

“— have to win. Yeah, yeah, I got it.”

Back in my own room, I plonk myself down in the middle of the floor and surround myself in a whirlwind of poetry, all my collections spread out around me.

I pore over them, starting with the classics: Mary Oliver, Emily Dickinson, Wordsworth, Maya Angelou, the Brontes, Langston Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and then go through the rest.

A while later, I get a sharp pain in my ribs. I become vaguely aware that my back hurts too, partly from sitting hunched over on the floor, partly from the tension that’s been building up in my body, my shoulders almost brushing my ears.

“Ugh.” I fling off my glasses and toss them on to the poetry pile, before lying down on the floor to try to unclench my ribcage so I don’t get any more pains.

No one really understands the overlap between autism and chronic illnesses (my money’s on the whole ‘trauma of existing in an incompatible, ableist world causing stress on the body’ theory).

But I like to think I’ve become pretty adept at living with my weird-ass body and weird-ass brain.

The tension stems from the fact that I’ve been reading poetry for approximately two and a bit hours and I still don’t have the foggiest clue what to centre my collection on.

I’ve written poems about all manner of things, but I can’t just pick any topic.

It has to be something I’m passionate about, something I can sustain enough interest in both for myself to write thirty poems on, and for readers to want to read.

I need an idea that zaps my brain like lightning on the ocean.

And there’s something else bugging me too. So many of the greatest poets draw on themes of love and passion. They write like they put a part of themselves into each line, words flowing out of their brain through the quill, embroidering an image of themselves on every reader’s mind.

And that’s what I want to do too. It’s something I need to do if I’m going to win. Writers’ and poets’ insincerity and uncertainty are always obvious to me as a reader – I need to figure out how to make my readers feel the things I feel, sweeping them up with me through the pages.

I just have to figure out what it is that I feel first.

There’s a picture of my family on the pinboard above my desk.

The twins, Owen and Naomi, are grinning as they hold up their pet snake (Snakespeare).

They got Snakespeare for their last birthday after they created a PowerPoint they presented to our dads to convince them that they were now responsible enough, at nine ‘whole years old’, to look after a reptile of their very own instead of just the ones that have sleepovers at our house when Pops brings them home from his vet’s practice.

Pops himself is standing behind them, hands on their shoulders, proud that his kids grew up into little animal weirdos like him.

Our other dad has his arm looped round Pops’s waist but is looking slightly alarmed as I pose for the camera while also trying to keep Bean Burger in my arms as he wrestles for freedom/to get away from the snake.

My dads always talk about how they knew they were gay way before they met each other in their twenties, when Pops went to A & E to be treated for a particularly nasty bite from a pig and Dad was the nurse who bandaged him up.

They knew from when they were teenagers, maybe even younger.

I’m nineteen now, twenty in a week, and I’m still yet to have the big realisation moment that they had.

Everything feels so abstract to me. I’ve never had an earth-shattering crush, never looked at a person and gone, “ Oh. OK.” I’ve never even crushed on a celebrity – the idea of having any kind of feelings towards someone I’ve never met and only know from their movies or music is so alien to me that it may as well be camping out in Area 51.

Like, sure, I’ve met people around me and thought, Maybe?

I’ve wondered whether they think about me, and I’ve got a bit nervous and spent too long picking out an outfit in case I bump into them.

I’ve imagined scenarios in my head of us going on a date and exchanging witty banter with underlying romantic tension, but that’s always as far as I’ve got.

I’ve tried to explain this to my dads before but they’ve just exchanged knowing looks and said that I haven’t met ‘that person’ yet.

It’s frustrating, them clearly assuming they know better than me.

I also suspect they both think I’m a lesbian but they must be basing that more on their observations of my disinterest in interacting with men rather than any particular interest in people of other genders.

I don’t know, though. Maybe I am just young and na?ve, and one day I will meet someone and be flooded with all these feelings I haven’t felt so far in my twenty years of existence. Or…

Maybe I’m missing something.

I scramble up, tiptoeing carefully round the poetry carpet I’ve accidentally made for myself, and sink into the chair in front of my desk with a sigh. I open up my laptop, going to the chaos document I often use to draft my poems in, and stare at the page.

“C’mon, Nell,” I mutter. “It can’t be that hard.”

Ten minutes of staring at a blank page later, I decide that no, actually it is that hard.

The wonky drawer below my desk lets out a pathetic groan as I tug it open and extract a notebook and pen. Sometimes the words won’t come out when typing and it helps to go old school – there’s something grounding about actually holding a pen or pencil and physically scratching out the words.

But, again, another ten minutes go by and no words have been scratched. Not a single one.

It’s my turn to let out a pathetic groan.

“ Ughhhhhhh. ” I put my head down on my desk, accidentally typing a keysmash into the still open Word doc.

Hey, it might not make sense, but at least the page isn’t empty any more.

Maybe I can pass it off as avant-garde, pretend I was inspired by e. e. cummings.

Or , I think to myself as I close everything down, step back across the moat of books surrounding my bed and throw myself down on it like an overworked Disney princess, maybe I just have nothing – no inspiration at all.

Maybe I’ll never be a great poet, shattering people’s perceptions with my astute observations of the inner workings of my brain and heart.

Maybe my heart is just something that pumps blood around. And maybe I have to be OK with that.