10, or 12, or 20… 100, 10, 1, O.

The numbers are confusing me. I keep having to google the word decade. I get it confused with the word ‘dozen’ and don’t know whether it means ’12 years’ or ’10 eggs’. I keep thinking it means I’m 10, or 12, or 20. but I am none of those eggs. or some of those eggs. Not all of those eggs, yet. I think about when I was 10, and 12, and 20. It takes me back to the day I walked alone near Barbury Castle and all of my past-mes were running along the path, some crawling, some flying, some walking… the day I wondered how many mes I’d have to meet in this one lifetime. I keep seeing people’s ‘things I’ve achieved’ things and can’t make sense of all the timelines – because we’re somehow in the same time, but not on the same timelines… the Draff of my brain tries to process a thing which the rest of me knows isn’t linear, in a linear way, which doesn’t work, and so I get confused. There is too much jelly soup for simple equations to function here, so I evaporate the liquid through a non-breakable hoover and turn the cubes into a bouncable trampoline playground of joy. A supposed-to-be adult on a bed hits their head on a slopy wall without much effort.

I need structure to fall from the sky like a stackable tray. How are you all doing this? It’s not that I want to teach the soup to dance, or to walk, but to THINK. The thinking is soup when it wants to be… bricks. Stackable bricks. I need help turning the soup into bricks. to jellify the jam. because when they are soup then I am soup. and, I am soup. which is soup, but I’m supposed to be being a human here.

If it’s 2020, then that means I’ve been living on my own for more than a year… is that correct? I struggle to do the sums. Numbers confuse me because of the circle-feeling. It’s why I found it so difficult learning to tell the time when I was younger. It felt so complicated. I get confused as to why a circle was 60 not 100 and yet is also 360, not 100, and when 100, it can be more than 100, not just 100, or 10, or 1, or O. and why there are 12 months, not 10. and they all have different… knuckle-things. I get confused as to what’s today and what’s tomorrow. and how to –
I get confused as to how to just –
it’s like trying to grasp the air within a balloon made of thin about-to-pop-sugar in a dreamland-limbo where candy-cane clouds laugh teeny-tiny paper-cuts onto unsung tongues

Is staring at the calendar-pages actually doing anything?

I retreat into the duvet-iglu and force myself to generate the energy it must take to manifest the inner-self I need to help us out of here. She arrives in the mindcave and I feel immediately patronised. She wants us to meal-plan, route-plan, day plan, night plan. Shower plan, tidy plan. Sort the things to do plan. but she hasn’t completely remembered how to direct us yet. Yesterday, she took us shopping and we returned with fruit and jelly and ice-cream. Tomorrow I shall become one of the plums.

I feel like the luckiest weetabix that doesn’t know how to weetabix.

I must remember to keep communicating with people – to keeping outer-ing, and not give into the lurking temptation of forever-silence, waiting like a heavenly pie-ghost.

I often wonder how much is related to my autistic neurology and how much is related to isolation and/or aloneness. and I know the two inter-relate, because a lot of the alone-ness (the chosen and non-chosen elements) are linked to being autistic too. I wonder if I was not autistic, how I would be managing the situation here. or how if I was not alone, whether I would be managing it better.

but I also know, that I AM managing better – so much better – and that this is all a part of bettering the better-butter until busy makes air graspable and manageable and shuffleable and seeable and the skies will roll to summer and –

dyu remember that heatwave when I couldn’t stop checking my pulse?
…see?! that seems like a lifetime ago.
It’s all just mini-lives.
mini-loaves.
sliced
dispersed
like crumbs of crumbs
the breaded sums
rolling, uncountable
unassembled breadlings awaiting the butter magnet from a winter-chilled utensil
dried and scattered
tiny

sleep, little breadslug
January is waiting for our creaturing dreams.