I have always found it difficult to talk to people. Perhaps this is why I am an artist. Allow me to clarify, it is not the talking to people that I find difficult, the act of socialisation, thats simple. A prompted cause and response. It the convention of my thoughts that I find it difficult to give away. It is not so much that I find it difficult to give, rather, it would seem they appear to be difficult to take.

I'm aware I am crafting an awkward situation for you. Perhaps you can't keep up with the level of detail or the speed at which my mind works. Perhaps the content of my message is...contentious... to you, a truth you don't want to hear. I am aware.

I was always bought up to be myself. It can be a lonely road.  There is no doubt in my mind that the words I say in any given conversation are truly authentic to my sense of self. To sensor ones words, to cushion a critique, to fake an interest in vapid conversation...is to sensor myself. In a meeting with my academic advisor we talked of the monotony of digital technology, in which my paradigm was highlighted. I have as it was put a 'resolved' sense of self, or identity. This of course is illusory.

There is a problem for me. I feel I can only make shallow connections unless I click with a person. Inside, I am told, I have a warm personality, but this does not always transpire. I am standing in a bar with a friend and several men who I've never met. A chunk of a man asks 'So what do you look for' presumably in a partner, to which I respond, intelligence and the conversation dies.

I cant sleep. This happens sometimes, most of the time, when I get designers block. It makes me question if I even want to, even can, design. Today I had an uninspiring tutorial, in which my tutors were rude, unengaged and obnoxious. Now I don’t know what to do about it. 

I also met up with A1 for an after work drink. He told me about his new housemates and how amazing they are. I can’t help but feel a little replaced. This weekend I achieved nothing. I couldn’t work, the thoughts didn’t come, and I couldn’t socialise - no one was around. It was, frankly, one of the most depressing weekends I have ever had in a long time. This weekend will probably be the same. 

I have been, somewhat, invited to A1’s house warming, although I am uncertain as if I will go. Part of this I guess is that I feel replaced, or threatened by these new friends of his, who seemingly now share everything that was once secret between A1 and I, and partly because I feel like I don’t know who he actually when he is with these new people. 

A few weekends ago, on my birthday celebration, these housemates were invited along with A1. I received a message which read “be straight yeah”. This annoyed me and frankly ruined my evening, which resulted, so I am told (I don’t remember... thanks vodka) in a lot of friction between myself and guests. I am not scared to be myself, and I find it hard to accept people that are. 

That said I have no architectural ambition left. I do however have four months of architecture school remaining, but I have officially ran out of steam. I have no inspiration for my project, and part of the reason todays tutorial was so dyer is because, I think, my tutors picked up on this. I have never “wanted” to become and architect. I have always said I am a designer, an artist. And always thought these were one of the same. But I’ve realised I’m not that interested in anything anymore. 

And I guess it's been a while. And that might be because I've moved to a different city, or because I've been thinking about other things, doing other things. But really its because I didn't feel alone until I was doing this. Doing nothing.

Not much has changed in the years that have come and gone between posts, the tides. My academic success has been short lived, although I was able to secure a place at a top university that I didn't want to go to for a course I don't want to do. But one must'nt complain right?

It would be nice to have a vodka friend right now, because hell I am lost.

Buy me these and I will take them on and off, for you, as many times as you like (T&C Apply, Maximum of 3 times).

https://shop.barcodeberlin.com/?view=item&orderno=90719_0

I'm size Small - Thanks in advance.

It has occurred to me that I am extremely lonely.

I grew up in a place feeling out of place, and since have moved from city to city to weave stories of drunken parties, drugs and lustrous sex.There is a photograph, from two weeks past, of four of us in a bed. When I think about my life, this is not how I imagined it would be when I was younger.

Purely for the thrill of the chase I recently decided to come between a couple, to be a temptress. And in the fall out, I fell in love. Now I am waiting in the shadows for the outcome I wished for, but it wont happen. It has occurred to me that I am extremely lonely.

An open letter which, I hope, you one day find. 

I am writing you a letter than I will never send, much like the letter I wrote six years ago. I penned that during my last night in Brighton and sealed it with hope before placing it in my holdall, but when we met in Victoria, I couldn't let go of it, do you recall? I guess not.

I still carry a flame for you. During my mostly unsettling times you have been there, we talked a lot through my first year of university and I remember sending you a text asking, part in jest, if you would take my hand. After a few weeks of flirtation you simply disappeared. A year later, I walked with my friend and then confidant, along the beaches of East Devon, and whilst staring wishfully at the crashing waves on the soft clay rock, I recall the words “If asked I would drop everything to be with him in London” falling out of my mouth.

This happened, in part, after Rome, when I stayed with you.  I could have easily not returned to my studies, but rationale (as always seems to be the case) won, and for that I guess I will always be sorry.

During our Italian Holiday we were like lovers, and there is not a point in my life where I recall being so close to someone. Although Rome wasn't without its moments, I came back with a terrible holiday hangover. Do you recall I cried on our last night? For several weeks following our adventure I was able to bring happiness by recalling our trip. In an intimate encounter I withdrew after stating that you are the only person who I knew who could make me truly happy. I fear now that this time has passed.

When we met on those steps in Victoria station, on that oddly mild November in 2007, I knew there was something. Until recently I still kept tickets, photographs, found objects from that day, and quite often replay it, et al., in my head. Perhaps this is one of my major downfalls, as I increasingly imprison myself.

As the summer of 2011 faded, you told me you had met someone and preceding this, that you had kissed someone. I pressed the self destruct button. That night I slept with whomever I could find, and for several months after, I went from bed to bed.

Come September you stayed with me at my parent’s house in Devon and every night I cried myself to sleep knowing that you were only a few rooms away, the room that I grew up in, and that I couldn't have you.  During my trips to London I would often tell you how I “didn’t want to go back” to where ever it was I was heading; University, Devon, Bristol.  I was “so stressed”. But realistically, it was because nothing could have been as settling as being with you, even through our arguments, and even with the torture of knowing that you were someone else’s – although I have know that this has always been the case, yet for some reason it bothered me more this time.

When I met Richard, I was extremely jealous. I still am. When I meet your friends, I am jealous not because they are with you, but because they know a part of you that I don’t.  It seems all I really know is how to annoy you, and you I.

At times, and usually over the most trivial things, a hurricane spins in my chest, and my emotions boil over. This I guess is an example of that. I can pretend to be your best friend and wait for you in the hope that you might change your mind, another year, another six years, twenty, a life time. But I am hoping that by writing this, these feelings will somehow magically melt away and disappear leaving only sweet memories.

I have never met anyone, with whom I am as deeply infatuated with, in love with, and now I am calling to question how much of this is a product of my perception.

I moved to London with hopes and dreams that so many bring. Stability, employment, happiness and even a love of the mundane. I am here, not to better myself, but to find myself and now I'm wearing thin. I have come to realise, that no matter what I do, what I have, who I have, I will never have enough for you. I am in love with you; I would die by your hand. But the same cannot be said about you for I. 

It was during one of those transitional periods, between the seasons, those late summer months, with the weakened sun still warm enough to lounge. It was around that time, between seasons, that I found myself around my home town.  

During my earlier years, at eighteen perhaps, these months, August, September, were always held as golden months. It was customary in our small town to lie on the beaches drinking in the last of the summer waiting for the end of era beach parties. One, or two, of these parties had been affectionately named The Last Supper and were, by and large, massively over organised and anticlimactic. Still it was the atmosphere that we all came for not the company.

A fire was often lit in the far corner of the bay where the sea had calved a semi-open grotto from the soft clay rock. Glowing embers would fly into faces and ash would spatter clothes and sun glasses, as the gentle sea winds would take the flailing flames up into the empty dust of the summer nights. The drum of conversation always present to compliment the American pop-punk, and full of passion and prospect, the great unknown,  laugher, life adventures, tales of travels yet to be arranged. The heat would lift the smell of smoke and hops through the air as if fuelling our dreams and what they would come.  

There were often dreams mentioned, or stories told, that I was eager to follow and indeed the protagonists.  But since living them and with the passing of time it was clear that these dreams where just that, and that gathering like those we had could not exist in the present. 

And I guess it's not really appropriate to call this A Bristol Novella.

At Embankment I make a right and then a right and a final right, lifting the dead weight of my legs, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27. Does the top step count. A question I always ask. And I'm standing on the bridge, looking at the lights and the polluted sky, and the stark, washed out, white dome of St Paul's. The moon kissed boats, bottles, buildings, half crescent faces of tourists. I'm listening to a Japanese man, who cant be more than 45, command his girlfriend - wife?- how to frame a photograph, and someone talks at me and a camera is held to my face, and I'm just staring, trying to blot out the noise, hands glued to my side.

And in the cool night air I just walk, the chill waking me with the smell of cinnamon, stake alcohol, piss. And I'm on South bank and ironically, I don't have an destination and I just walk, staring into the night.

At a taxi cab, blue, three months previous, the driver loads three bags; one a red holdall, into the boot. "23 degrees" a interaction I choose to ignore.

As the cab pulls away, over the raised drains and various characteristics of the hot summer tarmac the Wills Memorial building, framed by the cab window, starts to shrink and ripple as heat from the pavement distorts the image. Adele Someone Like You plays, clichéd, over the radio, and I push the headphones of my iPhone into my ears, and stare blankly through the cool glass, the shadow, the shop fronts, through buildings and people, and the floor starts to distort and melt, and it all melts, and my eyes roll and shut as I grab the jesus-handle and a calm surgical white rushed through me, and I feel free.

Sandstone tile encased generic yet, high spec, pod. Amongst the under sink crap: several back dated copies of Men's Health, ionic fluid and a selection of prescribed, and some self-prescribed meds.

An alcove caved into the mirror above the sink allowed for the careful positioning of a small MP3 player, or iPhone. And for a while, a week...perhaps three, I would listen to Placebo's cover of Kate Bush's classic: Running Up that Hill. Whilst in the shower I would turn the temperature to core, thirty seven degrees, and then to thirty nine, and I would add two degrees for every chorus. This would sometimes continue for fifteen or twenty minutes, and repeat with each increment of the song.

I'd often imagine falling, breaking teeth on the harsh floor. Blood mixing with water, swirling, running in the channels carved between the tiles, before sinking into the gridded drain. I took the cover off now and then. I would often lay on the floor, staring into the source of water, from which a thick steam would disperse and fill the room, condensing on glass and wall. And in the fogged mirror I would write myself messages: "I'll be yours". "I'm not having any fun". And wipe them away to reveal bloodshot, tearful eyes staring into at mine.

I will always question my sanity, and I guess thats healthy; as is there are always flames I will carry for people and places I will remember for the seasons. There will always be events I call to question because of actions, reactions, periods of time where I doubt my ability to cope. The winter in Berlin, the argument in Jüdischen Museums. A sabbatical in Rome, the touch of your skin, the play of shadow from overhead canopy, the bank of the Tiber.

The glazed eyes of Churchill stare across the room in the bedroom in which I grew up in, neighbouring the bust of Thatcher and other trinkets, blanketed in dust, and stored here; out of site of the main dinning room, and the entertaining spaces below. A pile of magazines, National Geographical, Architects Journal, abut my faithful desk. The eyes of Frank Lloyd Wright bleakly staring at toward and through the Venetian blinds the divide between the bleak outside and the bleak within.

A blinking light calculates the time on the Bose, and resumes - The Devil and God are Raging Inside of Me - and its been four years since this track has played, and the line "What did you do those three days you were gone" skips and plays continuously. And like Jesse I often believe I'm missing out, and fear my blight is to sly to hold back all my dark.

Outside the rain puts an end to what we've know of the English summer, and this is the fourth consecutive day. During my travel, I would often sit at a darkening window, shadows and lights flailing outside, staring at the face in the glass, whose eyes I once knew. And one simple phone call bought me here, and I wonder how long it will take to tare me away.

It's somewhere between 0145 and 0212 and I am cursing around the streets of the inner city, watching drunk couples stumble in and out of bars and clubs, men with blood on their shirts, and the classic short skirt cellulite girls on the corner of kebab shops. And I'm thinking when did it all get so fucked up.

At the 24/7, where we used to by straights for reformation into joints, I buy a bottle of vodka (home brand) and a mints, and solely walk from the service hatch to my pavement mounted car, unscrewing the tinny cap and pushing the mints into the liquid.

City and Colour, Sometimes, has been on repeat for 21 days, and is my cruise music of choice. Dallas has a way of talking directly at you, whilst egotistically singing about himself, and even though the music is evidently about a type of love that I have never felt, I imagine that I have, that I am.

The lights wash over the City from the observatory streaking an amber stain into the midnight sky, the neon floodlights of the Cumberland basin bouncing reflections on to the cliff edge. And Dallas is singing of blank stares and empty threats, the acoustics enhanced by the solid gorge as the car sits embankment above, headlights spilling over the scene. And I'm swigging on the vodka, and my watering eyes cause the lights to blur, and I'm thinking of all the people who keep calling me now we aren't at university, all that nostalgic bullshit about how "we should keep in touch" and how many times I'm going to have to click "reject", and how I promised to myself that I'd have left by now, be on some beach somewhere near my home town, some fishing village, and why I'm still here when clearly there are better things to be had.

And really I guess I listen to Sometimes to remind me of the City that I left behind, and the people that I left behind when I decided to move to Bristol, on the basis that I'd be with friends, many of whom I no longer speak to. And I guess this feeling is regret mixed with anxiety and anticipation, and I imagine where five years previous and then five ahead. The vast differences spread before me like a ocean. And I think of all the situations which I now regret, and all the people I have met, or haven't met, and all the people I have slept with, and how I could have had it all, and didn't want it. And all the people I've doubled crossed, or strung along. And I take the scalpel blade that I've been thumbing from my pocket and carve the words "Disappear Here" over the name, on the brass plaque on the bench beneath which inscribed, rather aptly, 2012.

These two words, a motto of mine, a summary of the feelings I have felt for this city a city in which I expected to make no lasting acquaintances. And as I finger the fresh edit I contemplate playing Disappear Here - a game which evolved from my unique skill to ditch unfavourables in nightclubs - and I think I am finally ready, four weeks later than planned.

nothing good ever comes to the man that stands still

In the sixty three days that I have been absent, inspiration has come and gone and there is very little to fill time in this city. The streets and the buildings are wearing very much thin. And the majority of my days are spent nostalgically trying to recreate moment in which I felt...what one must only describe as hopeless, and drunk.

I pondered for a period of time if office work, as described by London Preppy, was mundane as he eluded, and in truth, it is. But I have come to appreciate the mundaneness of every day living. My life very much runs around my new professional routine. And in the corner shop, I am often mistaken for the opposite of which ever personality I am portraying; the drunk, the suit or the prep.

I lived life, not long ago, very much as a prostitute. Not whoring myself for money (which in hindsight may have been a better idea) but for attention, and the connection. But it is through this that I have realised myself, and have very much secured my position in the Clifton Elite, acquainted with businessmen, waiters and barmen. They say there is no such thing as a free lunch, but I beg to differ.

Had you have asked me sixty two days ago where I would be on the first of June 2012, and the answer would have been anywhere but here. In a way, it still is. However I have grown to realise that professional interests, can quickly overtake personal. And this, like many of us I assume, is something I already grow to regret. There was a time, four years ago, that I promised to leave this city, if only asked by a certain someone, but realistically, real life got in the way.

I have eight boxes on the living room floor, and no pictures on the walls.

On the balcony which hangs from the Georgian façade of my quarter-of-a-million Clifton crash pad I realise that, in the four years I have lived here, so has this bay tree. Each winter it is covered in a thick later of white. And around this time of year, it emerges, unscathed. On the work surface of my desk which now faces the office across the road (The blonde woman there, who sits on Facebook all day, enjoys watching me dress, drink and dance) is: a note with the lists of academic references, scrawled words I can no longer comprehend; a original copy of Newer Sarum 1949, and two books pending review. And I guess what I am trying to say is, Hey. Once this is over, I am all over this.

Do you remember when we drove along Kingsway A259, and we listened to Casey's Song, and the windows where covered in condensation, and the sat nav spoke French. And how we sat in your car for an hour or so, reading and rereading contracts. And the traffic lights on the highstreet by the furniture store, and something with the name Sun?

I have often felt the need to write without the guise of a character, as myself. A young man in his twenties, with two degrees (pending). Perhaps one of the reasons that I have not done this is that so much of myself goes into ABristolNovella anyway, the two are the same - or were.

However I'm starting to feel we are drifting apart, and as my time in Bristol draws to an end, and I begin to slowly withdraw from my Bristolian life, there are so many things I want to document, which I feel like I can no longer do whilst I'm (pretending to be) a preppy stuck up twat. So many things that I want to record, for myself, and what has happened in the four years since I moved here.

And this is something that might not take off, maybe just writing this is enough for me to tell you, I'm not a total dick head.

You're standing over the hob when I walk in. And I put my arms around your waist and pull you into me, your neck against my lips and kiss you

At 1923 I'm dropped at a service station somewhere between junction 27 and junction 17 of the M5.

Who still reads this?

So I haven't been around for ages, but that's what I do. I drop in and out of peoples lives, and as far as I'm concerned that's what everyone does, I'm just more open about it. Except it usually only works if you have a few stable permanents - I no longer have this.