No milk today

I am sitting here at my kitchen table. As usual here in England, it is raining. For the first time in a long time, the weather corresponds to my mood. Yesterday evening, my love (I still call her that - I still love her) decided to leave me. She packed her bags and left. Just like that. She left the kingdom where she had reigned as queen, and she left me behind. So now I sit here, staring out at the rain, thinking of the sodden note outside my door - No milk today. The empty bottle from yesterday is standing lonely beside it. The people who pass my nondescript door don't know the significance of this little note - it seems a common enough sight. How could they know that this message means the end of my all hopes and dreams? How could they know how good things were only yesterday, and how much everything has changed?

We had wonderful parties, dancing through the night. Everyone was  happy, and I was probably the happiest of them all. As the music played, we danced faster and faster, swirling in each other's arms. We looked into each other's eyes, and we could both feel the spark becoming a flame. From that our romance just escalated. The fire burned higher and higher, fueled by the milk she was constantly drinking. She had no good explanation of this peculiar behaviour - she just said that she liked it. And I loved kissing away her milky mustache, so I didn't complain.

Now, I can't help but think of her when I see a milk bottle. And all that is left is this place, dark, empty, and lonely. I sit behind the lace curtains of the kitchen in my terraced house and peek out into the awful street outside. But this horrible, dark, lonely place becomes a shrine when I think about my love. It reminds me of the things we did together, and I remember my love for her. My little terraced house is just a two up two down, but still it can rise so high and fall so hard.

So, milkman, I will have no milk today - my love has gone away. The empty bottle on my doorstep is a symbol of the dawn after the endless party-night. Of waking up to reality after the fairytale dream world of the night. All that is left is this dark and lonely place where I sit staring out at the rain, and will probably be doing that for quite a while.

This is my interpretation of the song No Milk Today by Herman's Hermits. I have taken liberties with the story line, and this is strictly my interpretation. I do not pretend to know the true meaning of the song. Listen to the song below.

Success!

For those of you who appreciate memes

I did it! I read fifty (yes actually 50) books this year! I planned for this to happen, of course, but I am kind of amazed that it did anyway. I'm not huge on self-confidence, as you can probably guess.

So now that I have read all these books, and I also have a lot of books, I have been thinking about what I should do with all these books. I mean, put them in a bookshelf, obviously, but how? A lot is too relative, so I tell you what, I'm going to count all the books in my bookshelf here (The books that are not notebooks, reference, or school related. Basically the books designed for cover to cover reading) (I have more books, but they're not here). Just hold on for a second...

112. So then I, as the sorting and collecting kind of person that I am, unavoidably start thinking about how to sort and organise all these books. For as long as I can remember owning more than one shelf (80 cm long) full of books, I have been organising them alphabetically by the author's last name, like a library. But there are so many ways to organise books!

My books, sorted by colour. Isn't it pretty?

After I moved here, I decided to try a new way that I had seen on (wait for it...) the internet. I sorted my books into two categories - series and singles - and sorted the singles by colour. Not very systematic, I know, but I don't have that many books, so I can find the book anyway. The series then followed, in the order I preferred relative to the size of the bookshelf and the colour scheme. I am pleased with this sorting, and I also find it aesthetically pleasing (I know - I'm such a girl).

But there are many alternatives to these two ways of sorting books. I could organise them by height, or number of pages, or how well I liked the book, or publication year, or genre, or themes, or any other criteria you could possibly think of. I think the most fun would be to have a system that only you can understand. For example, you could group them according to what they meant to you, whether they (in your head) relate to each other in any way (across the usual boundaries) or just your personal preference.

Advent has just started, and there is snow on the ground and a calendar waiting for me in the corner. So I will go now, and open today's package. I hope your December has been nice so far.

Books read: 50
Pages read: 14616

Homesick

So I'll lose some sales

and my boss won't be happy,

but there's only one thing on my mind.

Searching boxes underneath the counter

on a chance that on a tape I'd find

a song for

someone who needs somewhere

to long for.

Homesick

cause I no longer know

where home is.

from "Homesick" by Kings of Convenience

Nowadays I often wonder what it is that makes a place a home. Is it the memories? The people? The books in the bookshelves? The pictures on the walls? The walls who have heard and seen so much? Or maybe the cheesy one - home is where the heart is?

My childhood home has recently been sold, my grandparents' house will soon be sold and pulled down, and I have moved away. Sometimes, when I think about it, I feel that I don't have a physical anchor in the world. Like a place which I can come back to and which doesn't change too much. But, I guess, that is too much to ask of life. I am a control freak. I don't particularly like change, to put it that way. I usually stick to activities, people and places. But life is always in motion, and change is natural. I'm not saying that the change itself is necessarily natural, but the fact that things change is thoroughly natural.

Geranium bohemicum
Literally grows from tragedy

Today, in the biology lecture, we learnt about succession in nature. The directional change of an area's environment, for example a forest growing back after a fire. Change happens in a certain direction until it reaches a final or equilibrium state. But even then, it fluctuates. So change is extremely normal everywhere. Even disturbances such as flooding or forest fire are normal. If the equivalent happened in our lives, we would say it was a disaster or a catastrophe or tragic, but some organisms rely on these disasters to survive. Maybe I and many others could learn from this. We could choose to focus on the good things that spring from the hard times and tragedies, like the beautiful geranium 'Orchid Blue', which has seeds that only flower after a forest fire (or high temperatures). It literally grows from disaster. So instead of being sad about the recent fire, we can marvel at the beauty that sprouts after tragedy has struck.

Change is inevitable and natural. And as someone once said - it's not about how you are, but about how you take it (it sounds better in Norwegian...I'm not that good at translating). And in a way, all our lives are built around change and changes. We grow up, we become older, we experience new things, we change in response to other people, and other people change in response to us. We live in a dynamic world, but still some of us (for example me) manage to get stuck in a fantasy that stability is the most natural thing and change is something strange and something to be feared. I think a good idea is to meet the change and be proactive when approaching it, instead of hiding in the shadows and wishing it would go away. And oh, how I wish I would follow my own advice.

Books read: 45

Pages read: 13110