'What the hell did I just do?'

Excuse the cliche, but I wonder how much in gold I'd be worth if I had a nugget for every cock-up, or imagined cock-up, I'd managed through my life without having died yet. I would estimate enough to not end up where I bloody started nearly twenty years later. The most irritating of cliches or memes or inspirational quotes is 'life is about the journey, not the destination'. I beg to differ, because if I ended up where I started nearly twenty years ago, what does it mean for me? I'm Benjamin sodding Button? What... sucking on a tit before I end up being hurled back into the womb? I'll try not to be negative - it could, after all, be something to look forward to.

I'm currently quarantined above the pub I used to work in eighteen years ago: before child, before nearly getting married four times, before the 'I need to go to university and get my act together', before I made it and lost it in the music industry, before I realised that high heels would never be my friend, and before I got to know disappointment on a first name basis. The only thing that connects the me now to the me then (especially during lock down) is listening to music imagining who I'd meet that would rock my world and going for walks listening to the polyphony of birds and whistling trees, as the soundtrack of my secluded fantasy. There was, and is again, a feeling that things could happen, a new start, a new energy of wonder at what could be.

Cue record scratching to a halt. Typically, when my brain is back in the room, I remind myself of the years passed, weight gained, opportunities lost, money wasted, alcohol consumed, and the 'loves' dropped, ghosted, or escaped. I will now take the time to clock-in (and be counted), own up (to my end), get down (from my galloping high horse), wake up (from my denial) and square it away - once and for all. If not, I'd be curled up in the womb as ignorant as I was the first time I was there.

........

This is an introduction to some nutty little realisations of where my time has gone: wasting it worrying about everything I said, everything I did, and everything I didn't do, taking my pride, so-called zest for life, love of people, to the toilet and my sense of humour with it. I will begin my account of fantastical failures with the most recent tale of not making it down the aisle (for the fourth time) and work my way backwards. I just hope that husband-to-never-be number five doesn't read it.