8:30pm on a Saturday and I’m complaining about the noise, turning down invitations because I’ve already taken my makeup off, dismaying over my tiredness as I promised to add another tick to my yearlong to-watch list. I complain a lot lately. I complain about crowds, offices, Instagram stories, busy brunch places. I stress about bookings and calendar dates, can’t keep up with the logistics of my life being stretched. Sometimes it feels like that medieval stretch torture, strapped to the rack of the month and they’re saying you will be taller! You will go out and be busy, have plans, get new clothes, keep up keep up keep up. With each bone crack I have to celebrate or it’ll make the new one seem worse, everything is about easing into to.

Life peels further from my imagination and I complain about that too. My dedicated time for rose tinting is squeezed and things are starting to slip through the cracks. I’ve spent all year missing uni, teasing myself with masters prospectuses, flipping through photos of my 18 year old self who now seems to me like the most social person ever, my peak. But 8:30pm on a Saturday in 2021 is cutting a bit close to 2017’s Saturday 8:30pms - ripping outfit after outfit from my body, getting hotter and hotter in my bedroom with music below, analysing the drink I made and uber costs and ease of getting home, selling my ticket and deciding to not go.

I could cancel on my best friends then if I had 50 minutes to falter. But the 18-year-old anxious flake looks like gentle when you’re in your 20s. Now it screams early retirement and I stress mostly about never getting it back as everyone dives in with such ease. Drunk girls are singing Valerie in the bar across the road, stumbling footsteps have returned to my weekend soundtrack – on Thursday the anxiety I got from 4 pints made me consider resigning myself sober.

Suddenly headachey and old, I keep looking at club pictures of my younger self and wondering if I’ll ever have fun in that body moving, chaotic way again. Surely we’ve all forgotten to dance? Or have we splintered off into those that threw themselves living room lockdown parties and those that didn’t? How long will it be until my approach to dancing can return? Liking to be the perfect level of unexpectedly drunk and dressed just casual enough that your presence looks just as spontaneous as you feel when you decided to go to a club at 1am. I barely remember 1am as anything more than a time to realise you’ve stayed up too late watching tiktok. 2am, 3am, even 4am are lost to me now. Should I be training for their return?

From the noise outside, I feel like I missed the reunion. Reacquainted with art gallery mornings, beer garden afternoons, café work days – It’s Saturday nights I can’t pry from the hands of my lockdown habits, clutching hard as the wheels turn and my bones stretch further. A more resilient person wouldn’t care, look down from the balcony with superiority as prawns cook and the 26^th film of the year starts.  But everything tells me I got old without realising, and everyone seems to be snapping back while I’m study wrinkles, wondering when I’ll get the chance to be 23 or if 23 is too late when 21 and 22 were sacrificed.

Far beyond clubs and bars, I complain a lot about people’s holidays, one way I can use the year’s moral compass as a wall between myself and plans. I turned FOMO into tuts as I add to the mental list of places to go, places I should’ve been, ways everyone is better than me. I’d like to go to Paris and wander round Versailles in a big dress. I want to go to every museum in Berlin, ride a bike in Copenhagen or Stockholm or Amsterdam, eat food in Italy. All these longings I’ve been putting off for a lot longer than a year, always waiting for something to say go as I was busy interning or working or stressing about working. It’s nice having a pandemic to blunt my own disappointments over my lack of travel, totally unable to empathise with people mourning the loss of their yearly holiday, but somehow knowing if travel opened up restriction free tomorrow, I’d probably still not go. I can’t figure out what I’m stalling for, but know the world’s pause was a comfort to me. It felt like a year to play catch up when I felt incessantly behind in big goal checkpoints. I relaunched a magazine, I started a newsletter, I wrote music articles weekly, I watched film after film, I performed poems, but my to-do list is long and the play button has been pressed. How am I supposed to go on holiday when I’m still writing my lockdown novel?

The rack is stretching me and I’m pushing back like it’s a leg press, like my strength alone could stop it. If I cut off my peripheral, I can be okay. Walk my path to and from where I want to go, figure out times when my favourite places are quietest and go, make my own leaps when I book tickets, take trains, make plans. But Saturday nights stay stubborn, too attacked by outside, too alien with the reluctance to make any plans to feel the empty space of no curfews. I am too old and too tired, affirming it with each early night and wondering when it will stop being true. I isolate myself in the house I built against FOMO, but they built a bar right outside. And when will it all come back?

I tried making a list, drafting a blog of ways to get your mojo back.

1.  Buy a new perfume but have no one be close enough to compliment it. Start doubting if it’s nice, because no one has said it is, with a subtly that won't travel 2 metres.
2.  Experiment with makeup. Do your eyeliner different on a day you don’t go out, worry too much to recreate it for the pub.
3. Go out to get yourself some new clothes. Buy nothing because you can’t try it on, fight a battle in every shop between the size you probably are and the size your brain thinks you are because you slacked on your hula hooping for a week.
4.  Get your fringe trimmed. Wake up at 7am and worry about your cool value in the world as everyone experiments with colour and you’ll never get the confidence to bleach your eyebrows.

I want to feel hot and cool, I got the memo that post-lockdown we were all glowing up, but it ended without me realising. I ask again, when will it come back? Starring at people from my balcony, head too busy creating a timed schedule for my movie night to even notice the tug to go out, the tug that would pull me into tiny tops in a moments notice and run out the door two years ago. Not ready to retire and not ready to go out, I'm lying in wait for some mental easing where spontaneity will take over the night shift from cosiness and 2am will be alive again. 

On days it eases and I let myself be excited rather than scared, I sit in a café with my friends. They talk about fake vaccine passports and people  who are playing the system to get to Portugal for an all-inclusive. I go home resigned to staying there for another year, turn down the evenings invitations, make a coffee and apply eye cream.

I’m starting to realise I like the idea of shopping far more than the real thing. Lately, I’ve been losing hours to the ASOS app, scrolling and tapping the little heart on anything that catches my eye, adding it to my thousands of lost likes that for a brief moment I thought might make it to the bag. Sometimes they do; I teased those gingham trousers, brought them so close to the edge with my finger hovering over the buy button. They heard me inhale, getting closer and closer… only to close the app and give in. The blue balls of the browser, nothing is satisfying me lately.

It’s my own fault really, I know I need to stop treating shopping apps like they’re Pinterest, but I like the power. While Pinterest teases me with outfits in outdoor spaces, girls in beautiful trousers sat on uncomfortable café seats or taking power stances in galleries, ASOS offers me a big question mark that is still so appealing in its cruelty. I browse and try to dream up days to come, racking my brain for places I used to go and things we as humans used to do; trying to find the appropriate skirt to wear to the party called life where the invite has no date and no location. But it makes inspiration run dry pretty quick when all these things feel too nice for my living room. They deserve better, we would only disappoint each other.

My last victim stares at me as I write this, a flash of denim hanging limp out of my wardrobe. It turns out, if you buy a fancy dress and only wear it once to drink alone in the kitchen on your birthday, it’ll lose its sparkle. I wrote about it back in August, the way my new House of Sunny dream dress felt trapped in that ‘new-outfit-insecurity feeling’, and as it transpires that feeling is only stage one, succeeded by the avoidance phase, then an overwhelming sense of ‘why the fuck do I own this?’, and then finally acceptance. I put the dress on Depop, it spends all day shooting cutting glances at me.

But it just felt so unfulfilled, months later when all my hopes of meals out and occasions were still empty, the dress felt odd. Stuck in the middle between the reality we’re living and the reality we normally know, so many of my clothes and all the ones left unbought in my ASOS list, lack any context. New clothes still feel coded with the idea of new places, usually always tied to the concrete image of a particular day or plan, and each time when my parcel can’t deliver me that, their contents start to look like my disappointment. The knee-high boots that only ever shuffled down the road and back look stupid in their hope of a party, a new vintage handbag hangs like a relic of a past life that turned out to be fake all along. Clothes have always been so tightly tied to memories for me with my favourite pieces almost always being worn on a particularly good day. So at a time when there are no memories to be made, nothing feels all that special.

The only thing that feels contextualised and right at the moment is loungewear and soft cardigans. But I hate how joggers make me look and another piece of knitwear would be one too many, and god I miss slipping into something uncomfortable.  I miss tiny tight skirts and feeling them dig into my tummy when I sit down at a bar, I miss feeling my heels hurt, I miss wearing layers of jewellery and not being bothered by it clicking together or making my collarbone cold, I miss buying something daring last minute for an event and wearing it before I have a chance to second guess myself. I think mostly I miss buying things with a guarantee that I’ll be seen somewhere in them, a vain thing to long for but I miss my purchases being perceived.

But still, my fingers itch towards the apps, adding more things to the list of unfulfilled wants. I want floral trousers worn in spring outside a coffee shop. I want heeled loafers that click on wooden pub floors in the middle of the day on a weekend. I want star print tights that rip midway through a night out and I won’t care. I want a fully pink outfit with a fluffy jumper that feels soft and comforting on the train somewhere new. But ASOS doesn’t offer those deals, so I just won’t buy it.

I’ve been sat with my fantasies saying goodbye for a while. I fear I might not see them again, at least not the same. The next meeting they’ll be doubled over, suddenly old like a grandparent you haven’t seen in a while, and I’ve been avoiding that too. Time passing in new groans when they stand up, and this reclusiveness isn’t compatible with shouting down the phone. Now I cringe at anything that reminds me I’m, probably because to be alive is to have lost all this, each night spent praying to be in some timeless dream, put to sleep for the duration and I’ll wake up in march; meet my fantasies for coffee all crammed round one table and we all still look twenty-one.

But on inspection day two hundred and something, mirror hour one thousand at least, I’ve found a wrinkle. Like the first grey hair of a coma patient, I’m laying to rest things that haven’t opened their eyes for months.

Old lists laugh in the hospital machine beeping, always seems like they’re becoming quicker. I see myself in slow-mo running towards my lifeless body as a protest parade sprints past, five politicians run 100m in 5 seconds, dizzy with the turning of the ground below me, the beeps go on and on, I’m running and I can’t get there but never flat line, just running

                                            and running

                  and running and

I’m saying goodbye to my fantasies while the world tells me not to be sad; optimism says the body will still be there it’s only the colour that will be missing.

Sunday coffee will be starved till it’s shut down, Paris’ palaces suddenly dusty and vulgar again, New York won’t sing Patti’s songs with an unwanted baby in its arms or blood on a backroad. Can’t shake the sense that all my dreams are going to come back to me haggard and different, and I won’t want to look them in the eye; can’t make conversation with a kind confrontation of how the year has robbed us of itself. Calendars all full of arrows, slipping through months of snakes and ladders, walking through milestones like ghosts.

After the parting I sit for a while pulling at the loose threads of myself, figuring out which ones are essential and which ones I can’t fix anymore.