Telling you things even I don't know

It's been a day. Or two days. I'm not sure.
I've been wanting to tell this story for a while.
And I think today's the day.



When I was 8 I lived in Sweden for a year. I lived with my brothers and my father and a nanny. Or au-pair as you call them these days. My mother wasn't there, she was too preoccupied with her bars and lesbians. My next door neighboar, a selfish fat prat, used to steal my videos and my playdoh. It's okay though, because at night I would water the streets so her little chalk pokemon would be washed away.

Now this is not meant to be a "woe is me" story, and indeed it's not, because I don't regret a second.

My nanny was an alcoholic. She called herself Laura and had real snickers in her hair. She gave me a bath once and told me about periods, and that was the only time anyone had mentioned it to me until the day I got mine. After St Patrick's day she'd sleep on the sofa, with her beer-belly hanging off and her snickers all tangled up, one leg on the floor and tell me to please darling, get me some ciggies from your father won't you? and I do. When I came back she was on the floor, this time with one leg still on the sofa. Sometimes she'd forget to take us to school, my brothers and me. We would get to the British International Primary School of Stockholm at 11am and go home at 6pm. Then one day I got home and she wasn't there. She was never there again.

My dear brother, silly little thing, glued chairs. He pressed pencils in there and spread glue with a glue stick all over it. He wrote his name on them, and no one could sit on his chair. The one with his name on it. He ran into the garden and shat on the tulips. He cut the hair off my barbies and flushed them down the toilet, which is okay because I preferred crawling in the forest with snails and things, pretending to be whatever I wanted to be right then and there. He watched Lion King over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over. Until the tape broke.

When I was 8 I had my first crush. His name was Alexander, and he was British. He was a little nerd like me, very interested in videogames. I decided to tell him, and I wrote it in the ground. He ran away, and I've never been able to tell anyone since.

At school we also had the best market system. We had tables, and things for sale. Real nice things too, like Pokemon cards, necklaces, games, everything a kid wants. But the best thing of all- the currency was peach and plum stones. I never had any, I never got peaches or plums and the ones in the schoolyard were gone by the time I got to school (which was around 11am, as I said before) so I never got to buy anything, but I was amazed nonetheless at the way it worked. And it worked. We (or they, rather) traded, bought, sold, negotiated, bargained, argued and compromised. Peach stones were worth more than plum stones, and dirty stones were worth less than clean ones. I wish that still worked.

Funny how all I remember is the autumn. I remember gold and red, yellow and brown. I remember the bad nanny, vodka bottles, balloons and rotting wood, glue sticks and peach stones and powerpuff girls and Harry Potter. I remember onions and Dinosaurier and playdoh sticks and cheesy gift CDs from Burger King. And then I don't remember.
Then I don't remember anything at all.



But none of it matters. None of this matters anymore. Because I'm not 8, and I'm not in Sweden and I can't do what I want to do. Things don't work like that. Like someone said to me today, nothing matters when you're sober. It's all whatever.