everyone always says if something is worrying them that 'it's not like it's all i think about, but it's always there in the back of my mind, y'know?'. well, i don't know about you, but i don't have the capacity to suffer in this way - i can only think about one thing at a time. there's no back or front of my mind, it's like the discussion is never opened to the floor, so there's this constant battle going on to muscle onto the speaker's platform. for instance at the moment i'm trying to get over this girl, formerly the It girl but now consigned to the this's and thats - as am i - but still as firmly It in my head as ever. the point is i'm not permanently unhappy by any means - i can go as far as to be blissfully content lying in grassy sunlight chatting with casual acquaintances about the heads of state we'd most like to kill and fatwas, or twilit walks in the wood indulging in absence of thought. unfortunately happiness' hold on the lectern is weak, and the slightest thing can remind me of It girl, and the fact that she's being an It girl somewhere else, for a different guy. slight as It girl was, she left lumbering great front-row rugby player memories behind her which hold sway over my conference hall with very little difficulty, thumping me in the face with a whiff of perfume in the street. To walk into the city centre on a saturday is to be the ball at the put-in, bouncing from one painful studded encounter to the next. i'll suddenly find myself walking behind some girl in a sari skirt who walks with an identical sway of the hips to It girl, and that's it, the wind's knocked out of me. next minute i'm standing side by side with the same beautiful nightmare of multi-dyed shoulder-length hair at a cd rack, so i rush away from the pseudo-It girl with the hair i've kissed a thousand times, only to find that i'm crossing the road towards a gorgeous girl with the same sumptuous mobile fruit of a mouth, inviting me to take a nibble, and all i can think of are her perfect red lips drawing on a cigarette, eyes dancing at me through the smoke. i've got it bad basically. i won't say i'm never like this over girls, because i always am, but it's no good knowing that this isn't going to last forever, when i also know that it is. contradictions sit well in my head, because i only ever consider each side separately, i don't have room to see the impossibility. god, she's everywhere i go! the real shock though came when i actually bumped into the genuine real her on my way to work. she was surprised but smiled, said Hi, shifted her bag on her shoulder and was gone. i was so entirely unprepared that my heart leapt into overdrive, and the sudden rush of adrenalin sent me stumbling to the floor. lying on the pavement watching the sky and oh-so-tall business people going past with no regard for the prostrate figure on the floor, i recoiled further and further from that smile, saying so much about her feelings for me, or lack of. how can she not realise how patently ridiculous it is for her to be with anyone else? every feeling ounce of my body aches with a stupid need to just have her whisper in my ear. most of all i want to sleep with her. not sex - if i need that i can just jack off for fucks sake, sexual urges are simple - i need that closeness that settles deeper every second that you spend asleep in another's arms. i realise that all i want is to feel loved, and that i'm just running to the obvious place i can find it, but there's nothing i can do. the headspace i'm living in is very familiar to me. reality and delusion, fantasy and hunger. i'm stuck here hurting myself, phoning up the complaints line, passed from department to department, kept on hold, going crazy, until eventually a voice delivers the final blow. you really have no rights or recourse here. what made you think you were special? i find your story hard to believe. it certainly appears largely made-up. how much of this is actually reality, and how much was just your busy little mind working away? i doubt any of it ever happened at all. i doubt this ever occurred, did it.