12pm
It might be a yellow dress day, or it could be a tomboy day; either way, the sun is shining and I'm sitting in the garden with a mug of coffee, the cat basking at my feet. Today's clearly mapped out and organised, stretching out in front of me like a perfectly drawn grid, but it would be so easy to lose another day to decadent lethargy, lying around in the backyard with books and lemonade and the beautiful boy.

1.30pm
I'm in Fisher Library, Level 8. It's cool and quiet, and the air is thick with the smell of age and dust. Standing amongst the 895's in a puddle of light spilling in from the glorious day outside, I am momentarily distracted from the procession of call numbers by the view of the roof and treetops outside. I press my forehead against the warm glass, I watch processions of ant-sized students on the ground below. I think only briefly of falling. A lecturer of mine once told me that in 'her day', kids used to steal books by throwing them out of the windows of the research library, then collecting them later. The locked-shut windows eventually put a stop to this, but they don't stop me from imagining the sound that a book would make if it were to hit the ground from 8 floors up, scattering surprised students and raising cartoonish clouds of dust.

Today I became a solo lease-holder, which is something of a milestone in my relatively short existence. It's exciting and terrifying. I had planned to celebrate afterwards with a custard tart at Sweet Belem, but discovered that it's closed until the 22nd August, so I went to a cafe around the corner to get a takeaway (I ran out of time to make coffee this morning). There was a lady standing behind the counter making some sort of ricotta-type cheese. I've never seen anyone make cheese before; she was straining it through a plastic seive. She looked up and caught me staring, and smiled at me, and I smiled back. People seem friendlier in Petersham. Outside the chemist's shop on the corner of Audley St and New Canterbury Rd, I was complimented by a stranger, a lady wheeling a pram.

On the station, waiting for the train to uni, there were several men in orange vests taking measurements and arguing amongst themselves. I think Petersham station might be getting a new ticket machine, and they were trying to work out where to put it. or at least, that was my understanding of it, filtered as it was between the roar of passing 747s. I didn't really care anyhow. It was sunny and warm, and I was on my way to Classical Studies class.

From Friday July 27th: Girl date with Helen to Lindt, sugar high, and uni.

I'm invincible, glowing, burning, sweeping through corridors, dragging lesser beings along in my wake. The walls of the Con, impregnated as always with layer upon layer of sounds, bend and ripple around me. I'm feeling for the first time craziness and beauty all at once, delirium mixed with lethargy, and it makes me want to laugh out loud and hug everyone, squeeze them tight until they can't breathe and my arms ache and they beg me to let go. I hold onto Helen's arm and we sweep along together, me an insider here and her an outsider, joined together to make one wonderful, beautiful creature. We are both invincible. No one can touch us. I'm sweating and my heart leaps and skids and my stomach contracts into small, hard knots, and every muscle in my body is charged with a dangerous energy, but I'm not scared.This is what speed used to feel like, back when I was a mortal, and needed pills and powders to lift me above the greyness. Now I can levitate on my own, buoyed by my own craziness and fear and the delicious mixture of joy and dread swirling in my bloodstream. I need hands, touch, and I want to kiss you until we both can't breathe and our hair is mussed and we both know that it will only be a matter of time until we start waking up together.

The 8.48 train to the city is delayed by approximately five minutes. Cityrail sincerely apologises for any inconvenience caused. Mozart's sublime arpeggios drown out the metallic voice of the electronic announcement. Utter banality and supreme, almost unbearable beauty distilled into two rival sounds, mixing uncomfortably in heart and mind and ears.

I am completely spent, exhausted, physically and mentally. I'm nauseous, sick, churning, eyes half-closed and brain on the nod. There's an unpleasant chemical reaction taking place in side me, effexor and tamezepam, having a prize fight in my bloodstream right now, it seems. Which will win? They're both giving it their best, I'll give them that. It's like a half-finished song lyric that I abandoned years ago, found recently in an old notebook:

lethargy, caffeine
in the same bloodstream
pumped through the ventricles
of this one heart

The tamazepam's made my blood thick, sluggish, full of sleep. The effexor squeezes my heart about every minute or so, jolting my brain stem to create the infamous sensation that Helen and I dubbed the 'brain zap'. It's hideous, horrible, and can only mean one thing:I forgot to take it yesterday, somehow.

(The slow movement of K488:in my opinion, one of the most exquisite pieces of music ever created. The initial piano melody is so deliciously tense and sad, perhaps one of the saddest things I have ever heard, but wrapped up in the classical package of restraint and periodicity, complete pathos neatly contained in a palatable casing. It's this quality of Mozart that find utterly addictive, mesmerizing:that mixture of painfully raw emotion, breaking through in the form of an unexpected dissonance or a loaded melody, and good old 18th century restraint & respectability)

I'm having trouble accepting my need to be medicated at the moment, to the point where I feel uncomfortable writing or talking about it. It makes me feel pathetic and weak, and also cruel, because I am attacking with chemicals the parts of my mind that make me myself.