There's a leak in the roof in the kitchen, and the errant raindrops fall into carefully placed plastic buckets in an awkwardly syncopated rhythm. 2-against-3, Brahmsian even, then 4-against-5, 6-atainst-7, 9/8, 13/8, out of step, out of time, disintegrating into a series of meaningless percussive non-sounds. It's drumming against the interior of my skull, and I feel taut and restless, full of ugliness. Beauty and love bounce off me today, echoing like those damn raindrops, dull thuds, failing to reverberate off a brain filled with muddiness and mixed-up pictures.

I need to go to Dulwich Hill and clean mould off the ceiling. I need to be tall so that I can do this, or else find a ladder. I need the right music to listen to whilst I clean. It's pouring with rain, and it's highly likely that I will be drenched on the way there.

Ugly, ugly day. Let's try to remember something better:

Yesterday, Helen's exhibition, the knitted toys in different sizes, aqua and white gingham curtains. The love letter I wrote to her on the train, two pages of my small repressed black handwriting, folded into a paper aeroplane. Mozart's letters. The photo shoot with Rob on the red and black couch which we matched perfectly. The lights and the chimney belching flames that smeared past the car window on the way home, his head on my shoulder, lips on my neck, words whispered in my ear. Vanilla vodka and table football. Turning Goulburn Street into the Seine with the power of our minds alone, 2007 into 1930, minutes into an eternity.

I feel as though I'm on a precipice, balanced precariously between desperate sadness and delirious happiness.

Several things:

1.Wednesday, 15th August

I'm sitting in the hair-washing chair at the hairdressers. Ali holds my ponytail in her hand, scissors poised. I hold my breath for a second. With a dry scrape of metal on fibre it's gone, fifteen centimetres of dry, over-bleached, deader-than-dead hair. I recall the last time I cut my hair from long to short. I was seventeen, nervous, drinking a lemon ruski in an unsuccessful attempt to calm myself. Sitting in Vic's unfamiliar garden in Darlington, on a sunny day, with Matt and Vanessa. I remember the moment that Electra snipped off my long ponytail; my head snapped forward, suddenly, surprisingly released from the heavy blonde weight that it had carried for the past eleven years or so. Prior to that day, haircuts had meant trims at Mrs Leal's salon in Mosman. (Mrs Leal was the loyal hairdresser who had tended to my mother's locks since the 1960s). 'Only an inch off the bottom, and no more'. Vanessa and I with our trademark long tresses, hers dark, sleek and straight, mine blonde, thick, wilfully wavy. Like my mother's, but for the colour. (My mother, before her hair turned white, had beautiful brown hair. With her olive skin, she tells me, people always assumed she was Italian).

Two hours later I leave, my hair in almost the same cut that Electra gave me ten years ago, 'the messy Amelie'. My neck feels naked, but I'm very happy, and I feel almost pretty.

2. Thursday, 16th August.

It's my 27th birthday. I'm at Hotel Chambers, surrounded by lovely people. The rest of the bar is a blur of suits and ties, but our corner is pure colour. I'm drunk and giggling, awash on a wave of half-price martinis and drunken conversation about boys and music and all manner of things.I'm wearing a blue and white polka dot skirt and a yellow scarf and brown boots. I'm losing my voice (laryngitis) but am enjoying its unfamiliar huskiness.Tomorrow I'll wake up unable to talk, but that isn't bothering me now. Everywhere I look I can see wonderfully intelligent and interesting people, all of whom I like a lot, in some cases even love, for multiple good reasons. I can't quite believe that I am the reason for their being here, right now, in the one place at the one time.

I am very happy.

I've been staring at the same paragraph for the past 10 minutes, and the words make less and less sense to me. The more times I read my words, the less concrete and logical they seem, and the more counter-arguments I can think of.

For example:

'The overall sound [in Scelsi's post-1950 works] is sculpted through alterations in register, level of rhythmic activity, methods of sound production, and pitch. '

Isn't this the case for all sound, in all music? All musical sound is perceived as an aggregate of its constituent elements, whether the listener is aware that this is the case or not. What I'm trying to say is that, in Scelsi's case, each element is manipulated in minute detail, more so than the larger-scale pitch/rhythmic manipulation that places notes into a melody and/or rhythmic pattern (the context in which we can normally 'make sense' of them). But I'm not really making this clear in my paper, and I feel too mentally and physically exhausted to clarify this.

Maybe academic pursuits aren't for me, if I can't even agree with myself for long enough to edit a short paper.

Sometime in 1997.

We are seventeen, stomping along in our big black boots. I'm wearing a T-shirt that I made myself, letters scrawled with white-out on black: 'ONLY POP MUSIC CAN SAVE US NOW'. Black lace skirt, black tights, silver fishnets, a brown op-shop hat. We're on our way to a gig; Marrickville? Chippendale? Somewhere like that, in a cavernous warehouse. Your ex-girlfriend is on the door and I am momentarily felled by her beauty. She has a small, delicate face, fragile like a tiny bird, and neon-coloured hair twisted into thick ropes adorned with stars. Five dollars and a stamp on the wrist and we're in. There's kids everywhere, lounging on the floor, drinking, dancing, kissing, slumped in corners. Everyone turns to look at us as we walk in, but there's not really much to see, because we're just two skinny kids from the North Shore on a day out.

I can't remember who was playing. I think I was underwhelmed.