WARNING: This post is quite sentimental, reflective, and may contain unashamedly soppy material.

Why does life have to be so complex
When I just wanna sit here and watch you undress

On listening to PJ Harvey's Stories from the city, stories from the sea:

I have missed this album. Seven years ago it was a soundtrack for me, of sorts, as cheesy as that must sound. At that point I was twenty years old, living in Vanessa's front room in Nelson St, unemployed, adrift, freshly empowered with the knowledge that there were no rules but the ones I created for myself. (It took me about another four years to put this realisation to good use, and perhaps another three years after that to finally let go of rules imposed from outside sources. Only now do I feel like I might be actually be able to make the Fionaberry universe my reality).

I was working at a cafe in Wynyard Station, making coffee all day long, starting at 7am and finishing early, at about 1pm. After that I'd often meet C. somewhere, often at the Century Tavern, and we'd drink beer and make fun of the slogans on the barriers surrounding the large construction site that is now World Tower.Other times we'd go drink coffee somewhere, not that we needed any more after swigging it all morning (he workied in a cafe too). Nights were amphetamines and clubs and music, lots of music, drum and bass mainly, and hip-hop and electronica, sitting in corners and dancing and dancing and talking and kissing, and sitting outside writing furiously in numerous notebooks in small tight handwriting, endless lists of things that had to be done, what was wrong with the world and with society, what was wrong with me.

I left that job for my first position in an office, a mortgage broker of sorts in Macmahons Point. I lasted about two weeks, heading over the bridge in my stiff office clothes, sitting at my desk attempting to be a grown-up. I remember songs from Stories from the city... playing on the radio in the office, but never my favourite songs from the album. I had to wait til I got home for those.

After I quit that job, I was unemployed for several months, bone-crushingly depressed, at a loose end. At night when I couldn't sleep (which was most of the time) I remember lying on the worn futon in Vanessa's front room in the dark, smoking, listening to This Mess We're In over and over again, the beginnings of unrealised analyses budding in my mind.

Seven years later, these same songs make me a little sad, but I'm relieved that I'm no longer in the place that I was when I first heard them, and that being in my own universe no longer seems like a terrifying thing, partly because I can finally share it with someone as delightfully imperfect as myself.