Sigh

I sit here in the dead quiet of morning. No dogs bark, no birds sing. The birds are sleeping in their cosy nests, the dogs curl together beneath the car, tails on noses. Beside my left hand sits a cup of the strongest coffee imaginable, liberally doused with soymilk and what now seems to be too much sugar. The darkness surrounds me, warm and thick and threaded with tendrils of cooler breeze that waft the scent of guavas to my nose from the tree next door. The laptop hums quietly on my thighs.
I should be studying, but I can measure in a teaspoon how much I care. What matters is the word processing screen that glows in front of me, the story unfolding behind the blinking cursor, the tale of simmering rage and sweet revenge. Cliched, perhaps, but, well, old cliches die hard.
His name is Sebastian. He likes dark-haired girls. Her name is Nadine. She has dark hair.
He's already killed her sister, a hooker named Lorraine, when we meet him. He dumped her body in a rough wooded area near the border of Detroit. He lets Nadine into his car three days later. She's a hitchhiker, she's got an accent. She's also got a knife strapped to her thigh under her pleated Catholic-schoolgirl skirt. He has a gun in the glove compartment.
Method meets madness, and so begins the tug of war. I don't know who will win. I never do until it is written. As for Adam...Adam is still with us. He's a little faded, like the spectre of something that once existed in vibrant technicolour, but he appreciates the rest. He needs it, more than he knows. And where he lounges in the corner, one long leg thrown over the arm of the chair in a decidedly sexy manner, his wry half-smile tells me he won't be silent for long. I know he won't. I feel him stirring in my mind...three months, Adam. Give me three months and I'll continue your story. For now, Sebastian and Nadine have the voice.
In the distance, an insomniac cock is crowing. A man yells shut up! and the bird falls silent, perhaps for good. In this hell we settle disagreements with cutlass blows - permanent solutions to temporary problems. I could use a permanent solution to my problem, the problem of staying here. I won't. I just will not.
Write, Adam whispers, and gives way to Sebastian's fuzzy insanity. Sebastian has a remarkable inability to form a coherent sentence, it makes life very difficult when trying to write prose. He has more voices in his head at once than I've ever had in mine. Sometimes it's refreshing to write about someone crazier than you are...

Nadine smiled a long, slow smile. With that colouring she could have been Spanish or Italian; Sebastian's hazy mind set the odds at ten to one that she wasn't Scandinavian. "Do you think we'll be more than friends?" she asked. The combination of slurred British accent and five-pack-a-day voice made his throat go dry.
Sebastian opened his mouth to say something relevant in response but was thwarted by his mind going blank. All he could think about was leaving the imprints of his fingers on her tanned, glowing throat...
She leaned over so that her skirt rode up her left leg almost to heaven, and her hand came down on his thigh, sliding slowly north. The speedometer mimicked the movement, inching up from twenty-five to thirty-five. Sebastian thought he would have a heart attack.
Nadine pressed her mouth against his ear, and her tongue did a slow, wet flick. "I have a feeling we'll be so much more than friends..."

The choice

I'm posting to reinforce my recent (today) decision to stop eating meat. And not just meat - dairy products, eggs and seafood. Yes, I'm going to turn vegan.
I've considered this before, and I was vegetarian for a while, but I've consciously made the decision today to do the whole shebang and flick the switch straight onto vegan. First of all, I'm allergic to seafood and partially allergic to milk, and I don't like how eggs taste. But giving up meat is a big thing for me, considering my favourite food has always been hamburger.
I love animals. I've always loved them. If I had enough money and land I'd pick up all the stray dogs and cats in the world and give them food, affection and a place to sleep until I could find them loving homes. But I realize that it's hypocritical to say you love animals and then willingly and happily eat beef and chicken. Why should I love a dog and not a cow? Why should I treat any animal differently from any other? They all deserve the same respect - not to be treated brutally, killed and eaten. There are plants. Eat the plants.
So from now on, no more beef, lamb, pork or chicken. No more honey - honey is stolen from bees who worked so hard to make it to last them through winter. No more gelatin made from animal bones. No milk, no cheese, no butter, no yoghurt.
Instead, vegetables, fruits, whole grains and soy. No preservatives. Nothing artificial. Not only am I going vegan but I'm doing it the organic way.
No ifs, no ands and no buts. I've made my choice.

Mocks

Mock exams start on the 13th. My schedule is horrible, I have five consecutive days of exams from the 20th to the 24th - and in those five days alone, I have fifteen hours of exams, with five hours on the 23rd and five on the 24th. Anybody wanna shoot me?
My real timetable isn't much better...for the actual Cambridge schedule, I end up with five hours of exams on one day as well - lit and history, one after the other, and then Communications and history on another day - five and a half hours. I foresee my hand falling off...too bad I'm not ambidextrous, I could write with the right hand for one exam and with the left for the other...
Education is structured so as to destroy all promise of creativity and youthful spontaneity, I swear. After such heavily structured high school, with rules like American schools have never seen - earrings are regulated, height of socks and shoes are regulated, hair colour is regulated - one's enjoyment of life is left considerably reduced...and one is released into the real world, which has no such rules, entirely bewildered by society and not sure how to proceed. They say they're preparing us for life - they lie. Nobody cares about whether I can solve a quadratic equation. Nobody wants to know about the development of the peasantry in the British West Indies after emancipation. Nobody cares about the Caribbean anyway. Sheesh.
If I manage to get myself into the States and I get married more than sixty days after I arrive, and I can convince the authorities that I entered into the marriage for love and not citizenship, I can get a green card, I can become a lawful permanent resident and eventually I can get naturalized. It's my only hope. I cannot, I will not stay here. I don't know how many times I have to say that.
Somebody...please...get me out of this place.