Sunday

How strange it feels to look back at what I wrote last Saturday: the end of an instantly forgettable week. Well, I won't be forgetting this one in a hurry. Nothing has ever wounded me like this before.

Everything else I did this week seems utterly irrelevant, though there was a little new growth among the carnage that followed Monday night. The temporary job went well, and my ESOL teaching career is slowly taking shape. On Thursday I found out that I may well be getting my first paid work from the place I currently volunteer at. The following morning I had a phone call asking if I'd be interested in applying for another position, this time teaching people from settled immigrant communities who don't have enough English to hold down decent jobs.

And I need to give this a try. I crave normality, and I think I have done to varying extents for at least the last year and a half. Despite its many attractions, I've had enough of moving around. I feel a need in me to settle somewhere, to feel my feet are firmly rooted in the ground. I guess that's why I was so eager to get married - I have this terror of ending up like Jay Gatsby, thinking that I can just reach out and grasp something only to find it's already silently slipped away.

I'm still jogging - every day except two for over three weeks now - I read whenever I can concentrate, and I'm listening to stuff that I'd neglected for too long - David Bowie, Al Green...it reminds me that there were a lot of things I never got round to doing with Katka. I don't want that to sentence to be misconstrued: I could have done no more at the time given the circumstances that prevailed, Katka being Katka and me being me. There are no what ifs.

Life isn't easy, but I don't suppose that's a bad thing. We learn and re-evaluate, we recover and move on. Eventually.