You are fifteen and here is Blake and here is Tolkein and they don’t have much in common except they like girls with hips like yours. You’re onto a winner here; these are wise men, they like far green countries and women who could rear children and chop down trees.

You know everything. If you woke up in the early hours and someone happened to be there you’d go with it because hey, a love story could start anywhere, could be anything, you only have to tell it right. You don’t want to miss anything, sometimes you want the world to turn to shit just so you can save it. Sometimes you feel sorry for murderers because it’s like homework, it all gets on top of you, it gets completely out of control and you panic, you try to cover yourself.  You’ve heard it’s the same with money; money and murder, you imagine a baliff at the door would be a lot like a body under the floor, that an angry letter, a bill on the doormat would be audible, would thump; the telltale debt.

You hate whispers, and flashing glances you don’t understand and friends. You have friends, a few, but you are as suspicious of their motives as they are of yours. You don’t seem to understand that friends last forever, like they do, you don’t even seem to hope. You have written them off as temporary, they have written you off as a joke, a poor investment. You want to write letters, and believe in true love, the sort that swallows your life from the edges to the insides, you haven’t thought about much else. You haven’t thought to leave room for much else.

You are fifteen and sometimes you think, perhaps Blake was mad. Sometimes it seems that Tolkein only wrote boys who hardly breathed but for each other and for war and for things without faces to fight and you know nothing of any of it. Sometimes it seems that way, sometimes you think like that, but you try not to.