I think the thing that I really miss the most about being at university is having the entire house/flat to myself on a regular basis.

Vast swathes of silence.

Walking about the house and nothing stirring. No noise other than the faint whisper of my laptop singing upstairs.

Stillness.

How I miss it.

Not so much the lectures, the hanging out, the clubs and outings. Maybe I’m alone on this one, but I crave solitude. Crave crave crave.

Being a student mentor and stuck in my flat for a week after everyone else has dashed off home? Glorious. Filled with pottering about, getting little things done and not talking to anyone or being distracted by noise.

Kind of makes me want to go back just for a taste.

A computer comes in between: like a car, but magnified a thousand-fold. It has its fingernails wedged far deeper into your life. Your computer is a backup of your soul, a multi-layered, menu-driven representation of who you are, who you care about, and how you sin. If you spend an evening skating around the web looking at naked ladies, your trail is there in the browser’s history log and in the disk cache – not to mention all the sites that logged your IP address as you passed through, so they can spam you until the end of time. If you exchange the occasional flirtatious email with a co-worker but carefully throw them all away, you’ve still done wrong until you Hail Mary the command to actually empty your software’s trash.
Even if you think you’re being clever and throw everything away, emptying the trash or recycler, you aren’t out of the woods. All that happens when you ‘delete’ a file is that the computer throws away the reference to it – like destroying the file card that refers to a library book on the shelves, telling the visitor where to go find it. The book itself is still there, and if you go looking you can come upon it or track it down. It’s like a man writing notes in pencil on a huge piece of paper. If you blind him, the notes are still there. He can’t put his finger on them, can’t show you where each one is, but they remain. If he keeps making notes (if you keep saving new files, in other words), he will start writing over the originals. His new notes, his new experiences, extend over sections of the original files, making it impossible to return what once was, to understand or even remember what happened first, what made his life like it is. Sections of these files remain, however, hidden and lost, but real – the computer’s earlier experience; severed from the outside world but still inhabiting portions of the disk like ghosts and memories, mixed up with the here and now. We’re like that

The Lonely Dead – Michael Marshall

Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn’t it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses, you build up a whole suit of armor, so that nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life…You give them a piece of you. They didn’t ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn’t your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like ‘maybe we should be just friends’ turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It’s a soul-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. I hate love.

Neil Gaiman (via indiansummmer) (via creampuff)