Life is going well these days. I've been working extremely hard on my depression, and I finally had a breakthrough a couple of weeks ago after a long and intense conversation with C. I'm lucky that he's the most positive, optimistic and resilient person I've ever known, and he drills speeches into my stubborn brain. Then I go be by myself and marinate his ideas vs my ideas, and an ahá moment happens. And that's exactly what happened that night, but amplified x50. Since that day, I haven't woken up a single morning dreading the day ahead and wanting to chop off my head. It is truly a miracle. I still have to keep my thoughts and focus in check, and I have to make a choice for my mental health every single day, and I feel I'm on a really nice path. I want to keep going. If it weren't for having him in my life, with his warmth and eternal enthusiasm and impeccable energy, I would be a ghost of myself. I feel so blessed to have such an encouraging and reassuring person in my life. He makes all the difference.
The last few weeks have been a lot of fun. Trips to Barcelona city in search of boardgames & shopping & eating & bonding. Hours upon hours in bed together watching tv shows. And one day, on my way to visit my mother in Barcelona, I went into a bookshop and finally -after a couple of years searching- found the perfect adult coloring books for me. Most of what I've seen in the last couple of years of my search have been mandalas and other geometric drawings that inspire nothing in me. I'm much more into flowy Art Noveau kind of images. And voilà! There they were, various books by this person called Johanna Basford, it was love at first sight. It was tough trying to decide which one book to buy; I wanted them all! One day, one day. ★ The Little Women soundtrack. ★ The Chocolat soundtrack. ★ Gifted myself a new art journal for the new year. It was expensive (8€) and it took me two weeks to go from mental chatter of "It's not worth it/I'm not worth it" to "I work really hard and I'm worth it!". It is made entirely of recycled paper and I'm so in love. I haven't been able to put it down. Even when I'm not filling it with stuff, I just hug it, or keep it beside me on the bed for company while I'm on the laptop... Maybe I should stop anthropomorphising inanimate objects, but no I won't, it's my nature to imagine that objects have personalities :P ★ Mimosas (my favourite flower) blooming in December, wtf! They're a February flower. Weather is crazy, poor planet. ★ Bought myself a ton of clothes, finally. I've been freezing to death for years because I was always broke. But now that I have a full-time job for the first time in seven years, I've been able to gift myself a ton of things I'm not used to. And it's definitely been a challenge to convince myself that it's okay to buy stuff. My default mental setting is "I don't need this", meanwhile I'm freezing to death or starving. I've learned to live in denial. Need to unlearn that. ★ Did a couple of money spells a month ago and money has been coming in from random places. Like I've won 50€ in the Christmas lottery (I invested nothing, since the lottery ticket was a gift from my mother), I'm also receiving random money from clients at work, I find euro coins on the street constantly, received a bonus 250€ that I did not expect at all, what a shock, and when I went to Lush to buy new shampoo cause I ran out, the shampoo I especifically went in for has half price off, no other product was on sale, only mine bahaha, it's so funny when shit like this happens. ★ My macrame plant hanger that I'm obsessed with. Yet another object I talk to. ★ The show Reign. ★ Road to Avonlea. When am I not obsessed with it? ★ Those quiet, fast-passing days at work. ★ My love's cheeks and freckles and gigantic muscly arms and belly and EVERYTHING. I want to kiss every part of him forever, all the time, non-stop. ★ Orgasms with him *sigh* ★ Homemade vegan salted mocha lattes. ★ Seeing my love have a social life and seeing him pursue his happiness. It's so sexy to watch. ★ Ron wearing his adorable blue jumper. ★ The female security guard at work who is so hot and sexy. I get shy around her hahaha. ★ Bought the Leonie workbooks, like I do every year, and I'm obsessed with imagining 2016. 2015 was a piece of shit of a year for me, emotionally and physically. And 2016 looks promising. ★ Rosemary essential oil in my drinking water. So refreshing! ★ Celebrated one year with my love C. ★ Went to the cinema with mom, dad and sister. Special mention: the delicious salty popcorn! ★ Mom joined us in putting up the Christmas tree this year (she lives in Barcelona and hasn't been around for "tree decor day" in many years) and it was way funner with her around. ★ When my brother-in-law attends our family lunches/dinners. I hate family get-togethers, but when I know that he's coming I know I will laugh until I cry and I look forward to that. A few pages in the workbooks are not exactly my cup of tea visual-wise, so I simply make my own. I will watercolor the edges of the Mottos page I made, for instance. And the list of 100 Things doesn't work for me in the format established in the workbook (it's too messy-looking for my taste, I like "cleaner" formats but still with color, not the awful boring black & white of the majority of workbooks out there), so I typed my own 100 Things page in the computer and printed it to suit my taste. PS: Already completed one goal, finished on January 2. ★ Medjool dates (which are very hard to find in Spain).
★ My dad's potato & carrot & olive oil purée. Bliss in the mouth! ★ The warmth of the sun. ★ Rainy days lying in bed with C, abusing his freckled bearded cheeks with my lips. CAN'T HELP IT!!! ★ Received an mp3 player as a gift from my parents for the cagatió. I haven't had any kind of music playing device in seven years, I kid you not. Now I can go to work, and go grocery shopping, or go for walks listening to music or podcasts. ★ Playing Trivial Pursuit with my family, eating nougat and other yummy crap. ★ Shampoos from Lush. ★ Hot sopa de galets on rainy, freezing days. ★ The book The Secret Garden. I re-read it for the hundredth time last month and it lifted my spirit and life seems so much more beautiful. ★ Star Wars marathon in bed with C holding hands. I dislike Star Wars (C loves it) but I enjoy insulting the characters I dislike and picking apart the awful dialogues. ★ How soft C's pajamas is. ★ My burgundy lingerie set. I feel the need to become a burlesque performer just so I can parade it around the world. ★ Buying kebabs for C and I, and going home to eat them in bed watching a movie. ★ Being picked to continue working for one more month. ★ The gorgeous full moon on Christmas ♥ I'm extremely busy with work and I don't have the energy to do anything. No physical energy and no mental energy. I spend all my free time lying in bed trying to recover from the exhaustion of work. This means I have no time or energy for the internet, my family or any of my hobbies. I can't read or watch youtube or make collages or go out or take pictures or anything. I rarely see my boyfriend cause we have opposite schedules. When I work, he's free. When I'm free, he's in class for six hours. Luckily, we did get to go to Vic on my only free day. He skipped class, otherwise we couldn't make it. A two-hour train trip, seeing gorgeous mountains and valleys, to attend the annual medieval market in Vic. I've been going there for the last few years, and last year I invited him to come with me. We were just friends then, but on that trip our relationship began to take a kind of romantic turn. Five days after the trip, we found ourselves hooking up in my bed and having profound conversations, and we've been obsessed & in love with each other ever since. So of course we had to go to Vic again this year. I've been so busy and exhausted that the christmas tree and all the decors are still in the attic. I'm a huge fan of Yule time, and usually by December 2 I've already put up the tree. But this year I can never remember that the tree is missing from my house. I don't feel like doing all that work of taking it down in three weeks, so I don't feel like putting it up for that reason. I did get a lovely poinsettia, as I do every year. It's my favourite thing to do! Poinsettia shopping! I hope I can go to Barcelona with C before Yule, and see the city with all the lights, and visit the Christmas markets in the Romanic/Gothic quarter. Once in Vic, we began the day stopping by the same coffee shop where we ate last year. Good times! Bought a beautiful handmade and handpainted dragon incense burner :)
This tape includes some of the songs I've been listening to every early winter for quite a few years, and it's been inspired especially by afternoons lying in bed with my lover under blankets daydreaming of days when we'll be able to travel & also inspired by solo train trips in the sunshine this gorgeous early winter.
Dusty Roads from tourmalinne on 8tracks Radio.
01. Roll Away Your Stone - Mumford & Sons
02. re: Stacks - Bon Iver 03. Hang me, Oh Hang me - Oscar Isaac 04. Fare Thee Well - Marcus Mumford & Oscar Isaac 05. The Heart - Needtobreathe 06. The Last Ships - Vio Mire 07. The Hurry and The Harm - City and Colour 08. Ghost Town - First Aid Kit ✫ Evening walks in the forest by myself (scary at times) ✫ Reading Philosopher's Stone in bed with windows open for five hours straight ✫ Watching Ripper Street obsessively with C ✫ The Witches of the Four Quarters marathon in bed on a rainy evening drinking cayenne pepper tea ✫ Bought a book!!! (financial stress means I haven't been able to buy any books in three years. In 2015, however, I've managed to buy three so far -second hand) Don't you just get goosebumps when new books are coming into your life?! ✫ C reading me Game of Thrones out loud ✫ Lots of baking, I love baking and feeding goodies to my people ✫ Ongoing rainy weather. The beauty, the smell, the breeze, the energy... ✫ The magic I feel in my heart this time of year ✫ Glamor spells in the bathtub ✫ Listening to MuggleCast epis for hours ✫ Bronze jewelry ✫ My new gratitude journal ✫ That Sunday night when C decided to come over spontaneously and sleep with me ✫ A midday spent in the forest by myself. Warm and glorious ✫ My dog's soft body ✫ Dressing up + kebabs & falafels with C ✫ My love's soft lips. Seriously, otherwordly ✫ Persimmon trees & how C climbs them to bring us dessert ✫ Mandarin essential oil in my water. Yuuum! ✫ Berry smoothies ✫ Having tooooons of alone time ✫ C appreciating hardcorely the triple sandwiches I put in his lunch bag. I know, I know, a wife... doesn't get any more perfect than me ;) ✫ Wearing mostly black & bronze color palette ✫ Making autumn crafts ✫ Got delicious free samples from Lush ✫ My cousin came back from three months in New Jersey (USA) and told us about her experiences ✫ Super fun lectures on the Brontës and Jane Austen, such as this one, and watching a ton of documentaries as well ✫ Walking under the rain for one hour, on purpose, because it's amazing ✫ That morning when my computer went ppffftt goodbye and I mentioned it to C over text and he RAN to my house to fix it even though I yelled at him not to come cause he had a lot of work to do. He always leaves everything for me, it's truly amazing. So grateful for the existence of people like him in the world, and more specially grateful for his existence in particular ✫ Outlander. Sooo goooood ✫ Buffy marathon with C in bed ✫ Oracle readings ✫ Apple cider vinegar baths ✫ When the women in Practical Magic dance around and are happy ✫ My first hot chocolate of the second half of the year. Spiced with orange, cinnamon and cayenne pepper ✫ C & I managing to resolve serious issues in our relationship and sticking together ✫ His arms ✫ His hugs ✫ His commitment to me ✫ My commitment to him ✫ My strength ✫ My beauty.
Sanctuary from tourmalinne on 8tracks Radio.
01. In Noctem - Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
02. Vois Sur Ton Chemin - Les Choristes 03. The Misty Mountains Cold - The Hobbit 04. Protectors of the Earth - Two Steps from Hell 05. Lacrimosa Dies Illa - Mozart 06. End Credits Part 1 - Danny Elfman 07. The Borgias - Trevor Morris 08. Long Road - Polyphony & Stephen Layton 09. Illumination - Anúna
★ ★ ★
Here's a few pages from the grey journal I began in May :) (Above) The very first pages. I use envelopes to keep important papers, secrets & the manifesto for what I want each of my new journals to look like and feel like ;)
♥ ★ That Wednesday when C and I spent the day in Barcelona for his new course ★ Anne of the Island ★ Beetroot, celery & fruit smoothies ★ Great morning sex ★ Shopping with mom ★ That amazing weekend with C: videogames, tons of sex & family lunch ★ Kill Bill marathon with C ★ My dieffenbachia has grown SO MUCH overnight ★ My new summer sandals that look like (faux) dragon skin ★ C bought me a new laptop cause mine died. A frikkin' laptop!!! ★ Making pizzas from scratch with C ★ How gorgeous the farmhouse was. Everything was wood and we were surrounded by greens and flowers ★ Mom's delicious birthday cake ★ The smell of dong at the farmhouse. So grounding! ★ Having Ron back ★ Visiting Andorra ★ Helping out people with my opinion/advice ★ My first ever hickie ahahaha ★ Plucked up the courage to go to the dentist ★ C naming his videogame characters after me ★ The film Kingsman ★ When I walked into the bedroom and C was in bed with the sheets to his chin and said super cutely "I want a hug" and he looked like a kitten. I died xD ★ The first thunderstorm in many months. So refreshing and enlivening.
My whimsical, reckless mother decided once again to organize a vacation within a week and a half. One afternoon two weeks ago, we were in my dad's livingroom after a family lunch, doing what in Spain we call "la sobremesa" which consists basically of talking while digesting massive amounts of food, when my mother said that she wanted to spend her birthday in the countryside with the three of us. Now, my parents have been divorced for many years and my mother is married to another man, but my parents remain great friends, and the four of us hang out often as the family that we are. She grabbed my laptop, my sister sitting by her side, and they began searching for farms to escape to. Within five days, we had booked a cheap farmhouse and we knew we had to find a dog nursery for Ron immediately, since the farm owners wouldn't allow pets. This broke my heart. I didn't want to go in the first place (if you've been following me recently, you'll know I'm in the claws of depression right now and everything sounds like a bad idea), and hearing that I would have to leave Ron with strangers made me panic. A bit of history: we found Ron seven years ago living in a dumpster, with clear signs of violence from his ex-family, and he's still psychologically marked by the abandonment. I agreed to go because it was my mom's birthday, so I felt obligation toward her & pressure from my dad, and also because I wouldn't have to spend a cent. Free vacation in the mountains! The idea of going to a farm and getting to be with donkeys, goats, gigantic dogs, geese and other animals I never get to see in person got me a little excited. On the farm's website, everything looked ideallic. The reality was that the house was indeed ideallic, but the conditions of the animals disturbed me, and that is why I didn't take pictures of them. To some people, these conditions wouldn't seem torturous; my family certainly didn't think anything of it. But to me, no animal should be wearing annoying iron collars with headache-inducing bells and other artifacts of torture. They were also confined to tiny spaces. I was in a constant state of anxiety during my stay there because I couldn't take my mind off the animals' conditions and I couldn't stop thinking of Ron and his abandonment issues. Would he feel abandoned in that place where we left him? Would he eat? Would he sleep well? The whole vacation turned out to be as fastidious as I imagined: leaving Ron in a strange place + disturbing animal conditions + my dad and sister slept all the time and I was perpetually bored (I thought the whole point was to explore the mountains, be in nature, have picnics... ?), and I found my family's company insufferable overall. What I did like was being surrounded by nature, literally engulfed! (have you seen the vines eating up the house? glorious!), sitting in the patio by myself for hours watching the bees, the silence of the place (the nearest town was 15 minutes away by car), the lack of television, the contemplation and meditation, exploring the mountain a bit with my mother, playing charades and "guess who?" every night for five hours, staying up until 1am due to amazing, profound conversations where we'd discuss everything about human existence, and of course the utter gorgeousness of the house itself. I felt as if I was living in The Burrow (Harry Potter reference ;) . We also drove to the country of Andorra because it was literally thirty minutes away by car. Andorra is a tiny country located between Spain and France, it is so so so tiny that people outside of Europe don't even know of its existence. Well, here I am to tell you curiosities about Southern Europe ;D |
about AlexandraBorn and raised in Barcelona city, now living in a small town. Categories
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