This is not my most cheerful post, and that’s saying something. You have been warned.

There are things you dare not think. There are thoughts that keep you up late at night. There are nightmares so terrifying that you wake up with a chill. All three of those can’t compare to the incredible loss you feel when someone you love, adore and cherish beyond measure. I’ve tried several times to write this since the event, and each time I’ve failed. The words have failed me. The last time that happened was when I lost a cousin six years ago, and here we are again. Maybe because I can write this now means I’m moving on, or at the very least coming to some form of acceptance.

On October 12th, my little cousin died of a brain haemmorrage. She was 7. These things just don’t happen. It doesn’t fit into how you picture the universe. Someone with such spark, such creativity, such enthusiasm for life, such a bright future ahead of her (not to mention such an obsession with all things Scooby Doo related) just can’t stop being there like that.

It’s still not real. It won’t be for a very long time. I still plan things to buy her, trips to take her on, stuff we can do together the next time I’m there. As her mum put it, she’s just visiting her grandma or out at school or with friends. She’s going to walk through the door any second, or she’ll call. I can still hear her voice in my head from the last time I called her. On the day she died, I was thinking of her - one week later would have been her school half term, and I was taking the whole week off work. I was going to babysit her for two days while her parents were at work, and I had it all planned. I didn’t get to see her often, and the pair of us were looking forward to immensely.

And then… I got a call to say she was in hospital. She had been fine until the day before, then a headache suddenly came on and she sat down because she couldn’t stand up any more. She never got up again. I was on the first train I could get to, and it was the longest train trip of my life.

When I saw her, it wasn’t right. She was sleeping. It was a joke, a prank. Anything to get me home to see her. Ho ho. It’s amazing what you can tell yourself. A couple of hours later she was pronounced… four letters, and I still have problems saying them. I cried after I got the phone call. I cried on the train. But when I got to the hospital, I went numb - the universe just stops because what you’re seeing isn’t real. And then when we went back to their house later that evening, everything was as it had been left the night before when she had suddenly become ill. Her school things on the table, her homework and doodles on the whiteboard, and her room a snapshot in time. I didn’t cry again for four days… until I stood in her bedroom doorway and suddenly felt a loss I couldn’t begin to describe.

Abi was such an abundant source of life. Again, to borrow from her mum - she wasn’t a frilly girl, but she was a pink girl. So it was fitting that everyone at the funeral was asked to wear some pink, and pink balloons were let off afterwards. 7 lots of 7 balloons, for a 7 year old with such an amazing enthusiasm. It was infectious. You couldn’t stay sad for long around her, and she had such an amazing way of looking at things. She was bright, she was cheerful, she was adorable, she was the only seven year old I knew who would spontaneously burst into the Hallellujah Chorus, or giggle along when I played the Toccata and Fugue, and I am going to miss her so very much.

Abigail Brenda Iles. June 3rd 2000 to October 12th 2007.

I have two hours worth of train trip to get through, so I figured why not take a few minutes to do some reflecting, but where to start?

My new flat is gradually looking how I want it to. As I am not allowed to put anything on the walls (and I mean anything) I’ve had to resort to free standing shelving and putting my posters (of which I have many) into storage. Other than that, it’s looking quite nice. I’ve spent a fortune at IKEA over the last few weeks but I figure it’s going to happen eventually when I buy my own place so I may as well make a start now… and that’s the excuse I’m sticking to. As with any new place, I’m reluctant to leave things switched on as I don’t know how steep my electricity bill is going to be. As such, I’m going round turning things off rather than leaving the evil little red light of power consumption shining away at me. To my amusement, I’ve discovered that my sister who has also just moved into her own place has started doing the same thing.

Living on your own is a mixed blessing. You get the tranquility of watching and listening to what you want without competing for volume (thankfully the floors and walls seem to shield out nearly all noise from other flats). You get to pile junk on the floor without feeling guilty that you’re obstructing someone else’s way (though I could list one or two people who weren’t bothered by that even in shared housing). What I like best is that when I do go around switching things off, I don’t have anyone to whinge that I’ve done it and go around turning things back on again and if I leave something on then I have nobody to blame for the bill but myself. Unfortunately, this sometimes doesn’t outweigh the feeling late at night when when I could do with someone to chat to, or how I occasionally miss the amusement of listening to my (frankly quite tone deaf) housemate singing the same line from a song repeatedly. Having recently spent an afternoon in bed with a chest infection that left me feeling drained and sore, it reminded me of the days sharing a place when they would kindly offer to cook or fetch things (and I offered the same - though in my case cooking usually involved offering a bowl of soup). It’s at those times that I truly feel alone, and chatting online just isn’t the same.

On the plus side, several of my friends live fairly close to me so I can see them regularly (although the tires of work have meant that we have not met up recently), and it’s always great to see them again. I’m grateful that a fair number of my friends are still in the area and that we are still keeping in touch. As inevitable as moving on is, some of those friendships I would not like to have broken by such a trivial fact as distance.

Which brings me around to work. Well, not so much work but the things its existence do to the way you perceive time. As a student, I had a fairly set timetable with half of the year as holiday time… sorry, study breaks. Now I am bound to a set number of days leave a year with the need to arrange my days well in advance so that we can always guarantee enough staff available at work. It certainly shifts the way you plan things into a much longer scale of events. As an example, I planned to visit my family this weekend only to discover that several of them ave gone away (and I have no doubt that they are currently getting very, very wet) and I will probably not be able to come back for several weeks. I now finding myself planning days off in December, asking my family what their plans are a month in advance and thinking about things I would need to have done before I could disappear for a few days. I’m now a firm believer that graduates should be given a pack with these things pointed out in advance.

And onto the job itself. If you had told me ten years ago that this is what I would be doing, I would have laughed at you. The goals were always so clear - get a degree, train to become a teacher, get qualified in it, teach. It sounded so straightforward. However, over the last few years two thoughts have derailed that dream. The first is how disheartened teachers seem to be these days with teaching - too much paperwork and too much “teaching to pass instead of teaching to inspire”. The second was a general desire to just get out of education and do something different. As a result, the job I got couldn’t have come at a better time - I had just finished exams and was looking around at the type of job that was going for someone with qualifications like what I has got and afraid that I would get a job that would get me stuck behind a job 9-5 doing some form of monotony after another (the initial reason I was against solely doing Computing in the first place). Instead, I have a job that is varied in content, ranging from support to programming to networking and working with people just as eager to teach me as I am to learn it… even if I may not grasp it straight away. Sure, there are occasional things that are run-of-the-mill, but show me a job that doesn’t have those! Most importantly, any job where you get to work with people who enjoy banter and the occasional verbal joust is well worth any repetition. They even seem able to tolerate the fact that I very rarely shut up. I wonder if therapy bills are being docked from my wages? More importantly, I even felt close to a couple of them that I was able to tell them why it’s a bad thing when I do go quiet and some of the reasons I am as I am… other than being completely bonkers, I mean.

Within four days I will have started my new job, within six days I will know what my degree classification will be, and within three weeks I will have graduated. Until then, however, I’m in a state of transition, and I hate it! Whilst I can be quite patient and wait for things to happen, I find it difficult to do so when the deadlines are some pre-determined fixed point. It’s those states of transition when you’re neither fully in one place or in another, whether that’s waiting for a degree classification and not quite being a student but not quite being a graduate, or in the process of moving house with some of your things in one location and some in another, or apprehensively awaiting the start of your new job.

As I write this, I am spending the first night in my new flat. Whilst some things have been assembled here, the majority of my things are either boxed, piled or still at the old house and as such are no use to me. In the case of my bed and wardrobe, they have still to be bought.

I said to myself this morning that there was nothing more deeply unnerving than an empty home, but I may have been wrong - what’s even more unnerving is having two partially inhabitable abodes. You could say that both places are in a state of transition - moving from inhabited to uninhabited, or vice versa.

Whilst I have plenty of reading to be catching up on (the number of manuals that come with this place is impressive, although as usual the one I really want isn’t provided) I find myself thinking `Oh, so-and-so would be on telly about now` or `I’ll just see if so-and-so is online or what they’re up to` or `I’ll just relax for a bit and read so-and-so` and can’t because I don’t have all of my things over here! Some of them are, in fact, 90 miles away.

I appreciate that it could be far worse and I could be doing all this moving while I was working - a prospect some of my friends are facing - but that isnt helping a great deal! Although I don’t regret the decision to get a place of my own, given that several of my friends will be living nearby, they won’t be moving for about a week so on a night like this where all I have is my dvd collection and radio for company, it has felt quite lonely at some points. Listen to me, I sound like I’ve been encased in this building for weeks!

And the moving of friends raises another point - some of them I may not see again for a very long time, if at all. What a disturbing thought! After three years endlessly harassing them, they get away scot free! We can’t be having this! It is a pleasing thought, though, that some of them are remaining in Leeds and that we’ll be able to keep in touch. Well… I’ll keep in touch and they’ll sob uncontrollably, thinking they’d escaped me. Bwahahaha, and all that.

One thing I’m glad I’ve done, despite the inevitable damage to my back, is to spend this night at the flat to get used to the building, the sounds of a 13-storey building and its inner workings (the designer of the constantly-running ventilation system in my flat has an entirely different definition of the word `quiet` to the one I have, and as such it’s been switched off!) and to get over the initial disorientation of being in a new place. The alternative was to wait until the bed was in, which would most likely have been Saturday or Sunday, thus leaving me little time to acclimatise. I’d rather be cranky around my friends thanto turn up for my first day of work on Monday complaining of lack of sleep - it wouldn’t have made a good first impression! Unfortunately, I don’t have a working fridge at present, so no cereal or toast in the morning… I know, I know, I’m deprived. Wait, wrong vowel!

Whilst the view out of my balcony is less than impressive at the moment, due to the construction going on next door and further up the hill, it is beautiful at night when the lights of the flats opposite come on and light up the building! I’ve even bought myself a deck chair so that when I’m more settled in I can sit outside and enjoy the lights… and ignore the evening traffic. Hopefully I’ll still enjoy it as much in the morning when construction resumes at some unspeakably early hour! When I start work on Monday this won’t be a problem, of course, as I’d be expected to be up at that time anyway!

As this post is going up the morning after the fact, I hope you have all had a pleasant night’s sleep! Despite an hour of restlessness, I eventually nodded off and, as predicted, woke to the sound of construction next door. Oh well, at least it will wake me on a morning when it’s time to go to work!