For a minute there I lost myself

"I just want simplicity. No more convoluted situations, no secrets I can hide from some, lie barefaced to others and throw heavy-handed at an unlucky few. I'm tired and I can only sustain selfishness for a short time and then it all comes tumbling down on me and I have to care about everybody else. I do my best to speak plainly, tell people what I think with a degree of tact. Yes, I lie. Yes, I reshape history, omitting certain truths or at most telling them so off-handedly that I think I sound like I don't care. Sometimes I don't remember what is real and what I imagined. In the end what I'm trying to say is when are you going to stop pretending. I am half-sick of shadows."

But the kittens have lost interest and the music changes. Goddamn Radiohead. Sheet music is before me and my beautiful neglected acoustic in my hand. The neck fits so well in my grip and I wrap my body around its own. I remember Em and Am and Bm. You can't play a Thom Yorke song without a hearty dose of the minors. I remember smiling when the other girl thought C was a stretch. I remember being happy there were no bar chords because I was terrible at them. And I remember being glad I didn't have to read tab despite being told that anybody can read tab. It messed me up. I blamed my tutor. He had spent a year and a half teaching me classical fingering. I had just about mastered a Malaguena when he changed his mind and handed me a sheet of chords to learn. I'm gonna brag here and tell you that I was the only girl still taking guitar and I was the only one who didn't mess up the practical exam. My ex boyfriend freaked out and my soon to be current boyfriend fluffed his 2nd song. The music department took care of me. I was the token female guitarist and sound engineer. It meant I spent time in the cupboard with boys who at first tried to feel me up but soon accepted me as one of them. We did things like write Gibson and Fender on the school guitars that had more holes than strings, and folded every piece of paper into an aeroplane. We also shunned the Viking and the wandering minstrel and invented our own tunes slagging off the waster that nobody liked and was the only one who still called me a frigid cow even when it stopped being relevant. The only lyrics I remember are "Why is Glenn standing over there? Because he's a fucking idiot." All of this floated through my head as I sat in the bar full of kittens and performed.

I woke up half-way down the stairs and flinched as I realised I'd been dreaming. I stumbled back to my bedroom and wrapped a blanket around my freezing legs. Maybe Freud could tell me why I keep having conversations with kittens, or people who turn into kittens. The internet (which is much quicker than finding a working flux capacitor) tells me that "To dream of kittens, denotes abominable small troubles and vexations will pursue and work you loss, unless you kill the kitten, and then you will overcome these worries." But the same site tells me that if I dream of "kissing a strange woman, denotes loose morals and perverted integrity" and come on, no it doesn't. If anything it says I have latent lesbian tendencies, durr hey. But the site is the reproduction of a book written in 1901 and I don't care enough to look at others.