Please stop confusing love with praise and attention

Rita's turning 80 this week and I want to know what she'd do differently with her life if she was starting all over again. I find myself doing this a lot lately: pressing people for more stories and wisdom than they were expecting to have to share.

“Body lotion,” says Rita, lighting a Silk Cut like a full stop. This conversation is over, my friend.

Body lotion! I don't believe her. She just doesn't want to spend another afternoon discussing love and ambition and personal failure.

“Okay, fine,” I say, leaving it alone.

Rita calls me Annie Get Your Gun, and so does the caretaker at work. I tell her that now – how I turned up for my first day too early, and the caretaker had to let me in and he said what's your name and I said Annie and he said oh yeah, Annie get your gun, is it?

“Yeah,” I said. "You got it.”

I like it when older people reference Annie Oakley when I meet them. It makes me feel like a cowboy. Then they wink at me and I wink back and nobody knows what just happened – but it has something to do with riding a horse through a canyon when really it's my first day at work and I'm not even sure where to find the bathroom.

“Down the hall and to the left,” said the caretaker, and I'd walked off down the corridor where he was pointing.

The building was quiet and dank and felt more like an old cigarette factory than a film studio. But that's because that's what it is. I walked past the empty costume hall with all the empty costume racks and into the bathroom; then I went and found the empty art department and claimed a desk and a pile of scripts and started reading. People assume that being a graphic artist on a TV show means you work on the opening titles or something – but that's a whole other department. My job is to make the graphics that the actors actually use in the set: old treasure maps and period newspapers and boxes of vintage cigarettes. Isn't that a great job? To be put in charge of making old love letters for the actors to pass between them on set?

I am making all this sound way more romantic than it is.

Rita is falling asleep. I remember her once telling me I should stop confusing love with praise and attention. My scalp is itching. Sometimes I wonder if I have skin cancer — is an itching scalp a symptom? Also, when people say “I've nearly finished my book” are they talking about reading a book or writing one? It's hard to tell sometimes and it makes me feel anxious. I tried to read/write something last night but I got distracted and ended up drawing a picture of an owl instead.

I tear the owl out of my notebook now and leave it on Rita's dresser. Stop confusing love with praise and attention, she said. I think I'm trying to impress her.

Shanna Germain

One Person's Forever is Another Person's Summer

"It's amazing what you can fit in to these small cars, isn't it," says Adrian at Storage World, watching me load up my boxes. I don’t think it's in his job description to help with any lifting.

"Yes, Adrian," I say. "My entire life."

I only say this because that's what people always say when they pack up their physical possessions, but I don’t really believe it. I'm more romantic than that and I like to think my life fits in footprints on mountains and in pictures I took in the desert — not in fifteen cardboard boxes jammed into the back of a Nissan Micra.

But it does, of course. I slam the boot shut, say goodbye to Adrian, and shift my entire life over the river to the other side of town. Then I sit down on my new bedroom floor and pick through the boxes. I have too much shit, I think, for someone who moves house once every six months. Definitely too many books, anyway. People love giving me books. They mistake me for a reader because I'm so great at spelling. I can spell pretty much anything right first time — even 'accommodation', which was the most frequently misspelled word of last year, according to a survey in the New York Times — but I can't read a book from start to finish.

Here's one now: a tattered yet never-read copy of The Grapes of Wrath. Inside the front cover someone has written:

With love forever, John.

Forever! I only vaguely remember him. Hmm. Yeah, I vaguely remember him eventually getting together with another girl in college named Summer.

"One person's forever is another person's summer," I say out loud, throwing the book back into the box and laughing at my own joke.

The house is quiet. I pull a blanket out of a bag and curl up with it on the floor between all the boxes. This is my usual response to having loads of stuff to sort out: take a nap. I can't sleep though, it's only midday, so I just stare up at the ceiling for a while and think about the future.

I've moved in with a lovely woman, as her lodger, in my favourite part of Dublin. It's only a temporary arrangement while I work on my temporary job, which is on a temporary TV drama about the building of a temporary ship they called the Titanic. They didn't realise while they were building it, of course, that it would only be a temporary ship: it was another thing on the long list of things that are meant to last forever. My screenwriting teacher, Mary Kate, says this is classic dramatic irony. And that just means the audience know the characters are fucked before they do.

Filming will last until November, then the sets will be torn down and the crew will go home and my equipment will be packed back up in to boxes. I'll take them to Adrian at Storage World again and then what? Go back to America, I think, and take more photographs of the desert. But when I'd said that to Megan she'd shrugged and said hey, who knows what'll happen between now and November.

There's an old fireplace in my room and I get up off the floor and start stacking some of the books up on top of it. Maybe this year I'll try to finish some of them — then I can give them away again. I have too much shit, I think, for someone who has no forever.

Magic Megan

{ Mulligan's beer garden in Stoneybatter }

Back in Town

I feel a little bit unsure when I get back to Dublin, like maybe I don't belong here or something, so I put on my aviator sunglasses and I go out driving. Am I a fugitive or some kind of a lady cop? Nobody knows.

I stop to pick up Megan — magic, magic Megan — who'd surprised me at the airport when I landed back in Dublin. SURPRISE she'd said, throwing out her arms, and I had been confused and then happy and then I'd started to cry a little bit. But crying at an airport isn't the kind of thing a fugitive and/or a cop would do, so let's not talk about that right now.

Back in town, back on the road. Is there any feeling greater than driving around town in your aviators? Sometimes I don't know whether to wave hello to people or pull them over.

Happy Summer Solstice

{ with Juste and Vala at midnight in Reykjavik }

Thank You So Much for Thinking of Me

Dear Adrian

Thank you for your email asking if I'm ever coming back home. I'm pleased to be able to tell you that I've accepted a job in Ireland and I'm on my way back for the rest of the summer. I should be there as soon as tomorrow.

You know, it means a lot to me that there are people like you — real Dubliners — asking for me and referring to Dublin as my 'home'. When I left town back in March it was like the city no longer had a place for me. I felt crazy and lost, unrooted and alone, and it was all I could do to run away to America again... like I do whenever things go a bit wrong.

But this has been a very good time for me. I've spent many evenings pouring my heart out to my closest friends, and they've fed me baked goods and interesting things made out of spinach. I've also poured my heart out to many strangers, actually, and some of them even stopped in the street to listen. I drove it like I stole it on the freeway, I made it through Vegas without losing any money or sleeping with anybody, and I've photographed many rock bands and some babies. (Well, mostly babies to be honest. Apparently 'that is where the money is').

I've also spent some time in Oakland with people less fortunate than I am, and I've realised that just because I don't have a forwarding address right now doesn't mean I can swan off around the world referring to myself as 'homeless'. I am not homeless, Adrian. I am the opposite of homeless. I've been the guest of so many beautiful people in their beautiful houses; I've eaten at the finest roadside diners; and I've slept peacefully in a tent in a northern Californian forest. I've seen Nevada, Reykjavik, and wild, wild Oregon, and I've thrown up my arms on a rooftop in Brooklyn and I have taken Manhattan.

Oh, and I also hired a hitman to shoot dead the worst side of my personality in the Arizona desert — but that's another story.

So as you can see, Adrian, I'm not crazy anymore. I'm just a little bit older, a little bit wiser, and I just want to come back home and get some work done for a while.

Thank you, so much, for thinking of me.

Annie

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Er, yeah, that's grand Annie, I just needed your credit card details so we can charge you for the extra month you were away.

thanks

Adrian Jones, Manager

Storage World

Herdís Hekla

This is my little goddaughter, the daughter of the previously mentioned "David the Postman" who moved in to my spare room all those years ago. David married Arna and had two lovely kids in a small town on the south coast of Iceland, where they built a shed and turned it into a cafe. Next time you're passing Eyrarbakki you should visit. He still bakes amazing bread.

The Iceland Weather Report

{ Alda Sigmundsdóttir }

An Empty House in Reykjavik

There's a beautiful little stone cottage in Dublin that I want to rent when I get back, with a tiny overgrown garden and no furniture. This could be a problem because I have no furniture either — but really, who cares? I spent my first year in Reykjavik living in a wooden house with nothing but two empty crates, a mattress, and a set of fairy-lights to my name. And that was one of the happiest times of my life.

"Er, no it wasn't, mate," says Cathy on the phone. "I remember you telling me at the time. You said you were quite depressed, actually."

"I wasn't depressed!" I say. "That was one of the happiest times of my life."

"Hang on," says Cathy. "I'll get the email up."

She puts the phone down and searches her mail for 'I'm quite depressed, actually', but I can't believe she'll find anything. I'm often overwhelmed with joy when I think back to that beautiful, wonderful time in Iceland.

"Hello?" she says. "Here it is: March 2004. Dearest Cathy. I still don't have any friends or any furniture. All I have is two empty crates and a mattress to my name. I'm going to walk into the sea tomorrow with rocks in my pockets."

Oh. Really? That's strange. I don't remember writing that.

"I'll forward it to you," says Cath. "You don't even mention the set of fairy-lights."

Nostalgia is a strange thing, isn't it? Of course, if I think about it, I do remember being lonely in Reykjavik. I remember staring out of my kitchen window at all the people on the main street in the evenings, wishing they'd beckon merrily at me to join them. They didn't. It was a very long, dark winter. I drank tea. I ate sardines from a can. I took long walks through the freezing wind out to the old lighthouse and I sat in fishing shacks and drew clumsy, poorly-observed sketches in my notebook. I didn't have a camera, or a computer, or a blog. It was very cold and I slipped on the ice a lot. I was 23 and maybe I should have gone to Ibiza with my friends.

But I also remember that the empty house was where, eventually, I did manage to make some friends. I remember the girls from work coming over to drink Viking beer on the floorboards with me. They brought cushions. I remember them laughing at my (frankly ridiculous) stories, most of which I completely made up just because I didn't want them to ever leave again. Ursula started inviting me over, a mountain guide who I referred to as 'my Swiss Army Wife'. She cooked elaborate Italian meals with one hand, rolled smokes with her other hand, and opened bottles of beer with her teeth. A postman called David moved in to my spare room and baked a lot of bread. Spring came along, the midnight sun shone, and I loved everything about it.

I never did get any furniture, though.

"Well, then why not take this empty cottage in Dublin," says Cathy. "You already have some people there that you can start to fill it with."

"Yes, I think I will," I say. "And if I ever feel like walking in to the sea with rocks in my pockets, don't worry, I'll be sure to send you an email all about it first."

Quentin Fottrell

{ West 22nd Street }

I Heart New York

"You're a New Yorker," says Jeff, "if you've been in the city longer than the person you're talking to."

I've been here two days and I am quite clearly still the newest person on the whole island of Manhattan. We're at a costume party on the Upper East Side and I'm wearing my battered leather jacket and a trilby lent to me by Quentin, because needless to say I didn't have anything even vaguely glamorous in my rucksack. The party is confusing me because now I think everybody here drinks martinis and dresses like Mad Men characters all the time. Maybe they do?

Jeff and I eat pretzels and watch the inimitable Quentin flit around the apartment like a social butterfly. He moved here only three months ago from Dublin and it's like he's been here all his life.

I want to be a New Yorker, too, I think to myself. In fact, I won't be happy until New York shows up at this party wearing an I ♥ Annie t-shirt.

On a Rooftop in Brooklyn

{ The Fantastic Ms Cox }

They Will Simply Feed on Your Eyelids

The fleas turned out to be mites, the mites turned out to be bedbugs, and the bedbugs turned out to be a complete figment of my imagination. If you've never experienced bedbugs — or at least never experienced reading about bedbugs, alone, all night long on the internet — then you should probably stop reading this right now because you just won't understand. You probably think bedbugs are funny, or fictitious, or even cute. But they're not.

"Do you know anything about bedbugs?" I asked my friend Ed on the phone, after waking up covered in what looked like small insect bites one morning.

"Yes," said Ed, with a heavy sigh of apprehension. "I know they are an excellent reason to sell your house."

*

Bedbugs are insects the size of small woodlice that live in the darkest crevices of your home. They come out only in the hour before dawn, when your sleeping body is at its stillest, and use their long incisors to inject you with an anaesthetic so you can't feel them sucking out your blood for 10 or maybe 15 minutes. You might wake up an hour later itching like crazy, but by then the bugs will be gone back to their hiding places. It is no good changing beds, or sleeping on the couch: the bedbugs will find you. It is no good trying to poison them: bedbugs are almost entirely indestructible. It is no good sleeping with your clothes on: the bedbugs will simply feed on your eyelids.

"You done any travelling lately?" asks the exterminator — whose name is Vinny from Texas — when I call him in a panic.

"Um," I say, trying not to swallow my tongue. "Some."

"Yeah," he says. "They probably came in your backpack from a motel or someplace like that. I can come over first thing in the morning and give you an inspection."

"But I can feel them crawling on me," I say. "I'm looking after this house for my friends – they're coming back next week. I need you to come right now, Vinny, right away."

"Can you actually see any bugs right now, ma'am?"

Vinny doubts very much that I can. It is 10 o'clock on a bright Sunday morning and he wants to get back into bed with his wife. He wonders where I got his cellphone number from. Online, probably, on one of those hysterical bedbug 'forums'. He wishes he knew how to delete it. Isn't there some kind of service provider — not unlike Vinny's own pest control business — that can eradicate your personal phone number from the internet? He can hear Julie getting out of the bed upstairs. Dammit. There is no finer feeling to Vinny than lying pressed up against her beautiful warm body when she's sleeping in on a Sunday morning, and now he's missed it.

"No," I say, pacing back and forth in the empty house. "I can't see anything. But I can feel them. Crawling on me. Feasting."

"Ma'am," says Vinny, sighing. "You been under any stress lately?"

My stress is entirely centred around the fact that I am house-sitting for two of my closest friends and, after they have looked after me for two whole months — cooking for me, caring for me, listening to my shit — I have now gone and infested their house with indestructible termites. They are about to lose everything – everything! — and it is all my fault. Welcome home, closest friends.

"So, yeah, I'm finding that pretty fucking stressful to be frank with you, Vinny," I explain to him.

"Okay, lady," he says. "Until you've seen a bug, you don't know that it's bedbugs you got. And nobody has to lose their house. I suggest you take a valium and get some rest, and I'll come by first thing in the morning for an inspection."

And then he hangs up.

*

Bedbugs multiply like crazy, is what it says online. They are nearly impossible to kill. They carry no disease but have made many people psychologically ill: bed is where you should be at your most relaxed, not where you fear being eaten alive in the dead of night. I scratch at my wrists. There's a man on Craigslist in New York selling seven dead bedbugs for $200 each. He knows how much these things are worth: landlords won't get your apartment sprayed unless they have cold hard evidence. People get crazy in the summertime as the city heats up: families fall apart, relationships break up, everyone needs something to direct their anger at. Bedbugs just take the rap.

I close my laptop. I don't need to read this shit. I know what it is, I'm not crazy, it's almost certainly a bedbug infestation. I pull on my jacket and go out to the hardware store to buy some traps: twelve plastic cylinders that fit under the legs of the beds, each dusted with talcum powder. The bugs crawl in on their way to feed on you at night, and then they can't crawl back out again. Tonight, I will lie in the bed and wait for them to come to me, then pick them out of the traps in the morning. I can present them to Vinny as evidence, then he can spray the house with kryptonite before my friends even get back from their vacation. Yes, I'll just have to lie very still on the bed for six hours tonight.

"Essentially," I explain to Dharma, who lives across the street. "I am the bait."

"That seems a bit extreme," says Dharma, who had to comfort me earlier over all this and is beginning to worry about the state of my mental health. "Can't you just come and stay with us and throw a big old steak on the bed instead?"

No, Dharma, unfortunately I cannot. Bedbugs are attracted to the carbon dioxide in our breath, not just the smell of blood. I've done my research, I know what I'm dealing with. I'm practically the resident Oregon bedbug expert at this point.

Dharma sighs and shakes her head. "Well, good luck, Annie," she says.

That night I make sure the bedsheets aren't touching the floor: that's just like throwing a rope down to the termites and inviting them up for more. Each trap is set under each leg of the bed. My bites are itching and I smother them with calomine lotion, then I spread myself out star-shaped in my underwear, making sure plenty of skin is exposed so the bugs can smell my blood.

"Good luck, mate," says Cathy, calling to say goodnight, from way over on the other side of the Atlantic, where it is already light.

"Thanks Cath," I say, wearily. "I'll call you in the morning, with the new evidence."

Cathy doesn't say anything but she thinks that this may be the worst of my hypochondria that she's seen yet, possibly even worse than the deep vein thrombosis I had in Tibet, or the six months that I lived with breast cancer, yet refused to get a test. "Goodnight, then," is all she says, gently. "Please just try to get some rest."

Rest is a nice thought, but it's not going to happen. This is what I get for ever running away to America in the first place. An infestation; my friends' home ruined. This sleepless night, I'm afraid, is my punishment.

*

At 9.30 I'm woken up by Lola barking and a loud knocking at the front door. Fuck it, I've overslept. I pull on my t-shirt and jeans (that are hanging carefully from the ceiling) and run downstairs to let the exterminator in. Lola dashes out in to the garden to take a piss, then rushes back and bounds around him.

"Hey," says Vinny, giving her a good rub, and I instantly warm to him. "Ready for the inspection?"

He is shorter than I expected, and less Texan. I also expected him to have some kind of jumpsuit on — and a pack on his back with the kryptonite — but he just wears jeans and a sweater and looks like a regular guy.

"I'm ready," I say, letting him in. Vinny comes upstairs and together we inspect the traps. Nothing. Lola watches us from the doorway. Vinny pulls on a pair of surgical gloves, then examines the bedding. I feel strangely embarrassed that the bed is probably still warm. He goes through all the linen with a magnifying glass and a flashlight, then he goes through the mattress, then the furniture, then the picture frames on the wall, then he starts on the skirting boards. Nothing.

"Nothing?"

"Nothing."

"But what about my bites?"

Vinny takes my arm and gently inspects the small pink marks.

"Could be mosquitos," he says. "Or a reaction to bleach, if you use that in your washing at all."

Suddenly, I want to kiss Vinny. I don't, of course: he's the pest control manager and I'm not crazy. I just pay him 50 bucks, thank him profusely, then he goes home to his beautiful wife and I start packing up for New York.

Oregon Ghost Town

{ in the window }

What it is to Love and Care for an Animal

David left town, too, to meet his wife and child on the East Coast, and I stayed on in Portland and looked after their house and dog. If Fiona took Summer with her then David took whatever was left of Spring, and the rain kept on until I began to wonder if there might be some kind of flood.

Lola doesn't seem that keen on getting wet but we go out anyway just so she can take a shit. I pick it up afterwards and put it in the bin, and even though the plastic bag stops any of it touching my skin I can still feel the warmth of it on my hand when we get back in. I get showered and put my pyjamas on because I feel like I'm getting a cold. That's okay. I'm tired of keeping busy and I want an excuse to just curl up into a foetal position for a while and mope.

I lie in bed for the day, then sneeze my way to the grocery store for enough food to survive a small nuclear war. Lola waits outside in a puddle, her ears pricking up every time she hears the automatic doors. A woman called Maureen helps me bag up my cans of soup then hands me a dog treat to give to her.

"I was brought up in a home with many pets," she says. "I know what it is to love and care for an animal."

Maureen looks and speaks like a robot, as if she never loved or cared about anything in her life, but I know that appearances can be deceptive and so I clear my throat and say thanks, that's kind. The only reason my voice still works is because of this dog. Sit down, good girl, come here. Let's make some tea and you can tell me all about your day. I very badly want her to sleep up against me on the bed at night, but she keeps jumping off and going back to Fiona and David's room as if they're still there, but they're not.

When we get in from the store I try to start packing up for New York, but just the thought of getting on a plane again exhausts me and I just lie there on the couch and stare at the wall. I decide to eat something and look online for a while, and a message pops up from Therese saying if I'm coming to NYC then maybe we could meet up? I'm excited by this because I like her blog, and I think she likes mine because she mentions the briefcase and the rogue dollars and stuff. I wonder if I should let my image slide and tell her that right now I'm lying on the couch with a bowl of mashed potato and just thinking about flying is making my legs feel paralysed. But in the end I write back and just say hey, yes, that would be great, maybe we can go out taking photos around Brooklyn. I include some exclamation marks then delete them again in case I put her off. Then I put them back in and hit send and immediately regret them again.

Eventually, Lola asks for dinner and I get up to feed her and give her fresh water. She's getting kind of old, I think. The rain seems to have stopped and sunshine cracks up the clouds so we go out to the porch together and I give her some fuss. Lie down, roll over, let me rub your tummy. Want to see a movie together this weekend? I wonder what I'll do tonight. Hot bath, maybe, then play the guitar. I forgot that my legs are supposed to be paralysed. I guess I just stopped thinking about that stuff when it was time to get up and feed the dog.

Fiona & David & baby Finn

Pit Stop

Fiona left with the baby to visit her folks back home, and it was like Summer got in her hand luggage and took off with her. The Portland rain is persistent and I now spend most of my time in damp shoes working at my laptop alone in coffee shops.

I got some work while I'm here making mood-boards for a film company back home, and I sat at the counter in The Fresh Pot every day for a week and treated it like my office job. Making mood-boards involves finding photos to illustrate the script, then working on the colours until they create the right atmosphere for the plot. This is exactly the kind of work I love, and when the director emailed me after seeing the final draft and said yes, we're done, that's it, I was almost disappointed. It's becoming clearer and clearer to me that I'm tired of being a fugitive and all I really want is to be working again. So when I got an email from an Icelandic client asking if I'd get some video footage here, I said yes, of course I would. But I have to work fast, I explained. My visa is running out and I need to get off the continent.

"We'll send the camera tomorrow," he promised.

"And will you fly me to Iceland afterwards so I can make videos for you there, too?" I asked, confidently, like an American might have done.

"Alright," he said, surprising me, and I had to reassess the direction I wanted to travel in. Iceland? Again? It's been four years since I lived there and I was sure I'd gotten over it and moved on. But suddenly I like the idea of going back, even if it's just for a short trip. I could get in touch with Ursula and see if she still lives downtown. We used to sit out on her balcony in the midnight sun, and I have romantic notions that everything will be exactly the same this time around. But I haven't spoken to her in years now and for all I know she got over it, too, and moved on.

Still, just the thought of Iceland is making up for the stupid yet crushing heartache I'm feeling about leaving the States. I love it here, I've always loved it here, and all of a sudden I feel panicked about going back to Europe. I didn't do enough; I didn't see New Mexico; I never took Manhattan.

"What about a pit stop in New York?" I asked, my new American confidence taking over completely. The windows of the coffee shop had steamed up and people came in off the streets, sheltering in the doorway from the latest downpour of Portland rain. I wondered what Manhattan Island looks like in the sunshine. "Imagine all the great footage I could get for you there," I wrote.

"Alright, Atkins," came the reply, eventually. "Just don't screw this up."

Things to Make and Do

{ ETHER CIRCUS }

I took some promo pics of Jake's band down by the old railway tracks last week. They said this summer is going to be the best yet: they have so many shows lined up and there'll be all kinds of festivals and parties — I should go along if I'm still around.

I'd like to, but the truth is I'm not sure how much longer I'll be about. On the one hand, I love the idea of more West Coast. On the other hand, I'm beginning to feel like I'm treading water, and anyway, my visa is running out. I thought about going to Canada briefly and then back again, but I have to be realistic: I spent all my money on an imaginary hitman and I can't afford to "go to Canada briefly and then back again".

I think it might be time to move on.

Tall Tom featuring Jeff the Goat

This is Tall Tom, who lives in the house next door and is a rapper and a farmer. When he told me this I didn't quite believe him. A rapper and a farmer? How is that even possible? But he just laughed and shrugged like anything is possible and invited me down to his farm to take some photos. Tall Tom has three goats, countless chickens, and a voice like magic jelly beans.

My Heart is a Cold Hard Stone

Daniel thinks I should stop blogging about heartbreak. He doesn't want to sound like an asshole, he knows I'm going through something of an upheaval, but I'm not doing myself any favours by writing about it.

"Oh," I say, and we sit down on a bench on Mississippi Avenue. It's beautiful here at the moment: the sun is shining and the cherry trees drop blossom all over the place. It's the kind of time of year that would make your heart sing with joy, if you were happy. In fact, if you were here right now, and if you were happy, you might pick this exact moment to write one of those texts to your other half that just say: "I love you!" — just because you want them to know.

"Don't get me wrong," Daniel goes on. "I've written my share of angst in the past. It's just, maybe, you know…"

Yes, I do know. I'm suspicious of Daniel. I suspect he wants to kiss me. He'd already reached for my hand, some time ago, and I'd jumped back and said, uh, I'm sorry, but I'm not ready for this, I'm going through a process here, can we just be friends?

Daniel had lied and said yes, and one night I went along to his show and watched his band play songs about, yes, you guessed it: heartbreak. Why is it okay for musicians to go on and on about their failed romance, but not for me? I wish I were a country music star. I'd write sad songs about walking away from love and then I'd go and sit out on the porch and play them again and again, day after day after day. Blogging is the worst type of writing because once it's out there you can never play it again. You can't take your pain on tour and every night have a different crowd sing along. You just have to pick yourself up and find new content and try not to censor yourself and carry on.

Fiona and I sometimes play guitar together in the evenings. She tries to teach me to sing and play at the same time, but I keep losing my rhythm and the notes go all over the place. Fiona has natural musical ability and I have none: I feel the same way about music as some people feel about drawing stickmen. But Fiona also has great patience and eventually, together, we play Johnny Cash and Dolly Parton and Willie Nelson and anyone else who ever sat out on their porch in the name of love — and love long gone.

Daniel sighs. I think he's losing patience. But I'm not interested in placating him. I'm finding it difficult to feel anything for the opposite sex right now other than indifference. My heart is a cold hard stone.

"My heart is a cold hard stone," I explain to him. "I already told you I'm going through a process. Don't think you can speed it up just so we can kiss."

"Jesus, Annie," says Daniel, getting up off the bench and going off me. "I'm not trying to kiss you, I'm trying to help you."

"Oh," I say, again.

Yeah, well. I get up, too, and we walk together in silence, down to the end of Mississippi. We pass the street cafés and the food carts and the people sitting around with beers listening to reggae. If you catch anyone's eye in this town they smile at you and you smile back: that's the rule. It seems like spring is turning into summer despite everything, and sometimes I can feel myself turning with it, too. But it just takes time to accept certain things, doesn't it? Life goes on; seasons change; people come and go.

If you love someone, and you're thinking of them, now might be a good time to let them know.

The Briefcase

A Photo Love Story

David & Lola

Rolling Around in the Hay

There's a sign at the supermarket checkout making me feel anxious. "Bring your own bag," it says. "And win a tree".

I do not want to win a tree. Where would I put it? Almost everything I own is in a storage locker in Ireland and here I am still rolling around in the hay with the west coast of America. A tree is the last thing I need.

On the train back through California from Oakland, I'd sat and stared out of the window at the mountains and the pines and felt something happen in my chest. It was a familiar feeling: elation and nerves and unrest. Oh God, not again, not yet... I can't let myself fall in love with America. It's okay to have this stupid crush, yes, but I don't have a work visa and I'm not in the mood for unrequited love just yet.

But my flight back to Ireland left yesterday, and I lay in Fiona and David's garden and watched the aeroplane fly over my head.

"I think I'll stay a little while longer," I called out to them through the open kitchen window. "If that's okay with you guys...".

Luckily, they said yes.

Oakland We Love You

There were only so many pieces of graffiti we could film before Astrid looked at me and said: "We need to meet more people." These are some of the stories we heard after we started getting out of the car and introducing ourselves:

Gordon

Gordon lost his right leg last July after it went gangrenous. He was on his way back to the hospital when we met him, although he didn't want to go: it's been hard, living like this, and he's scared they're going to want to amputate his other leg now, too. "There's a hole in my foot this big," he told us, shaking his head. Gordon is homeless and spends his nights trying to get some sleep in bus shelters. He has a cousin in Oakland, but he doesn't want to bother her. "She don't really like having me around," he said. "And I don't want to be a burden." Astrid hugged him before he left, and I wondered if the last time someone touched him was when they cut off his leg.

Tevere

Tevere is six years old and the only thing he's interested in is dinosaurs. "This is a Triceratops," he said, holding up his drawing for the camera. "He ate plants and lived in the Cretaceous period." Gordon wondered where the hell Tevere learnt to say all these crazy-ass names. "Didn't you like dinosaurs when you were a kid?" I asked him. "Well, yeah," said Gordon, closing his eyes like he was trying really hard to remember being someone's child. "Yeah, I guess I did."

Chonkie and eNinja

Chonkie and eNinja are turf dancers, marking out their territory on street corners. They've been dancing for years, but it's only in the last while that they've been getting paid for it. Now everybody wants them on their tour. "We're going to Europe this summer," Chonkie tells us. "They're flying us to London in a private jet."

Toni and Antoinette

Toni and Antoinette stopped to watch us filming the dancing. "I've seen those kids on TV," said Toni, and I told her we were making a music video for an English band. "What? You've heard of them in England?" she exclaimed. I said she could be in the video too, if she wanted, and she picked up her baby girl and they smiled for the camera. "We don't have any pictures of us together yet," she said, and I promised I'd print her out a copy and mail it to her.

Nathan

Astrid asked Nathan if he was proud of Oakland and he shook his head and said no. Why not? "It's so violent," he said, like it's obvious. And it is. The mural behind him is a tribute to two young girls who were killed in the building last year. One of the girls was shot in her bed, when a bullet fired through her bedroom window. But Nathan doesn't want to talk: he wants to dance. We filmed him for a while until the yellow school bus pulled up. "That's my mom," he said, pointing at the driver, and we felt a little odd, like we'd just been caught doing something we shouldn't have – filming someone's son. But Nathan's mom just laughed and said oh yeah, he loves to dance, that kid.

Tanisha

Tanisha's housing block has been taken over by gangsters, who broke in in the middle of the night and shot a tenant in front of his kids, telling them they had one week to pack up all their things and get out. Astrid filmed an interview with Nanci: aren't you scared? "No," said Nanci, looking pointedly at the camera. "I'm not scared. I know the police will do right by us, because that's their job." A cop pulled up on a motorbike and Nanci told him the whole story. He listened, he understood, he got them an attorney. It made no difference: every single tenant in the complex has since been evicted.

Monetta and Tachelle

I started talking to these women after the car pulled off, but just as I was asking them if I could take their portrait their pimp appeared from around the corner wanting to know what the fuck was going on. I backed off.

DD and his Cadillac

"May I take your photograph?" I asked DD, after spotting him across the street working on his Cadillac. "Hell no," he said, pulling his cap down over his face. "Well, can I take a picture of your car, then?" I asked, and all of a sudden it was a different story. He turned up the speakers so loud the whole street could hear, and then he stood there posing for me, letting me take as many photos as I liked. "You gettin' those rims in?" he asked.





[Astrid's back in London now, editing the footage, which will be released in September as a video for the new Cornershop track "Milking It". More photographs from our three days together over here.]

East Oakland

Driving around Oakland's Eastside is unnerving. On International Avenue we'd driven past a man loading a gun, crouched behind a car door, and I'd sank lower into the passenger seat and felt my heart leap in my chest. Astrid tells me that two people were shot dead last night just around the corner from the hotel. Today, in the glaring sunshine, the streets are mostly deserted — except for the obligatory dealers and prostitutes sitting on the corners.

We'd met up with a mural artist called Desi W.O.M.E. who said he'd take us to see some of his paintings (don't call it graffiti: it's art, not crime) so we could get some footage for this music video for Cornershop that Astrid is directing. But then at 2 o'clock he'd had to go and he'd left us on our own.

"You'll be fine," he'd said. "People don't be trippin' on neutral people."

"But how will anyone know that we're neutral people?" I'd worried, wondering what exactly 'trippin' meant, and Desi had looked at us — two pasty white women in a hire car — and laughed.

"At the very worst, they'll just think you're cops."

Astrid had arranged to meet a guy called eNinja on the corner of 88th, so we made our way up there together to give him some money. In exchange, he and his friend Chonkie will dance for the video out on the street the next day. I was excited to meet them – I'd seen a beautiful film of them "turf dancing" on the day of their friend June's funeral. June, they tell me, died when he was shot in the back of the head through his car window, driving through someone else's territory just a couple of blocks away.

Yes, driving through the Eastside is unnerving: but I left all my fears in the desert, didn't I?

"If I do get shot at in Oakland," I thought to myself. "After making shit up on my blog about getting shot when I was in Arizona… then be it on my own head."

eNinja

The Wait

What Happened in Arizona

Before I left the desert I took the worst side of my personality — the side with my temper, each of my insecurities, and my propensity for over-sharing and for being swallowed whole by emotion — and I locked her in the trunk of the car and drove her over the State border into Arizona, where a tall man in a stetson named Emmett Marking shot her in the head and left her for dead.

I'd arranged to meet Emmett in a diner in Nevada, in a small town called Boulder City near the border. I like the way Americans name all their towns 'cities', even when all they have in them is a junk shop and a hardware store. This means I must be from a city of 300 people in rural north Wales, I thought, nervously sitting up at the counter with a strawberry milkshake and trying not to stand out.

When Emmett arrived he walked right up to me and said "Where's the client?" just like that, like he really didn't care who heard him.

"In the trunk of my car," I said, handing him the case of money which he opened right there and then, counting out the dollars like he didn't care who saw him.

We drove in silence, across the Hoover Dam and into Arizona, and when we pulled over I popped open the trunk and Emmett seemed caught off guard all of a sudden. He was shocked, I think, to see that the 'client' — lying knocked out — looked exactly like me. Same hair, same clothing, same face, same frame… same thin white skin made for small Northern islands and the constant threat of rain.

"This is her?" he asked, dumbfounded, and both his posture and the pitch of his voice changed, making him seem a little frightened. I was relieved that he was showing a pathetic human side because, as I'd written his character in the silence of the car, I'd briefly considered having to fall in love with him. Be careful, ladies, of being a woman who is attracted to confidence. One day you may end up falling for an imaginary hit man.

Emmett composed himself, threw the body over his shoulder, and walked off with her behind the boulders. I waited at the car. I was curious, of course, but really — who wants to see something that looks exactly like you get shot in the head, even if it is only the very worst parts of your personality?

The car was too hot to sit in, so I stood in the sun and kicked the sand around for a while. The road was empty and stretched from one horizon to the other and I wondered what was taking so long. I spotted a lizard sitting on a rock and I lay down on the ground and got close to it, really close, right up to its face with my camera. I was just about to reach out my hand and catch it when a gunshot sounded out behind me. The lizard darted off and I knew it was all over. I got up, dusted off my shirt and jeans, and felt better.

On the drive back to Nevada, Emmett twisted and fidgeted in the passenger seat and started to irritate me.

"So, she was your twin sister or something?" he said, eventually.

I was quiet for a moment, just staring straight out at the road in front of me, then I said: "Yes, something like that," and I turned up the radio so he wouldn't keep on talking to me.

The Meeting