I love how shallow I have become

I bought a pair of knee-high snakeskin boots yesterday. I know, I know, if you'd suggested two months ago that I'd be looking at myself in the mirror wearing nothing but a pair of knee-high snakeskin boots then I would have laughed. But love, or the lack of it, does funny things to people; and now here I am.

My doctor says I've been overdoing it. I went to him with back pain and he tells me it's a chest infection. It's my lungs that are aching, not my back, which is why I look 'run-down'. What? I don't look run-down! I look great. Everybody keeps telling me how great I look, in my new clothes with my new hair and my new weight and my new french fucking manicure on each fingernail. But my doctor thinks I look run-down. He's never even seen me before.

I tell him I work long days, but I don't tell him about how I sat for two hours last Saturday on Sandymount platform at 5 in the morning, smoking cigarettes and shivering in a mini-skirt, waiting for the first Dart to show up. Or how before that I'd left a party I'd been to with my new celebrity friends — talk show hosts and basketball stars, all of them — and then realised I'd left my cash card in the VIP area and had no way of either getting home or getting back inside. And I don't tell him how it was only then that I realised, oh, maybe the talk show hosts and basketball stars aren't really my friends after all, otherwise why would I be sitting by myself on Sandymount platform, smoking cigarettes and shivering in a mini-skirt, waiting two hours for the first Dart to show up?

He prescribes a course of antibiotics and sends me to bed. But after three days I cant take anymore of this thinking shit — which is avoidable when you're working long days or hanging around with talk show hosts and basketball stars, but entirely unavoidable when you have to spend three days alone in bed — and so I get up and drag my friend the chest infection to the high street where we spend €300 in a panic on a pair of knee-high snakeskin boots. I don't even like snakeskin. Does anybody?

By the time I meet Rosie for dinner I'm feeling feverish, and without me even asking she runs out to the shop to get me some paracetamol. I'm glad I bought her a gift, I think, as I fumble in my bags for the little package from L'Occitane. I want her to like me.