It was only when I went back to the bookshop that I realised that I’d confused Dostoyevsky with Nabokov, and that reading White Nights wasn’t going to be as easy as I thought it was. I wanted to smack my head off the bookshelf, hard, for doing it again- subtly showing off about being someone I’m not, and being wrong anyway. 

 

I’ll often go into the bookshop just to stand for a bit; or look for a certain book, and when they don’t have it, leave. I don’t really know who I’m fooling, or impressing, or anything at all. I’ll see a book I recognise, and then talk about it silently all the way home, about how much I think and know. Most of the time I’ll still be talking to him. It’s awful even to admit on paper- how much I hated his pretentiousness, even after, and how much I still try to match and surpass it. I just have to be better. 

 

I don’t know where I am and I don’t know how to start a sentence properly without “I”. I spend all of my time narrating, living as if through a playback or out of my body, thinking and editing. It scares me how easily a person can see through another, and how hard I find it to do the same. Is it them who ruin me or am I doing the ruining? The same people come and go and I get worse, taking parts of them and making it my own, but for what reason I’m not sure- I don’t want them anywhere near me. But they follow me around and I indulge them, talking to them all the time until they torment me every second of the day. 

 

So I change my music taste, I find different clothes, I swear off the places I used to go and replace them with new ones. I like it. 

 

They always go as soon as they ask what I want. I freeze every time. As much time as I spend in myself, unpicking and rebuilding and imagining, I have no preferences. ‘Whatever you want’, and then they leave.

So I leave Dostoyevsky on my side table where it will stay until it’s dusty like the others, and maybe someone will comment on it and finally I’ll have to admit my shallowness. Or I’ll say nothing at all.