For some reason that song popped into my head on the drive to work this morning (an hour and a half with no car radio produces many and varied results), and I realised that those few lines are pretty descriptive of the way I�ve lived my life so far. I was one of those �special people� who changed. It ended a relationship. I don�t think I changed for the worse, but I changed and I had different ideas about life, and suddenly there was this huge rift in my relationship at the time. I was 20 and he was my first boyfriend. We�d been together for nearly three years and were even living together, and we�d always believed that we�d be together forever. Looking back it could never have worked out anyway; our ideas and expectations from life were too different. I guess I was in denial.

But he was my first love and that made it hard. I was scared to end it because I just couldn�t imagine us not being together. It had all seemed to be going so well� and then I went on this youth leadership camp run by Rotary. Whilst it didn�t put any new ideas into my head, it did something inexplicable with my old ones. It was as though everything in my brain was ripped into tiny little pieces and then scattered throughout my head. Everything I had thought and believed was still there� but it looked very different.

I came back after a week of no contact with the outside world, and our relationship was never the same.

There were two guys from that camp who �showed an interest� in me, shall we say. I tried not to let this get in the way too much. One of those people was Daniel, and Daniel can be a persistent little boy when he wants to be. I guess I never told him to stop trying, so he never did. He wrote me poems and sent me emails and I felt� special. I wasn�t even interested in him that way at first. We got along really well but I just wasn�t interested. Things changed eventually, there was a kiss� well, my boyfriend at the time never found out about it but I felt like the worst person in the world. It was just so out of character for me to be so deceitful, so underhanded.

I was a confused 20-year-old and I just felt so lost. We did break up � relatively amicably, and we are still in vague contact � and I have been with Daniel ever since. The adventures I used to dream of are coming true. We go overseas every year, we have snowboarding adventures, we do stuff. Breaking up was definitely the right thing to do, and everything has worked out better for both of us, but I just handled the whole thing so badly, I did everything wrong. The guilt from that period of time still haunts me and sometimes I really do wish I could run away from it. It�s the one little snippet of my past that I just wish I could shut out forever, but at the same time I feel as though I need to keep that awful memory so that I make sure I never make a mistake like that again.

The first few months with Daniel were hard too, because I had a very fixed notion about how a relationship was meant to work, and it was quite different from his. Since then of course we�ve worn one another down like the proverbial stones in the sea and worked out how we fit together :)

Anyway, then there are the next couple of lines, how many lives are living strange, where were you while we were getting high?

Where was I when everyone else was getting high? When all the other teenagers were rebelling, getting drunk, sleeping around, where was I? I was daydreaming, doing as I was told� the idea of rebelling never even occurred to me. Why would I do anything to disappoint my parents? They were just trying to look out for me, even if I didn�t always agree with their verdicts (what teenager does?). While others my age were going out, discovering the world, learning their boundaries, I was living in a bubble. Mostly I think that the way I lived my teenage years was the only way I could have done it. I was happy and everything worked out fine. But I was really shy and insecure, and I wasn�t interested in the bands or TV shows that the cool kids liked and I didn�t have the confidence to be noticeably different. I had a circle of friends of course, and we all had unique tastes, but I spent a lot of time in the evenings online, on IRC or ICQ. The Internet was great for me � I could be myself but not have to be seen � and I gradually became more and more confident in my bubble, so by the time I burst out of it I was ready to face whatever was outside it.

But while everyone else was getting high, I was too busy being a dork.

A young guy up the road from me � from where I grew up anyway � died last week, of pneumonia. Well, heart failure, really, as he had a degenerative muscular condition and his heart couldn�t cope with an ordinary cold. I�m not really a part of that neighbourhood anymore, so I didn�t find out until a couple of days later through mum, and I don�t even know when the funeral was. Maybe it�s today. I was trying to imagine him lying in a coffin, not in his wheelchair for a start. I haven�t seen him out of his wheelchair since he was about 9 years old (he was 22). After that he just couldn�t walk any more. But the whole coffin thing seems� well, almost sick. There�s someone�s son, someone�s big brother, someone�s friend, lying in a box, all neatly packed for the afterlife.

Just the weirdness of it is kind of floating in my head at the moment. It�s a bit like in My Girl, where Macauley�s character dies and the little girl is screaming, �they�ve taken his glasses, he can�t see without his glasses!� It�s kind of hard to accept that while the person looks just the way you remember them, there�s nobody in there. You just want to tell someone that there�s been a mistake, find the funeral organisers and say, �look, this isn�t right. He was a human being, he lived in a house with rooms and beds and couches. He didn�t live in a box. He doesn�t belong in there. He shouldn�t be in a box.�

And you can�t just reason your way out of those uncomfortable thoughts either. Rationally speaking, the person is dead, so who cares if they are in a box, or if they are planted head-first in the soil with their feet poking out? They�ll never know the difference. Their body was a vessel but now it�s empty. But nobody thinks like that, especially about loved ones. Death is something that brings about deep emotions, and you can�t just logic your emotions and uneasy ideas into oblivion. You just have to let them float around, uninvited apparitions in your head, until they are ready to settle in a dusty corner somewhere and let you move along.

Well, I was going to talk about Daniel�s work Christmas party, which was yesterday afternoon, but this entry is already really long. In essence, the Christmas party was a harbour cruise in Sydney � four hours of circling the same area, seeing the Harbour Bridge, the Opera House, Luna Park, the fort. But it was fun, and the food was great. We caught the train back with Daniel�s younger colleagues, who intended to go out to Northies for drinks afterwards. They�re nice kids (age range 19-21) but one of them really needs to grow up. Pulling faces at a teenage girl dressed as a �goth� and making loud and obnoxious comments about her just isn�t that funny. Especially since she looked genuinely hurt and left the carriage with her friend. Other than that all he talked about was where he and his friends were going to graffiti next, and repeating over and over the he�d had SO much to drink and he really had to take a piss. I�m not age-ist but that�s not really good company in any books.

Daniel & I got off the train at Woolooware (the station before Cronulla) so that we could walk home on the way and get changed, and said we�d meet them there, but luckily by the time we got home Daniel didn�t feel like going out to Northies so I didn�t have to tag along. How sociable of me.

Instead, he went out with his brother to a computer gaming place and shot at pixels on a screen, and I happily painted a wall, stroke-by-stroke, with a paintbrush. The colour change just adds so much life and depth to the room. Our unit is slowly looking nicer and I am most pleased.