And I write a letter on a one-way train, but I don't think you'll read it at all.

I just want to feel safe in my own skin

I just want to be happy again

I just want to feel deep in my own world

It was so much easier when I was a kid. My idea of a perfect life comprised of Polly Pockets, good grades and chocolate ice-cream. There was nothing ice-cream couldn't resolve; now, Ben & Jerry's doesn't work half as well as a perk-me-up. In fact, they make me fat.

But I'm so lonely I don't even want to be with myself anymore

For as long as I can remember, I've always thought being ordinary is the worst you can be. And it's so much harder now, five months away from being 20, and not knowing whether you'll ever find out what this - youth, dreams, career, marriage, love, life - is all about.

On a different day if I was safe in my own skin

Then I wouldn't feel lost and so frightened

But this is today and I'm lost in my own skin

Not knowing whether you'll ever be anything more than ordinary, anything more than what you are right now.

I just want to feel safe in my own skin

I just want to be happy again

Honestly Ok, Dido

I know I said it would never happen again.

Third stop on bus 22
The smell of strawberry biscuits
Brown uniforms and
Adidas shoes
Floppy fringe too long for rules

Tuesday mornings outside the library
Red jerseys and the number 5
Geography notes, chapter one
And the way - especially the way -
You said hello and goodbye

Marvel comics in the 1980s
Three out of hundred on a Mathematics test
Talking behind the GP tutor's back
And the meaning of CMPB
Liverpool and Man. U and Beckham's free kick

These foolish things
All these foolish things.

I wish we had made a mess out of everything.

"It seems to me that if you place music (and books, probably, and films, and plays, and anything that makes you feel) at the centre of your being, then you can't afford to sort out your love life, start to think of it as the finished product. You've got to pick at it, keep it alive and in turmoil, you've got to pick at it and unravel it until it all comes apart and you're compelled to start all over again. Maybe we all live life at too high a pitch, those of us who absorb emotional things all day, and as a consequence we can never feel merely content: we have to be unhappy, or ecstatically, head-over-heels happy, and those states are difficult to achieve within a stable, solid relationship."

High Fidelity, Nick Hornby

Your name in parenthesis; it was only a matter of time.

Giap enlisted last Saturday.

When I met him for dinner on Thursday, we talked about Patricia. I asked him if he was going to miss her, he said yes. I asked him if he wanted to see her, he said yes. Then go ahead, I told him. He said she's too busy to meet him. I reminded him that he knows where she lives. I said she has no excuse when he's already there. He smiled and said yes he's going to do it, tomorrow night. I smiled and said yeah, it doesn't have to be anything, but he should let her know, at least, that he wants to see her before he enters the army and that she's going to be missed. Giap smiled at me like he was wondering how I know these things.

The truth is, it made me think about how Nsboy came to look for me at work to just talk, a day before he enlisted. It made me think about how beautiful I felt, how I thought I must have meant something to him.

And I know very well, that I remember too many of these little details for my own good. I know it too well.

I try to remind myself I must be something you're not.

I'm clumsy with words, I tell my mother.

Nonsense, she says, you're too good with it.

Is that why Sophie gets all the guys? I ask her.

My mother switches off the CD player and starts to stack her Ella Fitzgeralds in two small piles. I can never remember which album "Black Coffee" is in.

You can't always compare yourself to Sophie, she says, you're different.

Of course. Sophie has a small sweet face, framed by long dark hair she took two years to grow out. But Sophie was never unpretty without the tresses. When she had short hair she was perky and charming; now, her gracefulness has made her almost picturesque. It doesn't matter that my older sister doesn't know the meaning of "aptitude" or that her favourite book is the Glamour magazine (she insisted that I buy her a two-year subscription last Christmas). The men think it's adorable when she dots her "i"s with hearts, they make her write her name on the restaurant napkins all the time.

I was always sort of disappointed, you know, that there are no "i"s in my name, I confess to my mother.

She hands me a green apple from the fruit basket and I think about how Sophie always reminds me of a red one.

You're strong, Sarah, both inside and out, my mother says, you'll never need the kind of men Sophie dates.

I wonder for a moment if I should let my mother know she's only half right.

Mostly, Sophie goes out with guys with looks and jobs that come straight out of television: the portrait artist, the car mechanic, the waiter who's actually the millionaire's son. I, on the other hand, get ask out by your average college kids and car salesmen. Once, I dated a semi-famous rock singer. He was about the only competition I ever had over Sophie. Later I found out that Jed had been sleeping with his male keyboardist.

The thing is, Sophie never planned to date those guys. She doesn't go to a certain club for the right crowd or make the correct kind of friends so that she will meet those men. It just happens for her. This is where my mother is wrong. I'm not strong, I'm just strong-headed. I'm twenty-five and still jealous of my own sister.

Is she bringing Trevor here for dinner tonight? I ask my mother.

She nods and says in faint delight, he said he's going to do something for me.

Trevor designs female lingerie.

Sophie knows the weirdest people, I say, doesn't she?

My mother smiles like she knows she's going to win but I know she'd hate for me to lose. She doesn't have to be this sensitive with Sophie because Sophie doesn't care. I think my mother blames herself for having taught me to take things seriously.

Sophie doesn't have standards for people, Sarah, she says. She's trying to make it easier, talking about what Sophie doesn't instead of what I do.

I can't help it if most people won't let me think they're good enough, I say, wondering who's next to blame.

You don't allow them to be, my mother says, you don't even stick around long enough to figure out. Her eyes fleet to the green apple, turning brown, half-eaten in my hand.

I don't say anything. My mother sighs.

Sometimes it's better to pretend you don't know what you want, Sarah, she says, sometimes you have to find out what you need.

It's like an open secret no one talks about.

Maggie listens to the telephone ring next door and she stares at her lemon colour 1937 rotary. There are two tiny coffee stains on the cradle and it occurs to her they must be at least a year old.

Patrick was still living in her house then. He adored the antique. "Conventional, classy and yet so youthful. Just like you, Maggie, the lemon colour is just like you. Pulchritudinous and youthful," he once, playfully, said to her.

Maggie suspected she had just, at worst, been paid half a compliment. Youthful is a good word. Later that night, she secretly looked up 'pulchritudinous' in the dictionary.

It was after Patrick left when Maggie became indecisive about it. She liked being twenty-four and looking eighteen. She liked the way she could pull the lines of her lips into the most puerile pout and no one would ask her to grow up. She enjoyed everything her guileless smile was able to get away with. Maggie had believed that her child-like peculiarity was her charm.

She never blamed Patrick for leaving. He had met someone - a twenty-nine-year-old Japanese woman - mellow, sophisticated and an aspiring environmental lawyer. Maggie had seen her once, when Patrick came back to collect his things. Yuri was waiting outside in the car. Maggie hadn't wanted Yuri to notice that she was peeping at her behind the lace curtains, but she needed to know what this woman looks like. Yuri turned towards the window and nodded politely, Japanese style.

Pulchritudinous maybe, Maggie thought, but definitely not youthful. Yuri had none of her lemon-coloured youth.