nobody calls me nicole anymore.

hi. my name is nikki.

i guess i will start describing myself at ‘cripplingly nostalgic’. yep, i’d put that on the list above ‘bossypants’, ‘amazing dancer’ or  ‘messy eater’. my apartment is basically a museum showcasing old stuff from your grannies living room and all the stuff that made growing up in the 80s so awesome. these tangible things are my aesthetically pleasing way of hanging on to the ever fleeting moments i’m terrified to lose. yep, i’ll start at ‘crippingly nostalgic’. i’m a collector, i’m a reader, i’m a writer, i’m a well accessorized tomboy, i’m a full time lover and part time fighter, i’m a nerd to the fullest and a perpetual dreamer. i’m erratic and unpredictable, i’m clumsy and emotional, i’ve got more feelings than a dashboard confessional anthology and i rarely use capital letters unless i’m writing a letter in which i am addressing someone as ‘sir’ or ‘madam’.

i’m an open book kept behind a locked door… you didn’t think i’d be that easy to read, did you? yep- i’m one big, fat metaphor.

all my life i’ve lived largely in a world inside my own head. (and before i go any further, i need you to believe me when i say this is far more innocent than it may sound.) when i was younger, i think this place was a means to escape situations that were bigger than i was. now it’s just a place to keep 25 years worth of emotional baggage with more storage space than my current apartment. and i think it’s safe to say that if you tend to vacation mentally rather than on some stretch of warm, white sand, we probably share the same life aspiration- to be a writer. (or perhaps you aspire to live inside a padded white cell, it depends on what type of ‘mental vacation’ you’re taking.)

i never felt the heroic call of being a firefighter or police officer and i was always too dirty to be a ballerina. but from the bottom of my five year old heart i knew one real, true thing- that when i grew up, i wanted to be a writer. 25 years and a few bad haircuts later, i’m still not sure what constitutes being ‘grown up’, but if you’d told me living off of mac and cheese and running a bong shop was it, i’d tell you that you obviously didn’t know what ‘grown up’ meant. ironic, innit? but here i am, and here you are and here is the place i am hoping to source some sort of inspiration to get back to doing what i’d like to think i was born to do- to write stuff down. somewhere between bad choices and trying to keep afloat ‘through it all’, i kind of stopped visiting the place inside of my head where my sanity has laid sleeping until i follow the trail of breadcrumbs back. so here i am. here it is.
here we are. here goes something…