Creative Writing Exercise 1

 Disgust

Melanie closed her eyes for a second and was thinking about a perfect hotel room with crisp white clean sheets on a bed that smelt of flowers and had chocolates on the pillow when you arrive.  The bathroom would be fresh and white with fluffy, sumptuous towels that were huge and you could wrap around yourself after a lovely hot bubble bath.   As she opened her eyes from her brief reverie Melanie was confronted horribly by the reality of her real life.  Melanie was a third year student at a low level university in the Midlands, she lived in student accommodation a Victorian terraced house (probably built for industrial textile workers) where she shared a living room and kitchen with three other students who unfortunately seemed to share the same attitude to house cleanliness and hygiene as she did, I suppose at least they had that in common.  The upshot of this, as she opened her eyes was the first thing that she saw was a pile of plates, cups and cutlery that had built up over several weeks that were covered in half eaten, now rotting food and cups filled with congealed drinks that now all looked brown, disgusting and smelt like milk that had gone off and made you want to hurl.  As she turned her head to take in the rest of the room the bed had, what were once pretty pink covers with a Japanese flower pattern, now they were a slightly yellowed, nicotine, coffee, and other unidentifiable green stained mess that had not seen a washing machine in at least a month.   Melanie looked at the the floor that was covered with mostly her dirty clothes, underwear was hanging on the radiator and was worn and now starting to look grey and very tatty, there was a desk but mostly it was covered with make up and hair crap.  Underneath this vile mess she assumed her laptop was living, not that she had opened this or really done any university work recently that she could remember.  This small, shabby student room certainly reflected Melanie's state of mind a dirty mess that is disorganised and seemed to champion chaos uber alles (as Nietzsche might have said), why she had chosen to study Philosophy was also a mystery as this had certainly sent her spinning into despair.