I remember wetting myself in a barley field with my arms outstretched. I was walking with lots of people at the time - not just my family, but other families, other children. I was wearing corduroy shorts. My arms were outstretched because it is difficult, as a child, to walk through a field in summer and not reach out your hands to touch whatever's growing. I knew I was too old for piss to be running down my leg in the middle of the day. There was no choice but to keep walking. The seeds of the barley stuck to my legs, which were now wet. Seeds and pollen and drying piss in a stream all the way to my ankles, and there was the smell, a sourness every child knows. I knew the smell would grow worse in the heat.

I don't know if anyone actually noticed. As a child, you often think that everyone notices everything, that adults are aware of all that unfolds around them. As a teenager, you start to think adults are aware of nothing at all, except you. You are uniquely aware and you are uniquely seen. I once heard someone describe adolescence as the experience of sitting at the unquestionable centre of a world which fails to understand or see you, despite that world's gaze being turned towards you at all times. You are a vacant, unknowable core around which the rest of the universe rotates. You are empty and invisible, watched by all. You are filled with things that only you can describe, and everything you touch is transformed. You carry around a cosmic conception of yourself. Others are interplanetary dust, part of the atmosphere, but carrying no atmosphere of their own. You walk the earth like a forgotten god, a deity who has fallen out of fashion with mortals. You carry coiled reservoirs of power within you, great oceans of ink and milk and smoke, and the fish in these oceans never die. They are fish that other people have never even seen. You are empty but full of invisible fish and the waters of life. A series of cascades, expressive, believing yourself to be still. You are bitter. You can't decide if you are a moon or a sun or something else entirely. On the bus, you watch the same people going to work every day and you tell yourself that whatever this is, whatever this thing is that you see in front of you, you're not part of it. You are at the centre of it. You are integral to its flow and functioning, but you're not part of it, and no part of it is a part of you. You sing the song of yourself. You think there is only one song. You have yet to read Whitman. You believe that failure is a thing that can be held in the arms like an animal that has just been born, laced with mucous and womb. You believe in failure the way younger children believe in ghosts. People can tell you it doesn't exist but it keeps you up at night, because you sense it's there in the room with you, and you know other people can sense it too, even if they tell you they can't. You almost believe in ghosts, but you would never admit this to anyone, not even yourself. You haven't yet developed the capacity to admit things. At some point, adulthood begins, and adolescence ends, but it leaves traces, like buried ceramics and ornaments of bone, to be picked through by later generations with their delicate archaeological brushes and thermos flasks of coffee and soup and talking therapy and advanced carbon dating techniques that can somehow define the root of a problem as existing within a ten year span, and they lift fragments of glass and blunted iron into the light and they marvel and they say: 'So this is how people lived back then.' The past always appears more brutal than the present, but the future is more scary.

I remember being more nervous than I had ever been in my life. I was sitting at a grand piano in the middle of a vast church, empty except for me and the examiner and stained glass windows of Jesus hammered to the cross that made the room blush blue and green and red, and I had to perform three pieces and then play scales and arpeggios. At one point during the exam, the examiner said he would now test me on my intervals. He was old and had a grey-white beard. I said I didn't know any intervals. He said I could just try my best. He made me stand to one side, then sat at the piano himself. He played a few different notes, slowly, and I didn't know what to say. He said it didn't matter. He smiled at me but he also seemed quite stern. He played a few more notes and at one point I said, 'That one was an octave'. He looked up at me and said, 'So you do know intervals.' There is no such thing as failure.

On the bus home, I noticed a man looking like he was about to cry. We were sitting knee to knee. He was wearing a supermarket uniform. I don't know if he was going to work or coming home from work because it was the middle of the day. He was looking out the window and sniffing and there were small lips of water in the bottom of both his eyes. Seeing this made me want to cry as well. I don't know how close I came to speaking to him, but I remember thinking I should have asked him if he was OK. I don't know if that would have been the right thing to do. I was a child.

Yesterday, I should have been marking my students' work, but instead I went to the gym and felt tired and weak and disconnected from all my previous lives. Then I went to a friend's house to play chess. He cooked chickpeas and eggs and fake chorizo and we ate out of the same pan like we were on a date at a tapas bar, and there wasn't a great deal of room because of a huge flat screen TV that my friend had recently driven up from his parent's house in North Carolina, and the only place to put the TV was the dining table, the only table in the house. There is no such thing as failure.

We played two games of chess and I managed to win both, but only because midway through the first game my friend's dog threw up and my friend was distracted by the clean-up. The dog was exhausted after vomiting and dozed with her head next to the chess table.

I lied about there being only one table in the house. There is no such thing as failure.

We talked about how things might feel in twenty years. We talked about how no one can tell you how you are going to feel, at any point, ever.

The dog had managed to throw up solely in the dog bed. None of it went on the floor, a small kindness. We joked about how watching the dog throw up had been like watching a car crash in slow motion, the dog retching for half a minute before the contents of her stomach emerged. My friend said she's never thrown up in the house like that before. He had bought her a new toy that weekend - a tray with different compartments covered with moveable plastic tiles. The tray is designed so that you can only move one or two tiles at a time, so most of the compartments remain hidden. The idea is you hide treats in some of the compartments and the dog has to nose and scrabble and claw the tiles around in order to get to them.

We discussed published writers. We discussed our mentors and teachers, the distances that separate them from us. I've heard published writers talk about how being published doesn't make you happy. They say it doesn't really mean anything, in the grand scheme of things, being published. They usually mean well when they say this. The problem is, it's impossible for them to know how they would feel at this point in their lives if they weren't published. I think they would probably feel an even greater sense of personal failure, but I don't know. We can never access alternative realities. We can never really know how we would feel if things had turned out differently. We spend a lot of time pretending we know how we feel about things, both things that happened and things that never happened. We pretend to know how we'll feel about things that may or may not happen in the future.

My friend had to pick the bulge of vomit up with a kitchen towel, throw it in the bin, throw the dog bed into the washing machine. I didn't envy him the task. The vomit was creamy-white. There was lots of it. It contained hair and other things. I remained at the chess board, laughing. I was in a compromising position. I had woken that morning with a grey, dusty dread hanging over everything I felt and thought, like a table cloth in my grandmother's house with the curtains closed long after she died. It made it difficult to smile or think ahead. I was about to lose either a bishop or a knight. I'm not a good enough chess player to make up for a loss like that so early in the game. I can't afford early mistakes. I prepared myself for a grinding defeat, waited for my friend to return from dealing with the dog vomit, and then when he did he suggested we quickly take the dog out for a walk, in case she needed to throw up again, because she had a glazed, soapy look in her eyes.

It was a warm, buttery Sunday. Thick sun, not too humid. You felt comfortable being held by the air. There were small blue cornflowers and fluffy weeds on the patch of grass outside my friend's apartment. We waited for the dog to do whatever she needed to do and while we did so my friend pointed at his neighbour's house and said he thought the neighbour might have killed themselves because he hadn't seen any movement in the windows for weeks, no one coming in or out. Apparently, the neighbour is a talented saxophonist but is being investigated for a crime involving children. I said, 'Surely you would know if they'd killed themselves' and my friend said, 'I guess we'd smell it through the walls.' I said, 'The dog would probably sense something was wrong' and he said, 'Maybe that's why she threw up.' She was nosing in the bushes, refusing to piss. Her harness is khaki green. It makes her look like a military service animal, recently returned from duty. I thought about blood in the desert, unexploded ordnance, infants flecked with rubble and rebar. There is no such thing as failure.

When we returned to the chess board, my friend overlooked the fact that my knight and my bishop were vulnerable. He made a different move and I let the game unfold a few more turns before pointing out his mistake. It's impossible to know how things would have turned out if any one part had been different. The afternoon made me feel better. It wasn't just the winning. We listened to Thelonius Monk and my friend whistled along, tunefully. All the food he cooked, I ate. Spring is here, and now. The world is getting warmer. There is no such thing as failure.