Yellow

Today I met family in a quiet cemetery in London to bury the ashes of my dad’s big sister. It was a mild day that felt like September, when in fact it’s November next week. I wore thermal socks and regretted it all afternoon. Death is everywhere, isn’t it. This feels like a trite thing to say in autumn, as we kick leaves up with every step. But then trees are good at death. Humans less so. 

I am thinking about grief again, as if I were ever not thinking about it. Almost everyone got lost among the seemingly endless headstones, but I was late, so by the time I arrived most were joking about it, stood as we were by the correct graves, close to the entrance to the cemetery. Some of us were awkward, and I sensed as ever the undercurrents of family politics that I do not understand, that perhaps I was a little too young to witness. I always feel a prickle of guilt, too, knowing how difficult my father could be, and feeling fairly sure he did various things to upset various people. Again, politics I missed. 

I am also grieving, I think, a book. I could be wrong, it may not be dead, but it feels like grief all the same. I wrote a novel last year, a short, dreamy, somewhat structureless and poetic novel. It was only when a dear friend asked me about grief and my creative process that it dawned on me that it’s a book about grief. 

In recent months I have been submitting this novel to literary agents. A strange and vulnerable process where the writer must have a thick skin and be prepared for rejections along the way, while also believing enough in the project to stand by it. In the past month, three of those agents requested the full manuscript to read. This made me sick with excitement and nerves, obviously. I sent my little book off, my little Kingfisher, and braced myself. The first responded with a no. A kind no, a no which left the door open for future projects, as other agents have in the past (a very good sign, I’m told). This agent misunderstood something about the novel which feels intrinsic to me. Something I could stand by. The grief of it all. But not just that. The lack of resolution. The loose ends, the frayed edges that death creates. 

I began writing Kingfisher almost exactly a year after my father died. The story welled up from the depths of my psyche during a period when I lost my father, a childhood friend, and my Auntie Pat all within a relatively short space of time. I’d hit that point, a point we all reach eventually one way or another, when suddenly people can disappear. Death is everywhere. 

Once I’d pulled myself from the funk of immediate grief, the voice of my protagonist came to me. He’s not a particularly nice man, although I love him. He is flawed and broken and damaged as we all are. He falls in love and then he watches her die. That’s it, really. He doesn’t learn any fundamental lessons. He doesn’t become less selfish, or at least not in the window through which we see him in the book. I think my writing is and always will be interested in rawness. I’m concerned with that middle place, the haze of experience before a person has time to understand it, to grow from it. The journey, not the destination, if you’ll permit me the cliché. 

Auntie Pat loved yellow. Today her ashes were held in a container covered in sunflowers. Yellow and black rosary were placed on top before we added soil. Her daughter stole sunflowers to place by the grave. Yellow is the colour of hope, and in Kingfisher my protagonist fills his lover’s rooms with sunflowers. He likens his friend Jessica to a daffodil, because she is always there, symbolising the potential for newness to grow from barren ground. I have always been ambivalent (at best) about Coldplay, and Chris Martin seems like a dick, but since she died I can’t listen to the song Yellow without sobbing. Look at the stars, look how they shine for you. 

The second agent said no. This was a no so kindly and well thought out, and a no that so clearly saddened her to say that I cried for two hours. My dog licked the tears from my cheeks. She gave me valuable feedback which I can use to improve the novel, if indeed it turns out to still be alive. She didn’t understand Jess, my character’s friend, the daffodil, and this fact alone is enough to reassure me that she is correct to not want to represent me. My protagonist is the rawness of turned earth. His friend is the yellow in his darkness. 

My uncle Tony, Pat’s husband, has dementia. When I walked up to greet him he stuck out his hand for me to shake.

Hello, I’m Tony, he said.

I took his hand in both of mine. Hello Tony, I said.

Oh aren’t you lovely and warm! he said. How lucky, how very lucky.  

Later in the afternoon he gave me a bear hug and thanked me for coming. I’m not sure he knew who I was then, either, but I realised it didn’t matter in the slightest. 

Pat’s ashes have been laid to rest alongside her parents. My father’s father died when dad was just six. I knew he’d been young but it still shocked me to see that he’d been just 30. Younger than me by three years. Nana died when I was a child, exactly when I can’t quite remember, but I had a whole childhood of her. Giggly Nana, we called her. She used to let me suck the lemon slice from her gin and tonic. Yellow again. 

I’ve not yet heard back from the third agent. I am most terrified of her response because I really like her. She’s around my age, she likes interesting, different books. She understood my protagonist and joked with me about him. If she says no to me, which I am suspecting she will (as I am worried the book has died) I know I will grieve. 

Watching my auntie be laid to rest with her family made me a little uneasy about the choices we made with my father’s ashes. We had him split so all four siblings could have some, as well as his sisters. Whether everyone got their share I am still unsure. I think I pushed for this, because selfishly I wanted him, some of him, for myself. My share sits on my kitchen shelf. I chat to him in the mornings while I make coffee. I had a ring made so I can have him with me. And I regularly scatter him all over the place. I have become familiar with opening the plastic bag and using a teaspoon to decant him into a small Tupperware. I’ve taken him to his favourite cove in Cornwall, thrown him into the froth at the sea’s edge. I’ve shown him my favourite walks, the river running through the town I live in. Eventually, when I have the ingredients of time, funding, and courage at my disposal I will be taking him across the world, retracing his steps with the RAF and writing about him, about his life. I told my cousins about the project today, panic rising in my chest as I did so, and they smiled. Thought we should all plan a trip together. 

In Kingfisher my protagonist and his friend Jess, his daffodil, travel around the country searching for a place to scatter his mother’s ashes. 

Today, my cousin told me that my grandfather’s parents were elsewhere in the city of headstones. We didn’t have chance to find them, so I’ll have to go back again. The Italian side. The reason we all tan so well. When we went for lunch afterwards I kept staring at everyone’s faces, tracing the different trails of lineage with my eyes. The olive skin. The thick hair, the roman noses. Lots of hazel eyes, I realised. My eyes are brown like my father’s, although he used to describe his as black, whereas mine are more toffee. My brother’s eyes are blue like our mum, except for a bloom in his left iris of brown/green/yellow, depending on how the light hits it. 

As with all of my writing (for better or worse) this piece has no resolution. Today I wanted to ask about all the family secrets, but knew I couldn’t. I wanted to hug everyone as tightly as I could, but only did so with the people I knew would welcome it. I wanted to see every picture ever taken of all of us, to see everyone as babies and teenagers and at weddings and christenings. I wanted to look back along the family line for all the black and brown and hazel eyes. To find someone else who has a bloom of yellow in their eye, just like my brother does.

The Tiger

I have been walking a lot. I’d like to say this has sprung from some sense of care for my own wellbeing, but I’d be lying. Instead, my funny little dog has progressed from the stage of puppydom that requires extremely gentle exercise to protect soft bones and delicate joints, to the stage of teenage pup who sits by the door and yawns if I take too long. The other element to my new, longer-than-usual jaunts into the countryside that surrounds me has been an incredibly dry January. And not in the sense of a boozeless one, although I do not drink much these days (gone is the heady version of me who drank whiskey like mother’s milk, these days I am ill within twenty minutes of a small glass of red). Dry as in this little valley I now live in, the second valley I’ve lived in in as many years, has been gloriously, generously, resplendently rain free. Don’t get me wrong, we’ve had the odd day of drizzle, but ultimately there were a solid couple of weeks when the air was that much sought after and difficult-to-describe ‘crisp’. 

There has been enough sun to warm my cheeks and kickstart the production of melanin in my translucent winter skin (I can always tell, as my sun allergy brings me out in a rash when this happens). There has been crunchy grass and gleaming brittle branches. Some walks even became autumnal, as leaves usually long mulched dried out enough to take flight again, wobbling into the air like beacons of hope for the little pup to chase into the wind. I entered my first winter in Hebden Bridge with trepidation. I read the books of friends who have lived through it by the skin of their teeth and began to panic. The valley is so dark, people told me. No light in the downstairs of your house! No light in the centre of town AT ALL. This hyperbole, I believe, is an expression of anxiety about the blackness that winter can bring to the spirit. It is all too easy to succumb to the cold, to stay in lit only by electric light. This, as dog owners all know, is one of the fabulous things about canine company. Ultimately, you have to heave yourself out of bed to stop them from shitting in your house, and by the time I’ve done that, blurry eyed and be-slippered, I’m already up. I’m already thinking about a coffee and a hot shower and a stomp into a field or wood somewhere. 

The Yorkshire locals will be reading this and laughing cruelly about February, and then March, and don’t forget that it snows in April now. Do not worry, dear reader, for I am not foolish enough to think I have weathered an entire winter. But what I am doing, and quite deliberately, is trying to remember to celebrate weathering anything at all. If I have learned anything from the last two years, it is that sometimes the little victories are the most important ones. And in this new year, writing as I am having survived January, there is hope all around me. 

The window box outside my kitchen sports orange crocuses, the greenery of bluebells and tête-à-tête. Between the fronds of the ever-faithful ferns in my many pots I can see life poking through, the signs of spring bulbs I don’t remember planting, and therefore will shortly be surprised by. When I talk to my friends, there is a clarity in their voices that was missing last year. Plans are being made with deliberation. We are beginning to realise, finally, that we have to live with the new normal, that horrible and overused phrase, rather than pause and wait for some imagined finish line that doesn’t exist. Life is now, in the daily routines, in the cyclical nature of our existence. We wake up, we go to sleep. We breathe in and then out. Seasons change, everything moves forward with a momentum so strong it can never be resisted yet somehow is so easily forgotten, lost in the mud of modern humanity. I find myself seeking meaning in traditions that otherwise would have passed me by – I inadvertently clean my house on the first of February only to discover it’s the day of Imbolc, the halfway point between the winter solstice and the spring equinox. Imbolc meaning ‘in the belly of the mother’, because the seeds of spring are beginning to stir in the belly of Mother Earth. The same day is Chinese New Year – the year of the tiger. A symbol of strength, of exorcising evils. A sign of new beginnings. 

As I write this, I receive a text from my mum. She is having knee replacement surgery and has been absolutely terrified. More scared than I’ve ever seen her be of anything. Not so much of the pain, although that’s a part of it. More a fear of shrinking. Of her world becoming smaller, smaller than it’s become already with the combined effects of Covid and reduced mobility. The text message is to say that she’s back in her room. The surgery complete, the first hurdle over. ‘The end of the beginning’, as she puts it. I am celebrating both small and large victories, and soon, with a bit of luck and a lot of hard work, she and I can walk our little dogs together through the greenery of true spring. 

SADness

Once again, we have reached that time of year. Those of us who are affected this way (and I believe it to be most of us), nervously begin to prepare. I place the vitamin D by the kettle, where I will still forget to take it. My appetite grows, after a summer of little interest in food. My animal brain prepares for hibernation, while my people brain tries to configure the inevitable need to carry on with daily life. For the first time since the winter months, I write a list of accomplishments for the day, forcing myself to be grateful that I ate vegetables, I got to read a book, I washed clothes and even went out for a coffee, while the voice of the winter shadows wakes from her summer sleep to admonish me for my failures, both the small and daily and the large and all-encompassing. This year I am distracted from my slide into a funk by the ridiculousness that is Otto, my new puppy. Although he did choose today to poo all over my kitchen floor. There was something appropriate about it for my mood, as I found myself dangling him over the sink and trimming shitty fur from his tiny arsehole. 

I only seem to write on here when I am trying to tease apart a problem, or occasionally from pure grief. It has been a little while since I felt grief of that kind – the kind I feel now is woven into my every day. I experience fewer wavering sobs and more commonly wince from the singularly sentimental, a twist in the side like a stitch from running for too long without a rest. So, what is my problem? What exactly am I trying to get the measure of through a tiny blog that nobody reads?

The answer is multifold, as it tends to be. For one, I have, as I think all women in this country have, been mourning. We have been mourning the collective loss of far too many women, this time through the prism of Sarah Everard, with the details of her horrific murder being released this past week. There are various reasons why her fate captured everyone’s eyes – partly because she was white, and pretty, but also because she did everything right, in as far as partaking in the agonizing limbo expected of women as we do our very best to not get raped and killed. As we bawl as if underwater as the onus remains on us, not on the men who are killing us. There is a collective pain there which women are all too familiar with, that has coincided with this change in season. Another autumn and still women don’t matter. Another season changes and still we die at the hands of men regardless of how we scream and shout about it. Or don’t, as the case may be. I have been silent. 

Secondly, and connected, as all things are, I have reached an impasse in the novel I am writing. I danced my way through spring and summer writing my male protagonist. A confident, beautiful, educated white man. A gay man, or at least that was how he understood himself until I came along and fucked it up for him. As should have been obvious to me, he was easy to write. I tapped gloriously into the simplicity of his existence and skipped my way through his story, a story where he becomes infatuated with an older woman. I was a fool. I thought I had somehow won the golden ticket – writing was easy now – huzzah! It’s not, it’s not. Because now I have to write the woman. Now I am going back to the beginning and telling the story of the woman he is infatuated with. 

The problem is that she doesn’t exist. Not in the sense that I am writing fiction, because on that plane none of them exist, but in the sense that this woman is completely free. She takes orgasms from this man without a single thought as to how her body looks. She is successful and wealthy in the career he wishes to have, she has a beautiful house, is highly respected in her field (obviously women exist like that, but not in the context I am grappling with). I don’t know how to write this woman because I need her to be liberated like a man, and I cannot conceive it. Not in the heteronormative structure I am somewhat constrained by, anyway. 

What would happen if my story didn’t work? If he didn’t want to fuck her because she’s old. Because her skin sags and because she’s got no tits, because gay or otherwise he still sips from the cup of patriarchal standards. What happens to the story if he rejects her, because she’s not that important, really, to him? What happens if I flip it all back around to the way we expect the story to go? 

She doesn’t have anything to offer him, in the way an older man might have something to offer a younger woman. He has a wisdom and status that the world respects, a pass on his wrinkly body, or his bloated stomach from drinking too much for too long. The younger woman would ignore these things. She would ignore the bad fashion choices and wince but pass over the comments that are dated now, like him, this older man. The younger woman would smile and massage his ego automatically, and from a genuine place, too, from a place of real feelings. She would care for him and feel a loss when he is no longer around. What would he feel for her? Lust, certainly. And a quality of care that does not impact the balance of his life. She would have to change for him, not the other way around. And she would have to do so while maintaining an appealing aesthetic, choosing her clothes well, keeping on top of the natural behaviours of her body – she is not allowed to be animal to the extent he is. The problem with this is that it’s BORING. It happens all the fucking time and I don’t care. 

I want a different gaze, however contrived that may be. I want a young beautiful man to want to fuck an older woman. I want him to want her body and I want her to take that pleasure from him without a second thought. I want all the men in my story to have blue balls and to worry about their bodies like women do. I want my women to be free and to orgasm all the time and to leave their socks all over the floor and to be dads who take their kids out and feed them sweets and no vegetables and I want my women to be paid more than my men and I want to flip the table over and smash all the glasses and plates and leave smears of food on the walls. 

My problem is that I don’t know how it feels. I don’t know how it feels to be the one that can afford to be blithe. I cannot get into the head of my poet because she doesn’t exist. For her to be real she has to be dying. She has to think that she is going to die, and soon, in order to access the freedom that means she gets to cum as much as she wants, the freedom to not change for this beautiful young man who will contort himself to please her. I don’t know how it feels to be dying and I don’t know how it feels to be a man. I have to make it up. 

I wrote part of this post in a fit of rage the other day, as I stared at the words I have for her so far, as I watched her tiptoe around everything, as I watched her tell her own story, the story of the shapes she has bent herself into in order to fit a world that wasn’t designed for her. I sent it to my wonderful and wise friend Georgia, who responded with the following:

I understand why you say your female character has to be dying. It is the literalisation of the metaphor that you have outlined, of a woman who is impossible in our society. You have had to make her somehow liminal, and – ironically – you have had to ‘other’ her. Dying people are the ultimate other.

From this point of view, of course you know how it feels to be dying. Women, as the original societal other, are always dying, every day.

Not only does she beautifully outline what has to happen with my fiction (and, frustratingly, highlight how fucking hard it is going to be to write), but Georgia hits exactly upon the problem, the reason I am rambling on this platform, the reason I have been unavoidably, exhaustingly SAD all week. Women are always dying, every day, and through the deafening noise of this I have to figure out how to let my female character live. 

New Places

I keep wanting to write something about my new home. Something gently awed about the owner of the local pizza place giving us free focaccia as a welcome, about the original wood floors buried pristine underneath laminate, as if gift wrapped for our arrival. Something about blossom and sunlight and huge sash windows facing south.

But that’s not quite what I want to write. I want to write about the new place my brain is in. About what death keeps teaching me. In September of last year I spent three weeks on a Greek island. I found a tiny kitten in the road. She was screaming at the top of her lungs, so full of life and fight. I named her Lucky, although she wasn’t , because she’d not eaten in more than a week. She was a sack of bones, thin like a sparrow. It was a Sunday, so all the vets were closed and I couldn’t buy her formula. I fed her water off the corner of a napkin. A kind man took me to his friend, another kind man with kittens he’d raised from babies. He gave her a meal, and promised to care for her. The whole time I held her she purred and rubbed her face into me. She was comforted. She died that night, unable to digest food after so long without any.

Life is short, although we aren’t very good at learning that lesson. A friend of mine died recently. Another kind man. A silly, gentle man. A young man, far far too young. My loss is small, compared to others who knew him, but now I watch those others who were closer to him begin to navigate the maze of loss in lockdown, the inability to follow instincts to be together, to hold one another. I grieve for them.

Today I went for a walk with another kind man. The fourth kind man in this short story. He told me to get out of my own way. To take myself seriously as an artist, so that the world will too. I wish it was that easy, to just take advice and run with it. But I’m going to try. Life is so short, you might as well get on with it.

Letter, Seven

Today I read a wonderful story. It taught me about Qingming, the Chinese festival of the dead. It is not that festival today, but I’ve not written you a letter in so long.

The story is called ‘Paper Menagerie’, by Ken Liu. It is a story about magic, love and loss.

Today is the first day of March. Although it is not yet the Spring Equinox – the purist’s definition of the beginning of spring – to me the world outside is screaming springtime. The light has a new quality, green shoots are abound. The Spring Equinox is March 20th. Qingming Festival is April 4th. But I’m writing to you today, Dad, for I think it is spring, and because I think you can hear me every day.

‘You know what the Chinese think is the saddest feeling in the world? It’s for a child to finally grow the desire to take care of his parents, only to realize that they were long gone.‘

I only took care of you – in the small ways I could – for a few short months. I am lucky, I think, that I realised it before it was too late. On April 27th, it will be one year since you died.

You died in Spring. When the light had a new quality, when green shoots were abound.

Reader’s Block

The first time I had reader’s block, I didn’t know how to read. I’m dyslexic, although mildly so, and it affects my working memory more than my grasp on grammar and spelling. But it was enough to make learning to read hard. I was blocked, I didn’t get it. It took time, patience, and extra lessons from a gloriously peaceful and kind woman named Diana for me to crack it, and crack it I did. Thereafter I would stay up at night reading under the duvet, as seen in films (?) I used to literally consume books – tearing off and chewing pieces of the cover as I read them. My favourite copy of Roald Dahl’s Matilda was the closest thing I had to a security blanket. Until I threw up on it, anyway. I can still see my mum desperately trying to wash sick off it to rescue it for me.

It was the first of only two times I have suffered the affliction. Previous stressors in life have not caused me the same problem. If anything, they actually pushed me towards books – life gave me stuff to want to escape from. As a troubled teenager I sought out freedom in fantasy, as so many do, and was reassured by the relentless tropes, and the assurance that power is found within oneself, if only you look hard enough. As a young adult I stuck with fantasy, but began to supplement it with modern fiction. I’m not ‘well read’, in the snobby sense of the term, but I’ve certainly read A LOT of books.

I went to university late, after a range of existential crises, but there I studied English Literature and Creative Writing. Lots more reading, and I was force-fed at least some of the classics I had been studiously avoiding (I still have MANY to read, but I’m rather bored of old dead white men, even the ones with interesting things to say, so I’ll swallow that medicine at a later date). I discovered how much I like realism, with a pinch of surrealism occasionally. I like fucked up characters and broken people. I like tactile description, I like to feel things very physically from the page. I love poetry, I love creative non-fiction. I LOVE to read. I recently completed my Creative Writing MA, which exposed me to even more delicious books. Yum yum.

But now, alas, I am deep in the funk of reader’s block, take two.

I tried googling the problem, but all the fluffy articles I found seem to be aimed at people who don’t really want to read anyway, but feel they should. That they would be better if they read more books (they would, everyone would, but it doesn’t help me much). I try reading short things – essays from Helen Macdonald’s latest collection – beautiful, delicate, forthright concoctions, but I can’t focus on the images and I drift into blankness. I try short fiction – but old faithful Angela Carter washes over me without impact. Poetry then? No. I feel nothing.

There is an obvious reason why I am experiencing this. As we are all so very sick of hearing, we are still in the middle of a pandemic. Groundhog Day rolls on and on. Stimulation is seriously lacking. The daily walks are mundane, dinner is about the most exciting thing to happen in our days. I feel like a 50’s housewife – I stare so long at my stupid house that I notice all the dirt and obsessively clean it all the time, only for it to get immediately dirty again because WE ARE ALWAYS IN IT. I’m not allowed to do anything fun and interesting. Escaping into a book just doesn’t seem possible anymore, without the daily jaunts into the real world that represent the other side of the coin. I am passive, apathetic. Empathy fatigue has hit me hard, and although I have enough in reserve to still follow the rules and not galavant around infecting people, I honestly can no longer make myself care about all the other injustices in the world right now, of which there are many.

Today I made a decision. I am going to wilfully regress. I am going back to childhood. It’s the only potential cure I can think of. The Avocado Baby and We’re Going on a Bear Hunt. The Very Hungry Caterpillar. For starters. It’s time for me to dig out that copy of Matilda.

Micro-fiction, an exercise: 3 ‘Georgia’

‘Be careful, they can sting you,’ said Tom, removing his hand by dragging it across her wet skin. He handed her the rest of the joint and left without another word. She didn’t move a muscle until she was sure he’d gone inside. The dragonfly landed on her shin for a moment, gently pulsed its wings and then flew away. 

Endings and Beginnings

Today it is New Year’s Eve. I am reading Deborah Levy again, as I always must, but most especially when I am feeling things. I am reading Levy and I am imagining what it will feel like to move away from the house I lived in when I found out my dad was dying. 

I will buy a new mattress, because this is the mattress I was sleeping on when my father called me to tell me he could not breathe. Today is the last day that I can say ‘my dad died this year’, for tomorrow it won’t be this year anymore, it will be next year, and yet he will still be gone. 

I will take the garden bench to the tip, for that was where I was sitting when the doctor told me that his heart had stopped, and although it was beating again, that was when the doctor told me I needed to get there as quickly as I could, driving on the empty empty roads. 

The house I will move to won’t have a garden, and I will say goodbye to the garden I tended here, the garden I obsessed over because I urgently needed everything to be alive. Everything needs to be as alive as possible, because he was dead, is dead, and that fact had a permanence I could only comfort with fresh green shoots and burying my fingertips into soil. I will leave this garden, and I won’t be here to welcome the plants when they grow next year. There is a poetry to that fact that I cannot avoid. 

New Year’s Eve means goodbye. We have so many goodbyes to say this year, and we will say them with relish, as this year has clobbered the world in a collective that does not exist in human memory. I will say goodbye to this year as I say goodbye to my father, as I say goodbye to this house, as the UK says goodbye to the EU; to freedom of movement; to the right to live and love and nest with our European cousins. There is far too much relish in those goodbyes for my liking.

We want to say goodbye to our living rooms, to our sweatpants and pyjamas. We want the new year to be completely different to the old year. We want everything to be alive, to feel wine in our mouths and music in our ears. To feel our skin against the skin of those we miss dearly, against strangers even.

We want fresh green shoots.

Lockdown Grief, 2.0

Productivity.

What is the phrase? If you want something done properly, ask a busy person. I do not remember what it feels like to be busy. I crave it, crave the feeling of juggling things in the air, of balancing the multiple proverbial plates. 

My life is one that causes envy for many. I have TIME. So much time it gives me a headache. That’s one thing about student life: you might have a shitload to do, but you can technically do it at any time of day. Mornings that should stretch ahead suddenly disappear in a whisper. I am no longer technically a student. I am a wastrel, an in-between person. I am a person with two degrees who cannot get a basic admin job. I am also a person who cannot hold said admin job for a year, were I to get one, because I’ll (in theory) have to ditch it when I begin my PhD in 2021. I am half a person living in lockdown 2.0 and I am very lucky to have all this TIME to WASTE. One thing I certainly don’t have is money. But that is the exchange. I am time-rich and money-poor, and also inspiration poor. 

Currently, my laptop is being repaired. I should be writing my novel, but I am not brave enough to work on it on the laptop a friend has lent me, one that does not have Word. It is too sprawling and precious a thing to open in foreign territory (and by this I mean that I do not trust google docs and I don’t care how old that makes me appear). I have been writing the proposal for said PhD but that is currently on hold, waiting for the advice of persons far cleverer than me. What an OPPORTUNITY, one might say. You can READ. I can, I will, I have. But not enough, for it is never enough, and ultimately reading will lead me back to the writing I should be doing. I make notes on a pad that I will later find indecipherable. I drink both good and bad coffee, depending on how many fucks I have spare to give that day. I dress or don’t dress in increasingly mismatched ways: full face of makeup and smelly pyjamas, or big black lace-up boots but I don’t step outside. On two separate occasions I’ve curled my hair before going to sleep at night. 

There are pieces of me floating in the ether. A post about productivity is making the rounds on social media. It asks for us to stop glamorising over-working, that grafting til you drop isn’t as sexy or cool as Capitalism would have you think. It’s a good point. I know all too many people who live in a consistent state of burnout. I’ve been there before, but not for a while. I’ve become rather militant in protecting my rest. Before covid, I was a mixture of hyper organisation and minimal responsibility. If you just pick one thing to throw yourself at it’s easier to be lazy. Wait, not lazy. It’s easier to resist the charms of Capitalism. However, covid has thrown a spanner in the works somewhat. Now my whole life consists of rest. I move from one down-filled surface to the next. I am not unhappy, but I lack any motivation whatsoever. When I reach out to catch the parts of me that float past, I cannot be bothered to stretch my arms very far. 

When someone dies, the normal thing to do is to fill your life with stuff. Activities, work, food, friends, booze, drugs, whatever. Wherever they land on the spectrum between healthy and not, they are distractions all. Grieving during a pandemic is so EMPTY. It’s like shouting into an echo chamber. WHERE HAVE YOU GONE??? 

I think I might be addicted to rest. One day I’ll be found under a duvet somewhere, my mouth filled with feathers.

Fallen: A Poem

for instance:

he is form and formless

hereless and inanimate

for instance: the trees are cold without him

*

try saying aubade

(especially now he’s not here)

I can’t tell 

whether it’s morning or evening anymore.