The Journey

 

 

 

It was my birthday on Tuesday, and now I am thirty three. I say it to myself with something like wonder. It seems impossible that those numbers apply to me. They are vast, immense, as old as the stars; a whole universe in the curve of double figures.  

 

When I was twenty (and twenty five, and twenty nine), I imagined thirty three as a far off continent. Things would be different there, things would be simpler. I would be a mother, perhaps, with children clutching stickily at my knees, printing my face with their kisses. A writer (of course) with poems in the world and a string of accolades. A wife with a diamond ring and honeymoon sun in my skin, still, golden.  

 

And now I am on that continent -  childless, bookless, without a husband. And the strangest thing about it is that I am happy, for the most part. Happy in my life. Happy in simply having a foot on the place, like I imagine Columbus was, planting his flag in the earth of the Americas.  

 

I have spoken, at length, about spending my twenties grappling with health, both physical and mental. Those years where every day was a whirlwind: food and booze, panic and bones; hair falling out in handfuls, fainting like the ladies in Victorian novels, blue-lipped, wasp-waisted, eyes swarming with stars.  

 

It seemed dramatic, then - life was crazy, amplified, passionate, intense – but in fact, my life was on pause in those years. The whole of my twenties a button pushed down and held. It felt chaotic but I was standing still. Nothing moved. Nothing changed,  except the numbers that flashed on a series of scales, the numbers that either praised or damned from the labels of my clothes.  

 

I could regret the waste – and I do, sometimes – but the experience has turned out to have its gifts. I dug in the muck for years and came up wild-eyed and bloody-handed with the effort, but I found my treasures in the end, my fistfuls of gold: respect for myself, and awareness; empathy and acceptance; a hunger for truth and for knowledge; a burning curiosity and a mad thirst for experience.  

 

Perhaps the strangest gift is that of girlhood. I had it, once, and wasted it; frittered it away in midnight kitchens, bent over porcelain bowls in bathrooms. I gave it, freely, in return for a body I could carve the air with, all knife-edge and cleaving slice. My friends were falling in love for the first time, and moving to cities, and kissing in bars, and buying spices in markets in foreign countries, and I was at home, alone, taking a savage delight in misery. All those years the other girls had, of trying, and finding, and fumbling towards something, I missed out on. I felt badly about that for a long time, as if I was behind, somehow, as if I needed to catch up. But the result of that now is that I feel like my friends did when they were in their twenties: like the world belongs to me in a way that it has never belonged to anyone else, that everything is new, and shining, and waiting to be experienced.  

 

Birthdays inevitably make me reflective. The sequence of passing years, the implications of mortality, the endless list of all the things I haven’t done or seen yet, the places I have missed. My thirties have been the first years in which this reflection has not been synonymous with panic. I think before, I saw my life as a sort of train journey with a beginning and an end, and a series of stations I needed to pass through in between: education, career, marriage, children, and so on. Only in my thirties am I beginning to appreciate that the point of the journey is the journey itself, not whether I’ve reached a particular platform by the time designated on the schedule (which isn’t, anyway, my schedule). Life isn’t the checking off of station-names until the final destination. Life is the miles of field flashing in between, the beads of rain on the glass. Life is the other passengers in the carriage and the sheep outside, sleepy-eyed, working mouthfuls of grass.  

 

It’s good to look forward, I think, but not too far. Not so far as to where the tracks converge to a single gleaming point on the horizon. You miss the wild flowers between the slats that way. You miss the way the dust turns like fireflies in the random slants of falling light.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

"So, we beat on, boats against the current..."

I have worn new clothes to work this week. Shirts with lace panels, and dresses with ruffles, and cardigans as finespun and delicate as cobwebs. I have been spreading wings of blusher across my cheekbones. Fancily pinning my hair. For myself, I thought, but in truth it was for him. I wanted him to think of me as pretty. I wanted him to regret giving me up so easily.

One half of me thought If he wants me, I will tell him no. The other half thought If he asks me, I will go.

I was happy on Wednesday. I could feel a light in my face, a radiance. I felt soft and good and pretty. He stopped me by the copier, my arms full of papers, and told me what I wanted to hear: lovely, was the word he used. I blushed, and floated back to my desk.

Be careful, said R, He is trying to charm you. I laughed, waved an airy hand, said no, no,  even as a bubble of hope rose in me like the fizz in a glass of champagne. He is not good for you, said N,  You have to let him go. I nodded, said I know, said yes.

I drank wine in the evening. I wrote a poem about the moon. I painted my nails the colour of beaten tin. All I thought about, the whole time, was him.

It was late when he messaged, as I had known, deep down, that he would. He told me that he was thinking of me, that he missed me in his arms, his house, his bed. I should have stopped the conversation there, closed over it the way water closes over a stone. Instead, I put my spun-glass heart in his hands. Turned my thin, pale belly up to his teeth.

I know already that this is wrong. I am not the love of his life, but only the easy option. I am not the object of his passion but only a desire.

He bought me a rose when we went to Rome in November. I pressed it between the pages of a book to keep the memory. I feel, now, a little like that flower. Like a rose in a book taken down from a shelf. He only wants to look for a while, and remember. He only wants a known fondness, the old familiar.

And still, and still, and still I am tempted.

Already I am hanging, like a coat on a hook, waiting for him to fill my empty places and give me shape. I am losing myself little by little to the air. He is wind and I am sand, and he sifts me, endlessly, from myself.

I want him. I don't want him. I want him. I don't.  I write to convince myself.  I write to untangle the need.

I feel like a wishbone, snapped abruptly apart. My wishes spilled, unsortable, across the table.

 

 

 

 

 

"I believe that the Universe wants to be noticed..."

 

It's funny, the little bits of knowledge we collect without really thinking about it, the way children at the seaside, sandy, salty-kneed,  fill their buckets with shells, and stones, and the ghost-pale skeletons of tiny crabs. Mostly, we don't do anything with our scraps of fact. We just like the way it feels to roll them in a palm on occasion. We like their colour, or the shapes they make in our mouths. Giraffes have blue tongues. Bananas are berries, but strawberries aren't. Pearls melt in vinegar. Polar bear fur is clear, not white.

I always accepted the fact that moths steer their course by the moon. I repeated it when it was relevant. I thought it poetic: imagined them, earnest little things, owl-eyed, flittering moonward. And then, just this week, I found out that it isn't actually true. That although they do always head for the light - which is why many moths meet a quick, frizzing death in the heat of a candle flame, or spend hours batting at a lit window - they navigate, in fact, by smell.

This is how they do it: they compare the scent in two points in space, and then move towards the greater concentration. Immediately, they compare two more points and revise their flight accordingly. And then they do it again. And again. Which is why they move in those funny, hitching little paths; they’re changing their course based on moment by moment decisions.  

Do you believe in signs, in totems? I do. I think they arrive when we need them, little points of reference like a string of lights along a dark path. I think they hold meaning and metaphor, the way dreams do when you look them up in the reference books a stew of symbols, portents, patterns.

There is a beautiful quote in the John Green book, “The Fault In Our Stars”, which says that, essentially, the universe wants to be noticed; that it enjoys its elegance being observed. There are times when I feel that the universe wants to be noticed so much, it leaves clues like fairytale breadcrumbs or arrows chalked on a path. I can’t help but feel that I am being guided toward something. That there is something I am meant to see, or understand. It feels like a firm hand in the small of my back, setting me gently but insistently in a certain direction.  

Moths, at the moment, are everywhere. They have infiltrated my life, a quiet sort of coup like snow dropping softly in a dark street. They crop up in the books I am reading. In songs I’ve never heard before. Last week, a friend emailed me a poem she thought I’d like. It was titled, simply, ‘Moth’. A tea dress in a boutique shop caught my eye; when I took up a fistful of cloth, I saw that the detail I’d taken for flowers was actually a scattering of tiny grey moths.  And then there was the quote I read at random, the one that informed me how moths truly navigate, thereby debunking my previously accepted moon-myth.

Simple coincidence, you might think, this flurry of moth-related occurrences. Pure happenstance. I accept that that may well be the case; still, I choose to disagree.

There is an Einstein quote I have mentioned before, in which he states that we have two choices: to believe that either everything is a miracle or nothing is. (Everything! my heart says; everything!). I have complete and total faith that there is more to the world and the way it works than we can even guess at, that there is more magic than we can imagine. 

We can map weather systems nowadays. We can follow a front as it moves from  one continent to another and predict, with some accuracy, its consequences. Meteorology is a science with its own private language: isobars and kerafonts, anemometers, mesoscales, and Rossby waves. A few hundred years ago, this would have been unimaginable - this level of knowledge, this ability to make predictions. The terminology would have sounded like an incantation or a spell. Words like sorcery might have been used; words like hubris. And yet, and yet; it was only ever patterns, being noticed. Just cause and effect being studied and mapped.  

When these little breadcrumbs litter my life, I can’t help but think it’s a pattern or system I just don’t have the ability or knowledge to understand yet. When the moths kept happening, I noticed, of course, but had no idea what, if anything, I was meant to take from it. I had no personal affinity for moths. There was no personal symbology there, no discernible message. And then I read that quote about their navigation techniques - almost like the exasperated Universe was showing me the answers in the back of a complicated quizbook - and I knew, I knew what I was meant to take from it.

I have been doubting decisions I have made recently. Big decisions. I have been, if not in a dark place, then at least an ill-lit one. It felt a little like I was scrabbling about for answers, for reassurances that I had made the right choices. One moment I would be holding them tightly in my hands, understanding, with relief, that I had done what was necessary, that I had been truthful to myself. The next, they would slip through my fingers like water, like light, and I would be empty and answerless in the dark again. 

And then came the moths. The moths who, I learned, make their decisions moment by moment. Who pause along the way to rethink and recalibrate before making whatever decision is the right one for them in that moment.  And always, always, while heading for the light.

You may think this is far-reaching. Or wishful thinking. You may think this is me building a scaffold of hope, looking for meaning where there is none. You may, as I said earlier, think it nothing but coincidence.

I'll let you keep that.  I'll let you keep your doubts. I have my moths and my sense of wonder. I have peace, and a view of the light.

It turns out I don't always need hard fact.

 

 

 

I write of love again...

 

 

It is getting easier. My heart is lightening in the smallest of increments. My thoughts scatter still, in the darkest hours, but they scatter less wildly. Less and less madly.

It is true, then, that the nights retract. That the breath comes back like the ocean, like the moon. It is true that time is the only way through, that the only gentling is in the  accumulation of the moments, the minutes, the hours. 

Did I write, before, that we work in the same office? That five days a week, I sit and hurt in his line of sight? I loved him, I think. And, He is no longer mine. I also think, He lies, and, I know this is right. But of course it still hurts. His pressed white shirts, his voice, his smile – fistfuls of salt rubbed into a hundred cuts.  

I wore the grief like a hairshirt at first. I smiled and smiled but underneath, the self-flagellation itched and burned. I looked at photos, I returned to the same memories over and over, a tongue poking at a bad tooth. Worse, I let myself imagine. I gave weight to rumours, shaped ghosts from the air. A woman, gold-skinned, swimming in his sheets. Another hanging like a jewel from his arm. Pin-thin heels. Elaborate hair.

There is truth in the gossip, I think. Regardless, it matters less now. It was my decision to end things; I hold tightly to that. It is a stone rolled smooth by the sea, made warm in m y palms. It comforts me. To know that I have that kind of strength. To end something I knew wasn’t working, wasn’t healthy, even though I loved him, even though I knew I would miss so much. There is a lot to be said for that. 

Love songs still bruise. I still look away from lovers in the street, knotted at the hand, their smiles strung between them like a ribbon on a gift. But the lump in my throat is dissolving. My mouth no longer tastes of salt and regret.  

There is a reason things happen. A rhythm beneath each experience. And it's not always clear. Not in the aftermath of something, the churn in the wake of a failed love affair, a death,  some other kind of grief. But there is always something we can learn. There is always a lesson. It’s up to us whether we choose to take it, or whether we shut ourselves off from the hurt, close like a hedgehog over our softness, our terrible tenderness.

I’ve had my hibernation. My tiny sleep. I'm ready to be open again. I'm ready to creep back into the fray. The wonderful, horrible, usual, sensual, marvellous, awful, magical fray.

Plumbing the depths

 

I have been listless these last weeks. Love, or lack of it, the culprit. It came out of nowhere, like a Summer storm, and I was caught up in the wild, sudden loveliness of it; it left just as quickly, and I was bereft. Where was the man who was holding me a moment ago, filling my ears with words as sweet as roses, where was the chest where my head so sweetly fit?

The truth is that I was grasping at ghosts the whole time. The man I fell for was smoke and shadow, a trick of the light. A man like that can't be kept. The tighter I held on, the less was left. I found myself with handfuls of ashes, fistfuls of only air.

And yet, and yet. Would I take back the last four months? The education of the body, the handling of the bones, the falling, the freedom, the fear? I wouldn't, not for anything. I needed to know that I was capable. I needed to know that I could break open like that. I needed to wear those strings of particular words like pearls, touch them, feel their cool weight against my skin, gleam with their soft spots of reflected light.

I feared, I think, that love might kill me. I thought if it ended I would bend and break, like a switch of willow in a high wind. I thought I would seal myself shut again,  cordon off the body and corral the heart, live the quiet, dusty life of an Immaculate.

Instead, I am sitting with my grief, knowing already that it will pass. We fall for the wrong ones, sometimes, the ones whose edges never really fit with ours, and that's ok, that's part of the human experience. People change. Hearts change. We change, and that is necessary, and right.

Growth hurts. I remember when I was fifteen, sixteen, my hormones gone suddenly wild; my bones creaked in the night like ships as they stretched, the new nubs of my breasts were two bruises that ached and ached. I shot up like a hothouse flower, and I hated it; I was a stranger in my own body for months as it quite literally changed and rebuilt itself around me, like living in a house where the rooms switched every day, where windows were suddenly doors, and ceilings were underfoot one minute and overhead the next.

But growth is crucial to development, even if we might not like it at the time, even if we feel that it's cruel, even if it's unwanted, even if it hurts. Maybe even especially if it hurts. Even as I tell myself this, my heart feels like a stone, heavy and hard, clunking dully in the space behind my ribs. Knowing that pain will pass doesn't lessen the immediate experience of it. Nor does it mean that I can sleep easily at night  again instead of charting the acres of ceiling like an astronomer mapping the stars.

It does mean that I can take how I'm feeling a day at a time (or an hour at a time, or a minute). It does mean that I'm certain that, given enough time, the space between clock-ticks will expand and relax again, and the pillow won't only be something to wrestle with in the deepest hours of the night. It does mean that I will be ready to love again when it happens for me, and it will, because I am open, and I have much to give.

The heart is an ocean. It isn't always safe. The salt stings, and its wrecks are countless. But oh my goodness, are there treasures untold in its depths.

 

Roman Holiday

 

 

The clocks were turned back last weekend, so the days have been suddenly and thinly compressed. The light starts to fail at around three o’clock, the yellow trees dimming as the grey deepens. By five o’clock, we are sunk in darkness: the wet ground duplicates the office windows, the streetlights shoulder their sodium haloes and the shy moon begins her slow climb through the earth’s turn.

Invariably, people complain about the changes – the altered clocks, the rain that slants in sheets, the nights that stretch like black elastic – but I love the suddenness of it all. Summer has dwindled gradually into Autumn, Autumn has heretofore dawdled along…and then comes the end of October, and with it, a switch is flipped. The line between before and after is clean and cold, punctuated with darkness and stars, and from now on, we are on the descent into Winter, down, and down, like Persephone into her long half-calendar of blue subterranean rooms.

Two weeks today, I will be flying to Rome. It is strange, at least to me, that it is still sunny there, the cobblestones still baking with heat, the blonde ruins still simmering in hours and hours of light. I’ve never travelled out of my season before. Always, at this time of year, I have gone to places that are as cold, if not colder, than home. Paris last year was bitter. New York before that was frozen over, glittering with frost like a disco ball. I know, of course, that seasons on other continents are different to those I’m used to at home, but still it feels otherworldly to be able to fly from one season to another on a whim - like a magic spell, or a wish granted in a flash of sparks.

This will also be my first ever romantic break, which amplifies the magic factor exponentially. The thought of four whole days in Rome together fills me with lovely drifts of butterflies. I can’t wait to explore the city - the opulence of the Vatican, the elaborate ceilings of the Sistine Chapel, the crumbling grandeur of the Colosseum - but one of the things I'm most excited about is to do so as one half of a couple, and take part in all those little coupley things that I've seen and sighed over for so many years but never experienced for myself. Holding hands in the street. Stopping to kiss by one of the many fountains. Taking arms-length photographs with our beaming faces cheek to cheek.

Don't get me wrong. I will never be one of those girls who needs a man to be happy (thirty two years of being single has put paid to that)  or who defines the crux of her existence by whether she has a head on the pillow next to her at night. But right now, I am all a-flutter with first love, and treasuring the honeymoon period, which I know won't last indefinitely.  I am old enough and wise enough to know that - if I am lucky - the whirling dizziness of these early days will settle into a calmer and more companionable sort of love, and if it does, I want to remember every phase, every layer, every moment of how we got to where we are, like counting the rings on a tree to determine its age: this is our first date, this is when we said I love you, this is when we realised it was for real and for good….

 

And if it isn't meant to be, then I will deal with that, too. It's just a pleasure to be participating, for once. To feel like part of the game, and not a faceless presence on the sidelines. It's still a  bit terrifying, if I'm completely honest, the whole falling in love thing - it's not all roses and goodness and pleasure. Openness can be completely unnerving. Letting someone have access to all those parts of yourself that you normally brush under the rug is nail-bitingly worrying. I suspect I will never be comfortable with being vulnerable, but then who is?

 

There is a quote I love by Kurt Vonnegut: "We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down". That is just about perfect for where I am now - somewhere between the sky and the sea, my skin thin but rippling with feathers.

 

 

 

Matters of the Heart

 

 

"The bees are flying...they taste the Spring."

'Wintering', Sylvia Plath

 

 

A blogless August, a blogless September. Where do the days go, and the months? The last of the sunshine slips through my fingers like water; the last leaves litter the lawn, crackling underfoot like tiny fires. I wake in the dark and go to sleep in the dark; my days are bracketed by blackness and stars.

 

October. I love the sound of the word in my mouth. I love its briskness, the implications of apples and frost, of breath hanging in the air like clouds. I love this whole segment of the year, the last cold quarter of the calendar, as crisp and clean as a slice of moon. The deepening. The gathering in. The hushed sense of everything having gone to ground, to sleep, to dream, to preserve and replenish. 

 

Year after year, I find my life mirroring the season. As the ground hardens and the hedges moult down to their brown bones, I invariably find myself sorting and settling, tying up loose ends, finishing the tasks that have remained unfinished – nesting, in effect. Readying myself for the year’s closing.

 

Which is perhaps why it feels so very strange this year to find myself suddenly in a process of growth and renewal, of newness and blooming, beginnings and opportunities. It seems somehow out of sync with the season. Like strawberries in January, or snow in the middle of June.  

 

I am thirty two and I have never been in love. Or rather, I have never been in love until now. While my school-friends were doodling names in notebooks and batting newly-mascara-ed lashes across the classroom, I was keeping meticulous lists of calories and loping determinedly around the running track in my lunch hour. While they were enjoying first kisses, first crushes, I was enjoying the new sharpness of my hips, my belly's empty bowl, the stutter of my palms over emerging ribs.

 

I missed out on all those years of relationships - the years where people learn what a relationship is, the years where people learn how to be in one. So that there was a part of the adult me that still felt like that tentative teenaged girl who hasn’t been kissed yet, who doesn’t know how to give herself to someone, who doesn’t know what really loving or being loved feels like.  

 

That used to terrify me. I saw it as a failing or a flaw, as something that made me somehow defective. I would tell myself that I couldn’t ever be in a relationship, that I’d left it too long without having laid the groundwork or had the practice runs. I told myself that it didn’t matter, that I couldn’t miss what I’d never had, that some people were just meant to live independently and alone. All of which is, of course, ridiculous.

 

My relationship history is perhaps atypical, but that doesn’t have to be a bad thing. Yes, this is all new to me, and yes, I am probably very green in lots of ways, but I don’t care, I don’t care, I don’t care. This relationship, this process, is so important and so precious, that there is simply no room for those old limits. There is no space for those voices saying Don’t, or can’t, or won’t.

 

I wake up in the mornings and the first thing that I remember is I love someone, and he loves me; my whole body hums with that knowledge as though bees had taken up residence. It's exhilarating and wonderful and a little bit terrifying all at once. I don't know whether it feels more like flying or falling. But I do know that I am treasuring every moment. And that the wait, however long, was worth it. 

 

This is what the poems are for, then. This is what the heart feels like when it's full.