"And in that moment, I swear we were infinite..."

 

When the weather is grey and wet, this city is a mirror. Rooftops slick with rain throw back the sky, and the sky returns the world a thousandfold in its drops. You can see the stars in the street: I love that. I walk through puddles just to shatter constellations, stand and watch them shiver, break apart. They recover, eventually. Everything does. The ripples stop sending themselves out, and the water settles, and there is the whole universe again, burning steadily underfoot, at once infinite and the size of a fireside rug.

Sometimes I am so struck by wonder that it feels like a bruise. Water, and light. Stars, and darkness. Moons, and poetry, and love.

These sweet weekend mornings, when I get to wake up with C, and he absently threads my hair through his fingers while we talk in that soft slow intimate way that you have when you've just swum up from sleep, and snatches of dream are still tugging at your ankles like underwater-weeds.

The long blonde slices of light the sun sends through the blinds to stripe the wooden floors like sleeping tigers.

Those rare days when the sun is snuffed out like a candle-flame between finger and thumb. I stood in the dimness of last week's eclipse, struck dumb by the oddness and the beauty of it all. The light was tea-coloured, and everything was strange, and it felt like the end of the world. I thought,  maybe I've died already, hundreds of years ago, and somewhere in the future, my daughter's daughter's daughter is holding a sepia photo, fingertips finding her shadows in my face, and the bit of me that lives in her, the cells in her blood, the strings of code in her bones, is calling back across the centuries like an echo: hello, hello, hello.....

It seems that magic is everywhere. It is hard to explain. Its not that I'm in love, which is its own wonderful thing and has its own sort of magic, but also has its own particular trail of fears foaming in its wake (what if I lose him, what if my heart breaks, what if I hurt him, what if he doesn't stay). Its not that I'm happy, because happiness, I know, comes and goes like the light does, like the rain.

It's more that I feel whole, somehow. And not from being half or part of something else. I am whole in myself. I'm not sweeping scraps of myself under rugs, or chasing thoughts, like spiders, into corners. There is light in every nook and there is light in every crevice, and if it shows up the dust sometimes as well as the good, at least it's honest.

There are nights when I wake and worry, still, and the second between each clock-tick lasts for days. There are times when the mirror isn't kind, and the old ghosts clank and rattle their chains. But mostly, I am good. Mostly I am grateful.

For the breaths, and the words, and the breakfast eggs. The kisses. The glasses of wine. The church bells that come through the trees on Thursday nights when the ringers have their weekly practice. The scented candles, the sweet plum tomatoes clustered on the vine. The daydreams. The poems I read that go off in my mind like tiny fireworks, glittering, gold.

Today is cold, and the sky is wide and white like a sheet. The rain is flying, a hundred thousand scattered beads, and my wellington boots are on. I have my keys, my woolly hat, my purse.

Contemplate the wonder of your own life. I'm off to shatter the Universe.

 

 

"There will be time to wonder, 'Do I dare?', and 'Do I dare?'"

I'm meant to be creating today, but the words won't come. Instead, I lie under blankets on C's bed while he works in the corner under one of those desk-lamps with the flexible neck. I link from blog to blog, looking for new words to love. I like the beautiful ones best, the ones that string sentences together like pearls.  I want to wear them on the shelves of my collarbones, the two moons of my breasts.

I have books, plural, in progress. Pages and pages of words I have coaxed and clipped and pruned into blooming. Like orchids, they are difficult to grow, even harder to keep alive. But I try. I try. Meanwhile the years keep passing and there are no spines on the bookshelf lettered with my name.

I dream of a neat little cottage in the future. A well-kept garden with radishes and beets. In it, a room full of pretty things - cushions, flowers, sun-filled lace - where I sit to write (and write, and write). All the words I've collected over the years, all the words I've dreamed, free to spill on to page after page, unkilled by hours in strip-lit offices and steamy canteens, unkilled by mindless hours in front of flickering TV screens.

I think I've found a way to pick that future's lock. A way to open the door to that room where I can sit and write the things that make my heart fill and swell. I must write, I decided, something fast, and furious. Not the book I want to write, not yet; not the poetry, not the sentences that sweeten into something golden and fine. I must write something quick and cheap, something that will sell, so I can leave the creativity-killing nine-to-five behind. Goodbye buses, and vending machines; goodbye logins that change every thirty days, and mechanical window-blinds; goodbye, air conditioning that is always too high or too low, so we roast like chickens on a spit in Winter, and shiver till our teeth rattle in the Summer.

It sounded easy, and it is, for the most part, it is. The words come freely when I'm not being selective, when I'm not choosing based on how beautiful something sounds, or if it holds truth. This is a different kind of writing than I have ever done, all cliffhangers and wordcounts, and the battle is being won. Even if the book feels a little shabby, a little thin. It's a bit like dressing in grubby, secondhand tweeds after years in the fanciest and riches of  silks.

To write fluff now so I can write gold later...does that make sense? I think it does, but I can't help feeling oily of hand, sometimes, shifty of eye. I go back and forth: It is necessary; a stepping stone for the future. / No, it is a waste, and mercenary.

I know what I want to write. I want to write about things that live beneath the sea, mermaids with silver tails like apostrophes, selkies that peel out of themselves, heel to skull in pale curls, under full, complicit moons. I want to write about love, and death, and every hidden fathom of the human heart. I want to write about light: the way it moves on water, like a scattering of sequins, and the way it falls through lace curtains to trace florals on skin. I want to write about a girl saying yes for the first time, about the boy she lets touch her with trembling hands.

I want to write and write of all these things... but instead I am writing sloppy mass-market fiction with haste. This is the risk: if it works, if it sells, it will all have been worth it. I will sit in my lovely rooms, and drink lemon tea, and write all of the things that live in my heart for the rest of my days. If it doesn't, then it will all have been a waste. But what will I have wasted, really? Only, I suppose, a handful of weeks. Not even a full turn around the sun.

I've never tried writing like this before. Forging words from speed and fire, lines from time and heat. There's that, at the very least, to gain. The chance I've never taken. The dice I've yet to cup in a hand and cast. The newness of the experience for its own sweet sake. Maybe it's worth persisting for that alone. That, and the hope it can't help but light in me, bright as a newly-minted coin of moon.

 

 

"Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself..."

Another February gone, with its frosts and mists. Gunmetal ground, and stars like cold fire. The white shoots of snowdrops. The Valentines flutes full of bubbles, full of hope. Another striped candle on the sweet, sweet cake. A wish expelled in breath and smoke.

I sit and type, and rain flies at the window like handfuls of sequins flung at a bride. The wet slate roof throws back the sky. This is my life. My beautiful life. In all its wonder and all its normalcy.

It seems just a moment since I wrote I am thirty three. Wrote of journeys, wrote of plans, and dreams, and the slats disappearing beneath the path of a train. And now I am thirty-four, another oak-tree-ring circling the shafts of my bones.

Twelve months. A handful of posts. Words scattered like breadcrumbs across the screen. I find the ghosts of my selves in the spaces: remember that girl; the one whose heart was crushed like a flower in a fist? And that girl, too, a flat balloon,  filling, very slowly, with warm air, new faith? I remember that perfect moment, and the moon. The gardens in Summer - squirrels, pinecones, wine on my breath. I remember the notes I took. The fingers that read the Braille of my spine like the dimpled print in a special  book. The seasons that spun in their slow carousel: light, and air, colour, heat;  new buds, old bones, sunlight, snow.

I have learned to let go, this year.  I have learned to breathe before letting out the rush of words. I have learned to be truer to myself, more clear about the things I want and don't. I have learned that I don't always know, and that that's ok. I have learned to say I'm sorry; I love you; I'm afraid.

What else?

Oh yes: that there are more chances than stars in the sky. That you can love without losing yourself to the process of loving. That you're never failing as long as you try.

I have learned to treat my life like a garden: to protect and to prune. To water what is good, and full of life, what helps me grow. To cut off the rest at the root.

I have learned that change doesn't happen overnight, but that I can chip away at the cliff face. I have learned that, ,through everything, goodness runs like seams of gold through old rock. That sometimes it glitters, right there for the taking, so beautiful, so free... and that sometimes we must sweat and hack and chisel for it.

I no longer look at my age and frown. I look at the numbers and marvel. I wear them like a prize. I still can't French-braid my own hair, or draw on eyeliner in perfect leonine sweeps. I still haven't finished the books I'm writing, or grown my own tomatoes. I still haven't tasted lobster, paid off that loan. But this is the thing I have come to understand: all those things, they're the patchwork pieces. The bits of your life - the experiences, the lovelinesses -  that come together gradually, over time, to make the whole quilt. The things we piece together, the experiences that give the thing - the life - its patterns, its colour, its heft, its shape. And my whole life is about finding those pieces and putting them together.

But so far, my thirties - though not without the most gorgeous of patches - has been about something just as important, and thus far lacking. The stitches and seams. The things that hold the quilt together, give it cohesion, shape and beauty. A sense of self, which I've found after years of working and searching, and which I'm grasping as tightly as a kite-tail in high wind. An independence, like sediment, at the seat of everything. A sweet sort of surety; a certain calm.

Life is a process, not a destination.  I forget who said that, although I've quoted it before, but never has this been clearer to me than now. Another year struck from the calendar. Another beautiful square sewn into the quilt. I can see, already, the edges of the next one. Gold like sunshine, like honey, like hope.

 

 

"Be in love with your life; every detail of it..."

 

Those days, when the tides inside crest and swell, and your soul, like the foam on the curl of a wave, rides it all out, in the simplest of joys, high in the blue, close to the sky.

 

Those days when bad luck or a black mood is nothing but the vaguest memory, nothing but ash in the fire of your cairn, and you burn with absolute clarity, you burn with focus and calm.

Those days when the words shake out of your fingers  like grains of salt from the cellar, and you lick your fingertips, you press your lips to your palms, and you taste of ink, and sweat, and you feel the heat of your own blood moving beneath your skin, and you've never felt so real, so alive.

These days, these days...I wish I could cast them, now, as they happen, cast them and press them into glasslike beads. I wish I could wear them in a rosary or rope, a string of my longest, most beautiful days spilling over my collarbones, over my breasts.

 

To handle them over and over, and return to that wonder. To roll each moment in a thumb.

 

I want to be higher, and better, and that part of me says Love every second...then let it go.

 

But the human part, the girl with a heart so soft you could nudge it, knuckle it, knead it like dough, says, Let me hold onto this for always; let me take my time with it, slow, slow...oh, let me keep this rush of love, this sudden golden flood of hope, of grace... 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"The moon and I are too much in love..."

First frost. Spiderwebs like dreamcatchers, strung with the dew they caught and kept. Leaves that break underfoot like glass.  Autumn may have slunk in like an alley-cat, all stealth and grace, but she's a lion now. The streets are copper and gold where she's stepped.

And oh, the moons, the lovely moons. Why are the skies so much clearer in the cold? The stars come back to themselves, are brilliant in a way they never are in Summer, when they are gentled by the heat, and the Autumn moons are startling: bone-white, diamond-clear, hauntingly bright.

I read somewhere that scientists think the moon may have been ours once, a commonplace part of our crust. That something struck us from the wide white sky - a meteor, perhaps, or a comet streaking fire the way a girl's hair streams behind her in the wind - and a huge chunk of land broke away and spun off into space, where it caught in orbit, and hung there, and became our moon.

Isn't it pretty to think so? I can't help but think of the moon as a girl, and that theory leads me to imagine her up there on her shelf of stars, lonely and wistful and Winter-white, always in sight of her old home but unable to return. Maybe that's why the tides turn, because she's trying to sing them back. Maybe that's why girls crease with cramp each month, because their blood follows the same silver tune.

There is something magical about the moon. That's why so many poems try to catch her in the nets of their lines, like a great silver fish. That's why so many artists try to keep something of her for themselves, in ornate frames, in cathedral-quiet gallery rooms.

 

I wrote a few posts ago of moths; of how they have become something of a personal totem after they batted insistently at the glass of my life in their soot-soft, silent-winged flurries. How I finally gleaned a message from their constant, persistent presence: to make the decision that is right for myself in every moment, and to always head in the direction of the light.

It stands to reason, then, that I may be more moon-obsessed, lately, than most, given that I'm following the path of the moth these days, and the moon is the very source of that light, in both literal and metaphoricalterms. I'm asking constant questions in a way I've never done because of that little lightbulb moment about the moths. I'm more engaged than I've ever been. I accepted my life just the way it was for a really  long time, because that's what so many people do. So many people just accept that they're in jobs they hate, or have toxic relationships, or are in poor health; they accept it because they take the attitude that this is real life, and real life isn't all dreams coming true and Prince Charmings happening along, and having jobs we really love and getting paid a lot of money to do them; we're not in a Hollywood movie.

And I accept that; I accept that we're not in a Hollywood movie. But who wants a life where the endings are already written, anyway, and the coincidences aren't strange and wonderful but scripted purely for plot, and the moon, the gorgeous, miraculous, luminous moon, is just something small and coin-bright on a flat screen?

Life isn't perfect. I've always known that. It took me a lot longer to realise and really understand that just because everything isn't perfect doesn't mean that nothing is.

Last night I had a perfect moment. It was both the loveliest and simplest of things. I had a glass of really cold beer, my boyfriend's hand was resting on my knee, and we were talking and looking up at the moon which was just wildly, insanely, outrageously beautiful, all wreathed in blue cloud and turning the air silver. And for a split second, I felt perfect, and happy, and absolutely full, and I thought This is it, this is what pure joy feels like. And then it was gone, with just the lovely afterglow left behind for a spell.

I think maybe the trick of happiness is accepting that we can't maintain that feeling constantly. We're not meant to. Happiness without any other emotions to frame it is empty. It's champagne without the bubbles. Fizz gone completely flat. We can't rest in those happy, perfect little moments forever. But in keeping those metaphorical moths in mind, I'm learning to move in that same, steady, hitching kind of flight in pursuit of those moments. Zigzagging between my moments of joy. Luxuriating in them when they happen, and then setting off again afterwards, eyes on the next bit of light.

The moon, more than anything else, has the effect of making me remember how small and human and mortal I am, even as it makes me contemplate how vast the universe must be, and what a miracle it is that I exist - that any of us exist - at all.

And so I'm going to go out again tonight. Breathe in the cold, look up at the moon. Know that if I could see my own eyes, there'd be a million stars reflected in them. All those galaxies, all that old light, ,existing, however briefly, in me.

What a miracle that is. And how simple it is to find miracles when you only stop to look.

 

 

 

Autumn is a second Spring, when every leaf's a flower...

Autumn is here. The stealthiest of all the seasons. In she creeps on little cat-feet, trailing her bronzes and turning the leaf-tips to copper as she goes. One moment the skies are jewel blue and absolutely clear. The next they are the colour of unlit lightbulbs,  the smoky grey of shoeprints on paper.

We went wandering a couple of weekends ago on one of those last clear days, and ended up in the gardens of an old stately home. We bought ice creams from the little on-site cafe, took off our shoes and sat on the grass beneath the old Tudor mansion house. Couples threw sticks for woolly-looking dogs. Children toddled by the pond, squeezing fistfuls of bread meant for the ducks in their chubby little fists. Magpies rattled like gunfire in the trees. Midges fizzed. It was beautiful. Later, we went for a walk by the lake, and I took photos of the water, the sky, the trees.

 

 

 

In one (the photo I posted at the start of this entry), a single tree blazed orange; the others, all around, were still green. That first sign of Autumn, even as the sky glowed blue through the gaps in the leaves. Just two weeks ago, and now the green is gone, and we crunch through molten colours in the streets.

This morning, we went to the food and craft market near C's house, and drank coffee as we browsed the stalls. Breads studded with nuts and seeds, and peppered cheeses; fat, split sausages spitting on the grills. Homemade ciders and local beers. Steamer trunks with real iron bindings. and stencilled names fading prettily to obscurity on the sides.

There was a lovely chill in the air, and the stallholders were cheery in woolly hats and fingerless gloves, and I suddenly wanted more than anything to press the morning into my memory like a flower in a book, or a moth behind glass, wanted to preserve it to take out and handle in the Summer months, in the Spring, say yes, I remember, this is exactly how Autumn smells; of coldness, and coffee, of woodsmoke, and grilled meat, and clean, good air...

 

 

"One moment your life is a stone in you; the next, a star".

 

Remember when my heart was glass, and love songs were feet that stamped and smashed. All those months when my face was grey, and broke open without warning, a sky full of rain.

A friend told me then, Some day, someone else made of stars will be waiting in the wings. I held onto that like a rosary or a charm. Thumbed it in the dark. Pressed my wishes and my hopes into it, like fingerprints in bubblegum or plasticine. Wanted to believe, but couldn't, quite.

In June, I went on a date to flesh out the bones of my loneliness. Tired of spending Saturday nights with a bottle of wine and my thoughts. Tired of Sundays where the hours were endless and glutinous, melting and lengthening like Dali's gloopy clocks. My friends were busy, my own four walls were driving me crazy, and I just wanted out for a while. I wanted sunshine that wasn't filtered through glass. Good wine. Some conversation.

I wasn't looking for anything, not really. But I found everything.

People said, You'll find love when you're not looking, and, When you're ready, love will find you. I've said those things myself - many times, to many people - and I've always meant them. It's just harder to believe when it comes to your own tender self. Its hard to have faith, even the vaguest kind, when you still feel like you have bootprints on your heart.

This is the beautiful thing about life. It's a truth that you sometimes have to root for in the dark, but it's true like a root, like a stone, like a star. There will always, always, always be a turning. Just as Winter will crack open into Spring. Just as the night will lighten into morning. Nothing is permanent. Everything, but everything, will change.

I may be hurt again, in time. Maybe it won't work after all. Maybe he'll break my heart, or I his. But that's the risk, isn't it. The beautiful, terrible risk of it. That's the chance we take each time we put our feelings - our eggshell-fragile, mothwing-delicate feelings - into someone else's palm's. But rather that than be lonely and be flat. Rather take a blind leap and a tumble than never start.

I have been a bud. I was a bud for the whole first half of the year, hard, and closed and very, very green. But now I'm uncurling. I'm ready to be open again, I'm ready for loveliness and light. Let the ashes of what went before feed my roots. Maybe my colours will be all the better, all the brighter, for that.