April, 2006
Sunday Scribblings: Why I live where I live
This is the post I would have written even without the prompt from Sunday Scribblings as today is the one anniversary of my arrival in this rented two-bedroom flat, three storeys up, ten minutes from the sea. Two months after the man I loved died from a heart attack, I left my flat in London and returned to my hometown. When the lettings agent first showed me around this flat I did not believe I would ever be able to fill the space as I had nothing – no furniture, no future, no hope, yet now I look around me and see colour and life in every corner and on every surface. Furnishing this apartment gave me something to think about when all I wanted to do was stay in bed and sleep forever.
The man on the television behind me has just said this sentence: “the act of building is the physical tangible expression of promise”. He is talking about Russian architecture, but that sentence sums up everything I am trying to express tonight. Moving into this flat I gave myself the space to grieve. Moving into this flat I was forced to rebuild myself, forced to believe that one day I would live again. Each piece of furniture I bought was a promise to myself that one day I would be okay, and that wanting that was not a betrayal of all that had gone before. The walls have been painted in my tears, the rooms filled with ghosts, the sheets on my bed are imprinted with my yearning for a man who will never again lie with me – or to me.
This flat represents my phoenix-self, risen from the blackened remains of my old life. It is within these four walls I have had to relearn everything I thought I knew about life. I have found answers to some questions, and accepted that some answers will never be found. This afternoon my goddaughter told me she loves my flat – being here, in this town, has allowed me to reconnect with friends and family and retread paths I walked along as a child, a teenager, a young woman. I have come home in all senses of the word. I have found a strand that will lead me to the future and picked up the unravelling end of a life I thought I had left behind long ago.
This flat doesn’t just house all my worldly goods; this flat is me.
** The picture above is of my beautiful godchildren. I worship the ground their little feet walk on, even if they do get chocolate on my pristine white sofa. For more Sunday Scribblings go here.
April, 2006
The wind of change
“The journal is the ideal place of refuge for the inner self because it constitutes a counterworld: a world to balance the other” ~ Joyce Carol Oates
Yesterday was a day off, yet my ‘off’ days look remarkably like my ‘on’ days, and that is the problem with working at home. I can’t get away from the office as the office is slap bang in the middle of the living room. But it’s more insidious than that. I’m finding it so difficult to switch off, as if, were I to let go for a second, to take a break from this ever vigilant awareness I have cultivated, I would fall down and dissolve. So I sit at my desk coiled like a spring, perched on the seat, waiting… I can sense that life is beginning to change and while I’m happy with this forward movement I’m not sure I want it either. It has taken a long time to get to this quiet place, one not filled with blood and sadness and rage.
How many times last year did I wish that time would not take me further away from my painful memories yet wish for the clock to speed up so the healing would begin. And here I find myself, tentatively, outwardly healed, thinking about myself again, striving, moving, living again. How dare I! For so long I felt the wind in my face as the world and its inhabitants rushed past me, the woman sat in her own bit of time, motionless, stilled. I envied my friends as they lived and loved outside the glass box I was trapped in. The grief that has anchored me for so long has shifted – the air outside has changed, the light is different. I can smile at friends again; I can talk about what happened without the tears coming. But where does that leave me? I’m not sure I know who I am if I am not defined by grief, by loss.
Standing before the sea yesterday, my head still spinning from a successful, satisfying day in London, I felt more open; last night, for the first time in a very long time, I allowed myself to imagine what it would be like to be held in another’s arms again. I have always pushed this thought down, denied my feelings, my yearnings, but last night they came out, dancing around me, tempting me, calling to me, and now they are out I cannot squash them back inside.
April, 2006
Curiouser and curiouser…
A window in my heart opened a little yesterday, and I let London back in. Walking through the Soho streets, the people, squawking, talking, shouting and laughing, the scent of coffee and cigarettes and cabbage leaves in Berwick Street market, all wafted around me, smoke fingers poking me, playfully. I stopped in Foyle’s to look for poetry; I sat with my friend Louise outside Bar du Marche and watched the Hari Krishnas go jangling past, the street cleaner and his spinning wheels obliterating all chance for conversation, our steak and frites washed down with bottles of cold beer. I was back in my beloved city, back in wonderland.
Sitting in reception, waiting for my meeting, I looked up at the bookshelves displaying the latest titles from the agency’s clients. There was one book that made me smile, that made me hold up my hands inside my heart and say okay, maybe this is the right path. On the middle shelf, directly on my eye line, standing proud next to Zadie Smith’s rose-coloured cover, was Alison Lurie. The circle of coincidence was completed.
The meeting went well. Over the next two weeks I will embroider and burnish my six chapters then give them back into the safe hands of my agent, ready to be sent out to prospective publishers. The journey has really begun.
Spelling
My daughter plays on the floor
with plastic letters,
red, blue and hard yellow,
learning how to spell,
spelling,
how to make spells
and I wonder how many women
denied themselves daughters,
closed themselves in rooms,
drew the curtains
so they could mainline words.
A child is not a poem,
a poem is not a child.
There is no either/or.
However.
I return to the story
of the woman caught in the war.
And in labour, her thighs tied
together by the enemy
so she could not give birth.
Ancestress; the burning witch,
her mouth covered by leather
to strangle words.
A word after a word
after a word is power.
At the point where language falls away
from the hot bones, at the point
where the rock breaks open and darkness
flows out of it like blood, at
the melting point of granite
when the bones know
they are hollow and the word
splits and doubles and speaks
the truth and the body
itself becomes a mouth.
This is a metaphor.
How do you learn to spell?
Blood, sky and the sun,
your own name first,
your first naming, your first name,
your first word.
~ Margaret Atwood
For more poetic inspiration, go here.
April, 2006
Now this is weird
"Beyond time, beyond death, love is. Time and death cannot wear it away”
~ Jeanette Winterson, The Powerbook
After I wrote my blog post last night, I followed the breadcrumbs to the bookcase in my spare room. Well, I call it a bookcase – it’s actually more of a book landslide, there are so many. Finding the Neruda book yesterday triggered a memory – and I can’t believe I haven’t realised this before now. Nestled on the bottom shelf I found another book with my face on it. (I should add that, luckily, there are only two books in the world with my mug on them – when I was studying photography, all those years ago, I posed for an awful lot of my fellow students). This book is by Alison Lurie, and the picture was snapped by a lovely guy called Spiros (who has since gone on to have a very successful career as a photographer). When I took the book off the shelf, it was like a piece of the jigsaw slotted into place: the book is called Women & Ghosts, and that title, coupled with the image, made me see that, twelve years ago, my path was already being written. And now I’ve caught up with it.
Poetry
And it was at that age… Poetry arrived
in search of me. I don’t know, I don’t know where
it came from, from winter or a river.
I don’t know how or when,
no, they were not voices, they were not
words, nor silence,
but from a street I was summoned,
from the branches of night,
abruptly from the others,
among violent fires
or returning alone,
there I was without a face
and it touched me.
I did not know what to say, my mouth
had no way
with names,
my eyes were blind,
and something started in my soul,
fever or forgotten wings,
and I made my own way,
deciphering
that fire,
and I wrote the first faint line,
faint, without substance, pure
nonsense,
pure wisdom
of somebody who knows nothing,
and suddenly I saw
the heavens
unfastened
and open,
planets,
palpitating plantations,
shadow perforated,
riddled
with arrows, fire and flowers,
the winding night, the universe.
And I, infinitesimal being,
drunk with the great starry
void,
likeness, image of
mystery,
felt myself a pure part
of the abyss,
I wheeled with the stars,
my heart broke loose on the wind.
~ Pablo Neruda
