Legs to the table top
A little applause for the anchorage thank you!
I’m never quite sure when S wakes. When she does, it is as though she is already in one piece, out the door before I’ve even decided on the matter. Occasionally, we both have our shit together enough that we find ourselves on the same bus, headed one portion of the way before parting. Usually, I do what I can to take longer. Mostly because I tend to make it to the office early, even when I try to arrive on time. There’s also just the unspoken agreement, perhaps universal, in craving our own in the morning. It is too early for anything but ourselves.
When we do regroup in the evening, it is with the acknowledgement that we have spent most of ourselves during the day. There is little left but the final dregs of tiny anecdotes. We lean into the delirium of half-formed thoughts, the fridge agape between us and the dinner yet to be made.
When I moved into this flat back in April, it was most unhelpfully during the same week I started a new job. My old job also thought it was an excellent idea to send me on fieldwork in my final week. It was all quite last minute, there was a lot of money being put into the project, and I was leading a significant portion of the matter. In the end, it was as if I had landed into my final day with but half the intention of leaving. My body, feeling like it was robbed of a proper farewell, seemed to walk out in spite of the rest of me.
All of this meant I had to make do with one day to pack up. I didn’t think it was unmanageable — I had done worse and I am too well practiced. Little P sat outside my room watching as I filled each box, hauling them one by one out to the front. He seemed to be entranced and then gradually suspicious.
When the room was empty, he tottered in, scoping out the sudden change for me. He looked me in the eye through the mirror and didn’t know what to do with himself. On any other given day, he would have leapt into the bed without hesitation. I hauled the rest of my bags out to the front and he stood by, uncertain. He didn’t have anything to say about the matter. Just stayed in the window watching, as I dragged myself to the gate.
I headed out. There was a van on my tracker that needed catching up. There was B waiting at the new flat to be my second pair of arms. Between the two of us, we got it done within the hour.
“It’s like you’ve always been here.”
S remembers my first night at the flat.
Meanwhile, I’m on her floor, eating a sad meal deal, not quite sure what’s occurred in the space of a week. What followed was a period of limbo and I overstayed my welcome at his while waiting for a mattress, pouring too much energy into being at my new office.
It’s been seven months now, and things finally feel less transitory. There are moments I recognise that helped put legs to the table top, one of which was an actual table, followed by a bright blue shelf that anchors this space as so incredibly mine. I’ve dressed each surface with the ornaments of past lives, the one from up the road next to that of some earlier phase. Here in the middle I have a postcard from a friend, framed, next to a jar of unsown fabric buttons found in Hokkaido (?), if memory does not fail me (it often does). On another, a vigil candle handed to me on Portland Place two years ago, next to a dying gift of an alocasia from earlier this Spring. I do my best to keep both alive but I cannot guarantee. All together — that’s one of the things that’s been missing for the past few years. I had my things, but not much to hold them in the ways I longed for.
Each of these little gatherings in such a small space have already seen me through so much. We always say this about the present, but this has been my most significant year yet. Of the person it allowed room for, of so much personalising made only possible by the choices I made over time. On a walk some weekend ago, S and I agreed that we ought to stay here at least another year. It feels important enough to us both that we allow ourselves all this routine and camaraderie before life throws us into whatever arrives next.
I have so much of myself here with me. I’m proud of this. It’s immensely important that I relish in that. Perhaps it is clumsy, and perhaps B will attest to this should we reminisce our painful steps up and down and back up these stairs, but I know what I’ve shed along the way. I forgive myself for not being able to let go.
