unfoldings // december, 2020
from winter to winter: paying homage to interior spaces and our attempts at makeshift permanence amidst chaos and grief.
My mind. I'm trying to make note of the thoughts that feel like furniture. How might I rearrange them, throw some out, push some nearer the window. I think I've created a sanctuary here for myself, of myself. It's not exactly home, but this will do for now.
from ‘Sanctuary’, a short piece I submitted for Bitter Melon Poetry’s Stay Home Diary earlier this year.
Hello readers,
As this year comes to a close, I’m tentatively dropping my first piece into your inboxes. I hardly know which of my words will touch you (if any at all). I hardly know where this journey will take me (if anywhere at all). All this to simply say— it means a lot that you are here. Thank you for reading.
This space is about the vulnerability of in-between spaces. I welcome all comments and conversations on anything I’ll ever write. Feel free to reach out on Instagram or Twitter, too. You can read more of my newsletter thoughts in the about section and introductory piece.
If there are extracts or particular pieces that you especially enjoy, please do feel free to share on social media (and tag me please!) or send it along to friends directly— hugely appreciate.
TW: grief, coping mechanisms, and expressions of dissociation.
I’m thinking less in terms of 2020 as a year and more from winter to winter.
I think of the places I’ve created for myself these past several months— how some of these are hardly physical spaces and more a set of mental whereabouts. Inevitably, I start to think of the ways in which, as a kid, I weighed myself down with pillows, made forts out of cushions, and pinned myself into corners behind shelves in order to find fitting. One of my strongest memories is being sandwiched between two mattresses while my toddler friends lie atop, hollering. I used to try and squeeze under beds. In the same breath, I would stand and assess whether I’d hypothetically fit through a certain bathroom window and think up infinite methods of escape. Helplessness used to drive me to the gaps between shelves and I would hug these junctions tightly.
I’ve tried to emulate anchorage but it has been a series of unfinished projects, mostly begun on whimsical, and somewhat unrealistic, desires to settle. Heritage is an unreliable narrative voice to me— it does not ground me. After all, it has never nurtured me or stood up for me. Anchorage is only possible in the principles and values I curate for myself and inherit from my mother and her father. Anchorage is, for me, less about permanence and more about how deeply something/someone touches me— the potency of substance.
When I think of last winter, I think about how stranded and how out of touch I was. And so, with time warped in this so-called ‘year’, I feel that last winter is this winter and I am brought back to what happened yesterday. I am not too sure where I am emotionally yet— and as the year comes to a close, the expectation of knowing exactly how to ‘wrap things up’ isn’t comforting right now. I am not so trusting of this concept called faith right now.
When I think of the borderzone of our campus, I think of the postgraduate block I called some semblance of home across my year of study. Nestled in between a medical centre and the golden facade of Leeds Arts University, it is not a striking building. Architecturally, it carries no distinctive disposition. There’s a commercial sort of newness to the combination of glossy windows and perfectly even red bricks that erases all memory of Victorian and post-war heritages. I have therefore never felt intimately home here— but I will come to intimacy shortly. There’s a limb of a freeway that encircles us and when I stand in the parking lot, I can just about hear the flurry of engines roaring. That parking lot is the only open space on this small street and the wind never fails to blunder through. During Autumn, the leaves cause ruckus here. I think the lanes of the freeway have been, oddly enough, more comforting to me than those loose backstreets off our doorstep. I feel less isolated, more connected to a larger body of work when I think of the mobilities of the freeway; the continuous travelling of peoples. I am reminded of the times I’ve taken those roads by way of an Uber or my dad’s car when family came to visit. There’s something jarring to inhabit so characterless a building beside so many larger personalities: those backstreets, smelling of the early hours of curries, chips, and piss and are dumping grounds for creased furnitures and moulded duvets. Meanwhile, the golden arches of that bold university can’t help but steal the spotlight.
I think of the innumerable times I have walked along our street and spotted the marks of airplanes across purpled skies, Parkinson Building in the backdrop. My friend once dropped his takeout on this same street, and too many times before, I have run into an acquaintance on their way to the medical centre or walking through to campus. Thrice did our building sound its alarms across the year I lived there and we would sit shivering on the pavement. Once, a bird was slaughtered by a tire and the whole street filled with its billowing feathers.
At the end of June 2020, mum and I didn’t speak for a week. It was a classic case of inability to agree to disagree, but in isolation, these fall outs feel augmented, too close for comfort. I was struggling to put words down on paper and the dissertation only inched forward rather pathetically. At the end of that week, she rang me urgently multiple times, demanding I pick up. I don’t actually remember picking up her call; I don’t remember what I screamed through my sweat and hysterical gasps and clogged eyes. Mum knows and it quite literally drove her north to me: I feel numb, I apparently insisted, I feel so fucking numb.
Rooms feel like states of being now. I am once again clinging to corners.
In October 2019, I visited Durham, where I had completed my undergraduate studies. I had only recently fallen out with a dear friend, so the city carried a particularly bitter taste with it. I wasn’t quite sure why I decided to go in the end; I suppose I gave into the persuasion of many good friends who were also returning for a quick visit. Around this time, if I remember correctly, some Masters assignments started to pile up and the protests in Hong Kong overtook my mind. All in all, I wasn’t in the best state of emotions when I took the northbound train from Leeds. When you near the train station in Durham, you emerge from closely knit woods— you see nothing and then you are running atop a viaduct and the sight of the cathedral turns something in you. I remember my vision soaked wet. Maybe its the piles on piles on piles of memories— “Cathedral Tunes” “oppressive”*.
I had a schedule to keep to when I got there. I took to Durham hills like a novice again and ran breathless this way and that to meet pal after pal— I wasn’t expecting a call from a friend based in London. It was his birthday and I’d sent him a message earlier, so I supposed he wanted to say a brief hello. We hadn’t spoken in months; I was joyous for an instant. Then I heard the numbness in your voice. Then you told me about M.
I think I remember a ringing sound— not the mobile device kind but the kind that washes you out. The kind that slows vision and turns everything into pixelated swaths. The kind that disables visibility and reminds me of the few times I have crashed to the floor, blinded. I don’t remember the traffic sounding beside me— my head free-riding empty roads. I don’t remember taking a breath. I remember you calling out my name through the phone— Can you hear me? Are you okay? Hello? What the fuck was I supposed to say. I must have sworn. I don’t remember crying.
I must have looked like I had seen a ghost when I sat down for coffee with two friends. I don’t know how I smiled my way through that afternoon. I don’t know how I had the guts to show up for a college event in the evening. I faced crowds and crowds of people, drank who knows how many doubles. I remember feeling disgusted with myself— how dare you smile at a time like this, how fucking dare you.
I didn’t sleep that night. Laid out on the sofa of my friends’ place, I drove myself mad by the beating of my own heart. I paced around the living room at 5am thinking it might tire me out. I gave up at 6am and went for a walk. I made sure to close the door gently and send a message to the group chat: gone for a walk, will be back real soon, left the door unlocked hope that’s okay— don’t wanna wake you guys. The sun filled up the skies and I let it fill me up. It must have been freezing that morning but heavy-eyed as I was, temperature didn’t sway me. I don’t remember crying.
In grief, there’s paralysis and there’s reckoning. I didn’t quite expect there to be so much rage. I don’t know which parts of me felt what or that I even felt anything at all. When I returned to Leeds and a week or so had passed, someone was crying as they lay sodden flowers at Roundhay. I couldn’t really see them though; it was after dark and the rain was shitting it, after all.
You are smaller than I remember
And so is the house, set downhill
Afloat in a sea of scrub oak. From up here
It’s an ordinary box with gravel
Spread over its lid, weighting it, but
Inside it’s full of shadows and sky.
from Katharine Coles’ ‘From Space’ (2014)
I met someone that same winter. Looking back, I hardly know what happened. I think I overestimated myself in terms of timing. I don’t know what I was after— I guess with all good happenings though, you hope for the best without imagining a sure outcome so as not to jinx it. You go in with a full heart and pray it doesn’t get broken. I didn’t know this at the time, but my heart was already broken going in— not because you hurt me (no, absolutely not) but rather because loss is a heartbreaker and I was still losing (it).
I was present, but I wasn’t. I was sincere to you (that I promise), but I was battling insincerity inside me. I was overwhelmed by the fear that you could see right through me, that I was distraught in my own body— that when you touched me, I was damp, crumpled tissue. You were the one good thing to have happened in those cold months and I held onto you— maybe the idea of you, too. I hated myself for that, because liking the idea of someone goes against every fibre of my being. Faith in others was a lost concept and you gave me the slightest hope that I still had something in me that would let another person in. To this day, I wish I had taken up your offer to stay a little longer; I wish I had held on a little tighter that night. But you deserve better. So do I, to myself and to you. You might not know this but you helped me get through that winter— and maybe you still do in absence, this winter.
I wasn’t scared of you. I was just so fucking terrified of myself.
When I think of the outlines of my room on the fourth floor, I think of my reversed cardboard boxes filled to the brim with the true meaning of miscellany. From the unused course textbooks that mock me with the intonations of a ‘normal academic year’ to the tinned fish and tinned beans that mum insisted I stock up on for the long-run to the used tissue I folded up just in case I needed to wrap something up— and at the bottom of these boxes lie the loose skins of onions and garlics past. At some point, I lie a speckled black headscarf across these boxes to produce some semblance of atmosphere. There’s an attempt at makeshift permanence: origami containers that resemble containers and used olive jars for empty pens and pencil shavings. All this to give the impression of a life lived long and closely knit, I suppose.
Yet, despite all these poor attempts at permanence, you came along and you did not forsake me. Perhaps you saw the endurance in it. Like a freeway of limbs entangled, there was enough of both our disparate selves to hold onto. I have your silhouette framed in the outline of my window and you tell me how the sky meets the rooftops in a strange sort of way that feels at once a perfect fit and also complete chaos. And I remember thinking, that’s not unlike you and I. Even the parking lot— and maybe even the creased furnitures on the streets and the roughly assembled containers of my space— all these remind me of you, all these unlikely places and your unlikely companionship. We have stripped this sad building bare, you and I, and for some reason, I think of how this very block flooded its own stairwells last winter, spilling us out into the street and forever after leaving us a little less trusting in our foundations.
At the end of August this year, I returned to Paris for family reasons and Covid circumstances. I was still in the middle of finishing my Masters dissertation and leaving so abruptly (though I knew my date of return early on) felt like the chopping off of a long-running circuit. To unclasp myself from the rhythms I had self-devised for seven months straight was to pull away all the support systems I had created for myself— to yet again be uprooted.
When I look out any window these days, I think of smaller borderlines, thicker brick walls, and the shape of you standing there, watching the skies purple. The closest freeway is the Périphérique which encircles Paris. We reside just outside this borderzone, in a small one-way street between the high-rises of La Défense and the intertwining streams of traffic that round off Porte Maillot. You can’t hear these rush hours from here. Instead, we hear the hold-ups of lycéens calling to each other a little too boldly during lunch hours, the long horns resounding from angry drivers, and the tut-tutting of seniors at rudely parked vehicles left abandoned by their owners. My window is a peephole into the interior commotions of an entire building opposite and in order to see the sky, you have to crane your neck a little more. I listen for my own sighs, breath preserving the surface of the uneven glass, and I remember what it takes to disassemble a cardboard box and turn it into furniture.
To this day, the idea of Leeds feels a place of the present and, simultaneously, a space I never occupied. I feel that I had only gotten to dip my toe in its waters. But perhaps it is accurate to think of Leeds as a body of water completely— its river overflowing. I have left little trace of me there and I feel that I have left nothing behind. Certainly, there’s a joy in returning home to loved ones. But like any individual who feels they live a double life knows that ‘to be home’ ultimately means assimilation under the roof that churns by a completely different set of rules— but that’s a piece for another time.
Mum bakes bread these days and the smell is intoxicating. We leave it to prove in our bedroom, for however long it takes, and it sits beside me while I write. Today, the air smells of cinnamon. In the mornings, the two of us chop vegetables together in the kitchen and we talk of nonsense and of sense. The kitchen is our sanctuary. It is ours— a safe space we have created for each other as if we know that with the door too widely open, we revert to isolated shadows navigating tenderness all over again. Together, we overwhelm each other with the sustenance of honest words, shared experiences, and spoonfuls of my favourite pumpkin stew.
So constant and fleeting and vacuous and vulnerable we all are— how utterly jarring our interior bodily spaces can be with the spaces they take up. I don’t want to be half-hearted any more than I don’t want to be a pail overspilling to make up for guilty premonitions. But perhaps that’s exactly what I need right now— to be overwhelmed. As one of my mentors repeatedly told me this year, do not apologise for what you are not wrong about. Well, I am not wrong about my body feeling othered by my own self. I am not wrong about you. I am not wrong for outgrowing you. I am not wrong for believing in you even if, in the end, you do not.
I am not ashamed of leaving. I must not feel ashamed that I am yet living.
I will take up every inch of space that is rightfully mine. Though there is no assumed relation between temporary and tempestuous, I would rather tempests than nothing at all.
With the new year impending, I am trying to find it in me to feel more fully again.