But I manage to get there, time after time, to the next
moment and to the next.- ‘I Have a Time Machine’, Brenda Shaughnessy
This is going to be a short piece.
And most of it is acts of small recollection rather than critical reflection. I’ve been showing myself how it doesn’t always have to be the latter. The hardest part about drawing the kind of lines I enjoy drawing is knowing exactly when to let go.
I’m also just not sure how to write this month into words of event when for the most part, event has been replaced by a succession of preoccupations on the word family. It’s been a lot, friends.
For whatever odd reason, getting through most days also includes wondering whether the drain will flow through a little easier than yesterday— although I suspect my hair (which has grown ridiculous length over the last month or two) might yet again have been the cause of blockage. Can I blame it on an alternate source of things we shed and things we let fall through today?
The notion of Time has come a little undone in my head— and so has the word family.
My last two pieces were more guttural outpourings than careful compositions. There were words that needed saying. What felt right, felt intensely, even overwhelmingly, right. There’s no way I can properly articulate the feeling— it was instinctual, inward, unpredictable— there before I knew what it was I had written. I imagine this is what can happen when you know a person too well. Between the two of them, here was someone I knew too closely (mum) and then here was someone I knew from a very full collective memory, even if not mine directly (gung gung). The challenge was therefore not so much what to write but how to write them into being— to get to the heart of the very stuff they’re made of, to even remove myself from their proximity and become their quiet observer from afar. To write someone well, as you know them and want others to know them— I struggled, especially since I was driven by inexplicable urgency. This has felt more difficult than writing itself; that process of getting to know them once more, not to mention the scratching belief of feeling myself inadequate to the undertaking.
Oxtail stew. Perhaps this is how I can write best though— wholehearted trust in my gut and running on a short lifetime’s worth of stories accompanied by the cumulative recollections that exist entirely beyond me but which have raised me, en suite. Perhaps, like my own approach to writing myself, I will constantly revisit my people over the years and see how I begin to shape them. Or perhaps it’s the reverse: perhaps I am trying to give them both what they truly deserve. Perhaps I hereby learn more about myself through those who have made me. Perhaps this is what drives me. Perhaps I recognise my opportunity as a daughter and a grandchild— the simultaneous chasm and bridge between generation, grief, and regeneration. Perhaps in being a few doors down from the immediate wound, I have the nerve to write what four sisters might not be able to. It seems these two pieces really spoke to many of you, and this means a lot. Thank you all for taking the time to read. My aunt told me she visited grandpapa today. She told me she said a little hello for me and let him know something is on its way to him. Perhaps it will take forever to reach you. Perhaps you’ve already arrived at it.
This year’s the year of the ox. This year is you.
I miss him without ever having met him. I want him to know of this illogical possibility.
Wounds to words. I published my letter to gung gung between my brother’s birthday and my own. I like to think of this timing as a virtual hug of sorts. I sent it into the air a day after Valentine’s day. Appropriately so, I hope, because I don’t like commercial calendar dates. There’s too much association on a day like Valentine’s. Too much expectation and commodification of feeling. We see things differently on Christmas, New Years, and the greasy spectacle months of Summer. I want us to happen on a random Tuesday afternoon, as I recently wrote on Instagram. I want there to be no occasion that brings two people together.
Mum did everything she could to give us some semblance of birthday this year. She does so every year, without fail. I remember all of my birthdays. It’s never grand in the way that some people enjoy booking a fancy restaurant where it’s almost guaranteed a band of waiters will bring round a cake emblazoned in fireworks. This isn’t us.
Nicholas still remembers the year he was attending his drawing class and mum and I surprised him outside, handing over something sweet through the window. This year, we surprised him with home-made pizza and a new suitcase for university filled with packs of giant dried mushrooms from the 13éme. Our language is always one of small things, but meaningful, personal things. From the outside, it must seem so silly— not that we have ever cared.
Last February, mum and Nicholas took the train up to Manchester to see me. Mum packed me a box full of my favourite stewed kabocha and carrots. Home food at a time when I needed it desperately. I must’ve cried. We stayed in a Premier Inn together for a weekend while Storm Dennis wrecked havoc outside. We snuck into a tiny alley for large plates of curry and circled the Northern Quarter for coffeeshop refuge. There was also, of course, the lovely Paramount Bookshop down Withy Grove. I remember asking for Ballard— and the owner gave me a knowing smile and told me my best shot is to have a rummage through the SF collections stacked deep into a shelf, though I’ll have you know, the man’s always asked for so I don’t know that you’ll find much of him right now. That made me smile. I searched anyway. I remember the three of us ate at least two meals at the nearest LEON because the places we had in mind were closed or too far a walk in the wind. We would take strolls around the train station of all places to take a stroll. We would walk, the three of us, arms interlinked, and talk of everything in all their more bizarre substance. This is us.
You can read my piece on mumma here.
This month. Perhaps I’ll start with the anger— the way I’ve been wasting my energy and mind and heart on someone who claims to be tossing and turning in his sleep but is actually sleepwalking in life and tossing loved ones into the bin. Perhaps I’ll start on the Tuesday morning of my twenty third birthday— waking up and stumbling into the loo for a piss and hearing the excited whispers of mum and Nicholas next door. Perhaps I’ll press play on all the voice notes I’ve sent this month all at once— and maybe the encore will be mum’s secret recording of me swearing my heart out at him in the living room for all our neighbours to hear. Perhaps I’ll start with the last Sunday evening before Nicholas returned to school after half-term break— feeling held tight in his arms, this newly seventeen year old boy, and knowing I won’t be able to hug him again for another six weeks at least. Social distance and all— we know the drill, it must be done.
Hold on tight.
Let’s finish on the joy of successfully twisting open a new jar of bonne maman chestnut spread, the near hysterical pleasure of cooking (and failing) our first artichoke, and the lady at the marché who couldn’t help but share her favourite recipes when she overheard mum discussing all things artichoke with our favourite amiable grocers. Let’s remember the new pair of slippers mum gave me after my last pair ripped so deep they began resembling tendons. But let’s hold onto those rips as we do our scars and remember how our overstretched shirts and unravelling slippers have withstood every single pandemic day in all their ridiculous resilience.
This has been the nature of my February— a series of occasional joys between a clear mass of heated commotions. I am reminded of my own words from December: “we have stripped this sad building bare, you and I”. There, I spoke of intimacy, but here I pull at my own words with a desire to tear them apart— this month has shown me defamiliarisation beyond a simple untangling and breaking apart in order to distill. No. Here, between these walls, we are showing each other every part of our realest natures, we are baring all our true teeth and standing firm to who we really are.
You do not know me. For all my lifelong wishes that you would know me better, stand by me and defend me, I now give up entirely. I feel that I am always speaking at you, never with you— unheard, at loss, absolutely invisible. What is the meaning of care, I have asked you. Your reply is always a blank silence, your mouth an arrogant downward ‘U’. But you haven’t even tried, I want to tell you. You haven’t ever tried to know me from the ground up. Admit that you might not know how to, sincerely, and I would let you in. But instead you tell yourself and others that you and I make a splendid pair. You have become all my most disappointed friendships and relationships encapsulated. You have taken what you think is me and gifted it to yourself. I feel so fucking used. You do not know me and so you cannot have me.
Every poem about fathers fails me.
I know this is why I wrote to gung gung.
This is how I protect myself. This is what I hold on tight to. This is how I show you what I truly mean by living while you choose to shut your ears and eyes and settle on contempt. This is how I tell my story— a story you wouldn’t know how to begin reading, even though you have ‘known’ me all your life. I no longer do it for you— I have nothing to prove to you.
This is how brave I know myself to be. This is how I show myself all that I can do—
To end on a quote:
We came, Takver thought, from a great distance to each other. We have always done so. Over great distances, over years, over abysses of chance. It is because he comes from so far away that nothing can separate us. Nothing, no distances, no years, can be greater than the distance that’s already between us, the distance of our sex, the difference of our being, our minds; that gap, that abyss which we bridge with a look, with a touch, with a word, the easiest thing in the world. Look how far away he is, asleep. Look how far away he is, he always is. But he comes back, he comes back, he comes back…
- Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossessed.