older

where the living goes / orange wine and kitchen tiles

Twenty hushed voice five. Wedding invitations in the letterbox. Speak to colleagues more than family. Tiny stools and orange wine in the city. Your leave request has been approved! My hands in your cheeks. Google somatic therapy and dance with you in the kitchen. Do people whose frontal lobes have developed still hang fairy lights? Should all our pictures be framed now? Buy whole wheat pasta to make the ninety percent pasta diet feel healthier. Watch another limited series we’ll forget the plot of in two weeks’ time. Please see attached. Take the tram into the city and walk down a narrow street with tall buildings on either side of me, not like they’re closing in on me, more like they’re protecting my vulnerable edges. Let myself want to be hugged by them. Ignore the dull ache in my chest reminding me that I’m not living the life I’m supposed to be living — the one that sharpens from time to time, like thread being pulled tighter into a stitch I will later unpick. Approve sign-in? Read to distract myself before bed and hope I feel better tomorrow. Know that I won’t.

I guess I’m in an odd period of my life, one which I feel diametrically opposed to; it’s not transitional; it’s not on the way to anything: it’s still and it’s rooted. There is no back door escape, only a front door whose location is known by everyone in my life, if only they should want to knock on it. It’s not always amazing, but it’s generally without complaints. I’m not working towards or aiming for anything other than contentment. And that sounds like it should be easy, but I’ve not practised this — I don’t know how to bear it. I am used to grit and pain, or at the very least, unending postponements and waiting for what I want. I am not used to being there already, and I am simply no good at it. They don’t make movies about this, they don’t write self-help books for being happy and staying still, they don’t tell you how to deal with living with your soulmate and paying your own bills and enjoying your surroundings. And when they do, it’s a montage: a pregnant woman painting the walls of her new home, her husband rushing past her carrying something heavy inside, the two of them laughing — but all this forms the way to a bigger picture, to the actual plot, the uproarious highs and lows that are coming. We don’t linger in the everyday, where most of our living goes. No one is making media about the handle falling off your kitchen knife, or remembering to go outside and take the meter readings at the end of the month, or joining the library and borrowing and returning books, or walking the same routes around the neighbourhood to combat your office bum. Yet this is my life now, and I don’t know how to stay here, mostly because I don’t know how to narrate it — when narration has always been the way I survive, the way I regain control: the way I own my life.

We are very good at preparing to live, but not very good at living. We know how to sacrifice ten years for a diploma, and we are willing to work very hard to get a job, a car, a house, and so on. But we have difficulty remembering that we are live in the present moment, the only moment there is for us to be alive.

Thich Nhat Hanh, “Peace Is Every Step”

February’s sun is punitive, peeking through ever so occasionally, most often when I’m at work and can’t enjoy it. Winter has infected me with its characteristic inertia and archetypal numbness. Life is becoming about stacking years on top of years, instead of diving inside them and holding them above my head with all my might until the end of their three hundred and sixty five days. I keep trying to make old memories with you. I keep trying to leave the moment I’m in.

Telling people where I live now seems to be an implicit assertion of who I am and what I’m capable of. I used to live abroad and that meant I was capable of anything. Now I live in a safe suburb of a city close to where my family live. Does that mean I’m no longer capable of what I once was?

°❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:･

In the last year, the kitchen has become the most meaningful room in the house. The room where I cook for you and you cook for me, the room where we wash the dishes we ate from so that we can do the same again tomorrow, where we take turns making coffee in the morning so we can start our days, where we decant leftovers into Tupperwares to take to work and university, where we shove frozen food in the oven when we’re both too tired, where we prepare food for our friends and loved ones to eat together. The kitchen seems to bear witness to the most of our living these days. And I think life and love in my twenties has boiled down to this: who I want to spend time in the kitchen with.

@jordanklancaster on instagram

I have become a background thing this winter, a leaf that fell in the autumn, mulched down to wet brown dust on the ground. It’s inalienable sometimes, this feeling of being nothing, no one, nowhere. It’s all that’s mine. So it’s inexorable, then, that I’ll surrender to it. What else do I have? Who else can I be?

Until spring, you and me in the kitchen is all I have.

Do you know what I was, how I lived?  You know

what despair is; then

winter should have meaning for you.

I did not expect to survive,

earth suppressing me. I didn’t expect

to waken again, to feel

in damp earth my body

able to respond again, remembering

after so long how to open again

in the cold light

of earliest spring--

afraid, yes, but among you again

crying yes risk joy

in the raw wind of the new world.

Louise Glück, “Snowdrops”