Hi, hello,

Yes, I’ve been tinkering with the layout AGAIN. Can’t stop/won’t stop etc etc. Consistency? Not around these parts, folks…What do you think?
 

I have been thinking in big strides lately. Churning over topics that stretch the whole damn perimeter of that which is existential. And it all feels a bit big; I’m holding a lot close. You know that feeling when you have a lot to tell your girlfriends but you hold out a little while longer, just knowing that it will all take on a different affinity once it leaves your lips? I am learning how malleable the truth really is, right now. Which is a whole thing in and of itself I could speak about for aeons, but rather than stumble around all of which feels suffocatingly large, I’m going to instead start at a single moment. And simply see what comes to light…enjoy…

I walked down to the sea the other day; let my feet ooze between what was more mud than sand. I picked up a seashell covered in barnacles and slipped it into the pocket of my dress. I let the ocean swirl in my palm cupping the two small crystals I have been carrying everywhere lately — the stones instantly brightening with their submergence into the saltwater. I watched a cluster of knots dance in formation, making an echo like thunder as their wings propelled ripples against the water. I drew my name in the sand and I remembered how, a decade ago, a boy I loved took his own finger to the ground and wrote ‘will you marry me?’ right here on this very beach. I wonder how many times the tide has crept in over the spot where those words once took up a very temporary occupancy on land but a very permanent occupancy in my heart?

60% of the body is water. We are endless currents keeping our blood pumping and our bodies moving. There are endless oceans inside each of us, all intricately formulated and moving to their own tides — coming with it the endless opportunity to let life wash over us. To begin again over and over. To let ourselves be moved with all that is malleable — which is to say, every last drop of us. It is both a comfort to know there is an endless reinvention of the self and an unspeakable grief for all that was however wonderful, was always fleeting. 

We write over loves, over loss, we walk the same paths over and over. Tweaking our memories, forming new stories. Adding to a melange that makes up our lives, endless movement, endless passing from one emotion to another. But as quickly as it is easy to forget, the clues will last much longer in your body than they do in your weary mind. Because energy lingers and is stored between muscles, under flesh. As Yōko Ogawa writes in her dystopia, The Memory Police: “memories don’t just pile up—they also change over time. And sometimes they fade of their own accord.”… “Even if they fade, something remains. Like tiny seeds that might germinate again if the rain falls. And even if a memory disappears completely, the heart retains something. A slight tremor of pain, some bit of joy, a tear.”

I am endlessly fascinated by the energy that lingers in places you have long since stepped foot. How your memory brings back the feelings you once inhabited when you revisit certain locations — regardless of whether or not those feelings still have a home in your head or heart. Last November I wrote of my relationship to London and how I was to navigate it whilst all I was able to feel was loss stitched into the fabric of its streets. How it isn’t just contending with your mind, but your body too. Your body remembers even when you have sometimes forgotten, or moved on. 

Never have I questioned the duality of the self more than within this year where my body is experiencing something entirely different to that of my mind. Never have I been more aware of the distance my mind has clocked in the absence of my wandering geographical footprint. Where my bum has been steadily planted, contained through lockdown restrictions, my mind hasn’t stopped moving forwards.

When I got on the train to London a few weeks ago, the first time since pre-pandemic, the air exuded what it had in that last time my body was in that space: pain and hurt. My body twitched as it remembered. How funny it was for my body to have to catch up to my head, which has raced so far ahead, so far away from that hurt in all these months that have passed.

Despite all of this year’s wallowing about feeling as if I am missing my own life, despite all of my frustrations towards all of which is not and can not happen, stepping back over the threshold into the world outside has cemented just how much I’ve actually grown in 2020. My body is catching up to my mind, and just like that, whoosh, okay, things are happening.