24 Nov 1995
3 months ago I turned 27 in London, far away from home. This city has a busyness about it that is, at the same time, so intensely lonely. I don’t mind it though. It is strange but also mundane; ordinary in a way that belies the chaos, the filth, the unpredictability. I wanted to write about moving because it is the bravest and most terrifying thing I’ve done, all on my own terms, but I put it off because it felt small. Ageing has meant growing—I’m taller, stronger, clearer—but in so many ways it’s also meant shrinking. My life is tiny in the grand scheme of things; people move all the time. The more I thought about it the less there was—to say, to feel, to be.
You probably won’t believe me when I tell you this, but almost every time I have ever been unsure, or on the precipice of selling myself short, I encounter a piece of writing that moves me: sometimes cognitively, away from the mistake I am about to make, other times emotionally, granting me the ability to appreciate the depth and complexity of my being, of what I know I shouldn’t do, but do anyway. What I learnt from what I read is that writing often means a willingness to be embarrassed—to witness yourself piecing yourself, and to allow others to do the same.
So I will tell you now about what it’s been like: to move, to be, and to turn, 27 very far from home.
I don’t stop very often. There is so much to be done and I am never fully satisfied: with where I am, who I am, what I’ve done. I read Second Place a couple of months ago and Rachel Cusk writes, “…meanwhile I had come to view the world as far too dangerous a place in which to stop and congratulate myself. The truth was I had always assumed that pleasure was being held in store for me, like something I was amassing in a bank account, but by the time I came to ask for it I discovered the store was empty. It appeared that it was a perishable entity, and that I should have taken it a little earlier”.
I imagine growing up in a small city and moving to a big city hasn’t helped much. People walk quickly and they always know where they’re going. If you slow down you die. The only people who’ve really looked at me are children, in that arresting, uninhibited way children are allowed to look at things.
I’ve had to stop a lot since I got here. I don’t know my way around yet, and sometimes I am overwhelmed with the realisation that I can’t just sit on a bus that will take me home. But most of the time I find myself stopping for the sun—when it has deigned to show itself, and I feel both wonder and heartbreak at how impetuous it is. The unprecedented breaking of the sun through the clouds has had me stop, impulsively, over and over again. I turn off the stove and let sauce congeal in my pan because the sun suddenly beckons me outside; I spin on my heel and double back out of the train station because I feel it warm on the back of my neck; I routinely skip traffic lights just to stand, for a little while longer, in the presence of an entity that will never, ever know me. I am lucky because daylight comes (Winterson, loosely); I am greedy and petulant when it doesn’t.
January was a very difficult month. I forgot what it was like to inhabit my body, and reckoned with the possibility that maybe I never knew. I went to see a band I love play live but barely made it halfway through the concert. I took long, long walks and ate an entire cake on my own in one sitting. I forgot my rice on the stove and had to scrape the burnt bottom. I went days without talking to anyone and when I finally did I couldn’t stop. I realised it had been months since someone asked me what time I’m coming home and the thought made me cry. I asked 3 different strangers to light 3 different cigarettes I wasn’t going to smoke because it was the only way I knew how to start a conversation. I didn’t enjoy the conversations. I struggled to stay warm despite the layers and missed familiar sounds and voices very deeply.
It has been strange and upsetting to be reminded of how small I am; how insignificant in the movements I subject myself to and the ones that simply happen. I have been placed squarely in my body, and I don’t always know how to be (t)here.
On the eve of my birthday I walked through the Waterstones closest to me, bought myself a copy of If Beale Street Could Talk, went home, and read it in one sitting. There is this bit where Fonny says to Tish: “Baby. Baby. Baby. I love you. And I’m going to build us a table and a whole lot of folks going to be eating off it for a long, long time to come.” I had already read this, and so I already knew how it was going to end, but I wanted to go there again. Reading can do that. It can bring you to places you’ve already been in ways you’ve never been and in ways you’re used to and in ways you need to be, over and over and over. There is something about the kitchen table—about having someone build you a kitchen table—that emblematises an intimacy I wanted so badly to feel around my birthday.
Since being here I have dreamt beyond the interchangeability of ‘domestic’ and ‘feminine’ and into the entanglements of domesticity, intimacy, intuition, and care. I have found cooking and preparing meals to be an exercise in gut feeling and method, and I have grown to love its respite from the rigidity and unnecessary perplexity of academia. Even before I began cooking I dreamed of having a bright kitchen with big windows and an island and a kitchen table, so maybe what I’m really dreaming about is the ability to make things with my hands, in the sun, for people I love. I’m dreaming of being granted the permission to want this.
There is a poem by Joy Harjo which goes: “The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live”. I'm slowly learning what the infrastructure of my life is: how to turn my body into a home with a kitchen where life can keep beginning and where it is sustained by creation.