Over pizza, our friend made us laugh by saying that if she hadn’t already known that E and I were related, she’d’ve definitely been able to tell after today because, ‘you both spend the entire time you’re in a shop - touching things!’
(Touching things, like: softing the sleeves of jumpers between our forefingers and thumbs as we passed by them, running our palms over the roughness of folded jeans, tracing fingers over the bumpy-soft-silkiness of embroidered t-shirts...)
‘You both do it,’ she said, while E and I turned – surprised – to look at each other.
Written 11th June 2019 // I keep trying not to pray. I’ve caught myself at it a few times – like, halfway through a journal entry I’ll lapse into writing sentences addressed to some great ‘You’. Or, when everyone else is asleep and I’m lying in bed – the light switched off, covers up to my ears – I’ll start whispering out a few hoarse words into the dark.
God…?
Hello?
If you’re there…
It’s been a difficult winter. The hardest one I can ever remember actually… without meaning to sound too dramatic about it. But, like a little miracle: spring has arrived. It’s here (outside my window there’s a single, skinny daffodil bobbing in the wind). And thank God for it…
It’s the old train this evening – and when I say ‘old’ I don’t mean charming-old: one of those Potter-esque-steam-trains with the sliding doors and the storage racks and an air of Romance about them. I mean one of Scotrail’s semi-refurbished contraptions. The kind without tables or plug sockets or, like, a working toilet. The carriage keeps squeaking and making clacking noises whenever we cross a bridge…
When I came across Edwin Morgan’s poem back in August, it was at a time when I was thinking about someone at the end of their life. At any other time, I know I would have enjoyed the poem well enough. It’s such a vividly drawn scene – the blue plates, the strawberries dipped in sugar, the knees, the crossed forks – and simple. No fancy language. No tricksy metaphors. Also, it’s about food which generally endears me to a piece of writing/art…
Dear September, you began with the saddest of news. With dark clothes, and borrowed blue handkerchiefs, and photographs that made my heart ache. In your pale light, we cooked up a feast – creamy lemon chicken with mushroom rice, dark chocolate orange and cardamom brownies topped with pistachios – and ate it together: lighting candles, sitting close, lingering long at the table in the golden light, remembering. Because: ‘when you are sad, you need to eat good food’…
Yesterday morning, I led a journaling workshop and started it by reading out Maggie Smith’s poem ‘Rain, New Year’s Eve’. In it, the poet recalls a moment where her young daughter describes the rain as a broken piano, ‘playing the same note over and over’. ‘Already she knows loving the world/means loving the wobbles/you can't shim,’ Smith writes, ‘the creaks you can't/oil silent—the jerry-rigged parts,/MacGyvered with twine and chewing gum.’