preservation

claw marks in everything

Each day slips quicker than the last this late summer. For breakfast, you bring me home an ice cream. Vanilla dripping down the cone onto your hand. I’m suffering too much from the night before to accept, and this inadequacy makes tears brim in my eyes. If I’m not fit to have a spontaneous ice cream for breakfast, what am I good for? So you help me push aside boxes of leftovers in the freezer, and we stand the ice cream up within those pillars to preserve it. I come back to it days later, cone soft, sweetness still holding the shape of your tongue from where it threatened to melt on my kitchen floor when you first held it out to me. Pompeiic gelato trapped in time. Recently I’ve been shouting from the rooftops that not everything has to have a deeper symbolism, except I don’t mean it when it comes to moments of bliss, tokens of living. The things you can hold in your hands, run your fingertips over, and even keep round for a while. I’ve tried already, somewhat flailing, to explain how sometimes something just is a poem, and there’s nothing to write about it. The ice cream stains my shirt, and so the life cycle goes on.

I’m preserving everything in case one day it’s the thing that saves me for a moment. Survey the glass pots of dried petals that line my mantelpiece, I can tell you where each comes from. Pink peony, orange canna lily, red rose. I find mementos, photo booth strips and receipts long with cocktail lists inside books I’ve set aside for the perfect moment. A ticket for a museum in Lisbon, the phone number for a bar in Paris, a note slipped inside a birthday card. There’s no emergency cash in my battered purse, because I can’t afford to withdraw a twenty I’ll probably never spend, but I do carry around a verge-of-death kit in it: a polaroid of me and my best friend and an organ donor card. My heart can go to someone who might make use of it better than I do, my kidneys can go to science, my soul goes to find her.

In bed with a hideous, singing morning light slipping around the sides of the curtain. I take a screenshot of an Instagram post, a bride and groom kissing under an archway, and send it to my friend with a message saying ‘this guy used to fancy me in high school’. Then I scrape a crust of dried blood from the skin outside my left nostril. I can’t tell the difference between where it sits on my nail and where the polish is persevering despite being mostly chipped away. I look back at the photo and lick the film off of my teeth. Everyone’s forgetting things. I try to reminisce now and it’s more like a reminder. People retell stories of things we did just a few years ago and I realise I’ve forgotten some of the characters even existed.

When I was young, I listened to the last part of The Chain so many times I felt kind of sick. Music-sick. I don’t know if you’ve ever felt that way. You have to time it just right, you have to scroll to a few bars before the bridge so you feel it build. You’re not supposed to cut up songs so they make you dizzy, but no one’s going to stop you. There’s a live version from ‘77. In the second verse, about halfway through, you can hear a girl in the audience scream. They’re quiet otherwise, the crowd, but you hear her just fine. I’ve always thought, imagine having your scream immortalised in one of the best songs of all time. Frozen in amber. Surely that has to cast some kind of spell, keep you young forever. I’ve always wanted to find her. Me, I would’ve been eaten alive in the 70s. I’d rather have all of that at my fingertips now, there to listen to any time, post-remaster and without any scratched records, plus the fifty years since. But who knows, maybe if I’d have been her and I’d have seen that light pouring down on me from behind Stevie Nicks, making smoke of her lace batwing sleeves, I’d have screamed too. When she sings, it isn’t smooth like butter. Her voice has always sounded to me like being dragged away from someone you were never supposed to get close to in the first place. Nails scratching into a brick wall refusing to be forgotten. So many people write songs to preserve the people they love, but she seems to sing to preserve herself. I remember hearing an interview where she talked about never having been formally taught piano, and wondering, halfway through her early career, if she maybe should. She was told no, what you have now is beautiful. To learn techniques and titles would be to lose that. I put myself in that crowd when I listen, I put myself on that stage like I’m a teenager fantasising that somehow something will happen. I pull the song back halfway through and relive it again, and again, and again. 

Nearly a year ago now, I sat alone in a screening of Jeff Buckley’s 1995 Chicago performance. A church at the end of the tube line. His guttural, swooping vocalisations, lyrical roughness, suggestion that whatever he was accessing in that moment was true freedom. Throat open. I remember, very clearly, mediating on whether or not the world would have experienced the seismic shifts I was feeling in that hall if his show hadn’t been seen, wasn’t being heard. If it had happened in private, with no camera or microphone. Would the ripples have spread if there was no one to be pushed ashore by them. If a tree falls, etc etc. I landed on believing that art doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Even if it isn’t taken in, the process- the very fact that it can be made- sends fractals through the aether.  The soul that exists to create- a soul that everyone has in one way or another- is a glowing, pulsing thing. As long as we still live in a world where people can create, we’ll be okay, maybe.

I spoon whole sentences of meaning out of my writing, carving them out like I’m holding a penknife. You have the structure that still stands around their absence, but you don’t know what’s missing from the shadow in the centre. Maybe you can even feel that they’re unaccounted for. Maybe they’re the ghost that’s been following me, making sounds so I can’t sleep, pushing shapes into my peripheral vision that disappear when I turn my head. Maybe I’m just an insomniac. But the imprint they leave is still there, between the words, even if they were too much to be allowed to stay.

Preservation and immortalization are different. Immortalisation is for everyone else’s sake, and they didn’t even ask you to do it to yourself. You can lie down and let the fossil form around you. You can cram the sediment around yourself to speed up the process, making the days you have left into one long, uphill battle (one imagines Sisyphus googling ‘how many calories in half a banana’). It’s ego where there used to be humanity. It’s being to be seen. But preservation is the breath of life that ruffles the branches. Thumbprints left in loved ones. For blood humming in veins and electrified skin rather than a frozen image. You’re wearing an outfit built from items I’ve never seen before, but you’re talking to me with the voice of someone who used to know my every thought. You listen to that song at breakfast and I hear everyone in the flat singing it under their breath for the rest of the day. We’re echoic memories to each other. If this is all it ever is, at least it was.

And everything sounds sad when you talk about how easily it decays given half a chance, but that’s not the point. It doesn’t sit right that I love my days so intently, that I grasp at so much joy, because it feels like I’m supposed to be a sad girl. Write about the flowers drying, sad girl. Write about the late nights, sad girl. Write about the sleeping dogs that won’t lie, sad girl. I’m no longer interested in the adolescent drive to make everything worse than it was because that was the only way it could be real, I thought that was what this hedonism thing was about. And even though I’m past the desperation of holding everything too tightly instead of beckoning it to stay and knowing that’ll be enough if it’s meant to, there are still things I want to mummify in their place. Plunging deeply enough into any given moment will do the preserving for you- you can’t forget something you were chest-deep in.

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