the space between symbols
meaning only feels good when you notice it
It’s not because I’m a narcissist that I decide the sun is out especially for us. It’s a way to appreciate it, I think. Searing gold motif lost to the season, except for today. How else to explain it other than purpose-built; design from something stronger. If I see it that way, it’ll embed deeper, starker, brighter than it could’ve done by coincidence. You know you’re really in need of a sign when you start to see them everywhere. No one who’s sitting comfortable the way they are sees signs in the concrete.
And now, despite the prodigious weather, it’s getting dark again, as it tends to do when you’ve wasted a day. Soon the lights of the canal boats will warm against the ink water, and the path I’m walking will feel ten times cooler on the periphery of their glow. Tunnel is a knell is a mouth, that I’ll step through with my phone torch shining out of my hand. It’s never been a good idea to take this path home, but I do it anyway. I know there’s graffiti sprayed in solidarity by women who’ve taken this journey before me, who probably eventually fired off a round of ‘home safe’ texts just like I would do if I wasn’t feeling so violent. The words of encouragement punctuate the track like a spell, like runes to keep me safe, but I can’t see it in this night. This early night that smells like copper and leaks into my chest like someone else’s smoke. Skimming lampposts with hunched cold shoulders when I find myself back on the streets that feel less ominous, my fear dwarfed by them as light so often manages to do. I’m stewing, which is what happens when there’s no overwhelming roar of public transport or the perfect balance of drinks to drown out the dirge of the partygoer’s commute home.
I can’t stop asking people about the meaning they find in the world around them, and the synchronicities between us. Everyone seems to be obsessed with karma, but everyone thinks they deserve the good kind, and I’m not sure it’s as simple as that. I think karma exists in the sense that doing good things makes you feel like the pleasures you later experience result from your goodness, or at least your attempts at goodness. Whereas when good things happen to ‘bad people’- selfish people, harmful people- they think it’s because they deserve it, inherently. And I truly believe their bad karma, the outcome of suffering, is that they have to live that way. Convinced that they’re entitled to goodness rather than seeing themselves as a mirror reflecting a mirror into oblivion, hope reflecting hope reflecting hope. It’s no way to live. Then again, maybe I’m condemned to draw non-existent lines between fleeting symbols for the rest of my days, trying to figure out the path behind the outcome, seeking comfort in the transient. Maybe that’s my karma.
Scale resetting itself, water stilling after a ripple, glass teetering on the edge or the table, to fall or to rest. In the middle of the night, hungry and unable to sleep, I reach over the side of my bed to dig around in my bag and pull out an apple. I bite into it in the dark and eat through to the seeds before fully acknowledging the strange taste, and when I turn the light on, discover that it’s almost entirely rotten beneath the skin. Black and brown and disintegrating and suddenly I can taste the bitterness in the back of my throat. In the morning, I take a sip of cold coffee and crunch down on the body of a fly, about the length of the nail on my little finger. If this is a sign of something, it’s a heavy handed one. And if there’s anything to conclude, it’s that I’m already too deep in whatever rot is being foreshadowed to do anything about it. So I spit out the wings and drink deeply.
My dreams are vivid these days, if they come at all. They prophesise happenings that straddle the mundane and the earth-shattering. Splintering promises, collapsing buildings, two lines where please there’s only supposed to be one. Callous, diamond-sliced comments fed to me by wraiths, placed gently on the back of my tongue as though my mouth won’t split open if you keep insisting your hand will fit and I swear that in my waking hours I have teeth in these bleeding gums with which to defend myself. A mouth is still a mouth no matter how widely its gape is cut open. And why call them prophecies when not one has materialised? (Because they still happened to me.)
I treat the world around me like ink blots to be gazed at in the hopes that something more will lurch off the page, a shape formed out of the abstract. My deepest darkest fears and hopes and joys reflected back at me. I don’t need there to be a higher power looking out for me, I just want to have enough control to decide which harbingers of meaning I accept and which I ignore. Clay to be shaped into what I want to see rather than stone tablets from above. I construct an echo chamber and decide that the reverberations I’ve drawn around myself are confirmation that I’m on the right path.
Much like a telescope zooming out from a single person, back and back further until you can see how tiny they are on a street, in a city, a country, a planet, I feel ant-like when I think about the artists I lean on. Dizzy when I consider how Frida Khalo, in all of her misunderstood glory that I don’t claim to be able to unpick, was inspired by Modigliani. I think about Khalo leaving her stamp on Patti Smith, and Smith shaping Florence Welch, and Welch raising me up with what felt like the first real music I’d ever heard as a child. And now I’m listening to her whilst sitting on a bench enjoying the sensation of the goose bumps rising on my legs, because I never quite have enough clothes on for this time of year. Head tipped back like my neck’s broken, looking up, counting the colours of the near-silhouetted leaves. Trying to make the clouds look like something more than they are, but they’re just contrails. All I can see in them is pencils and paving slabs.
The older I get, the more those songs that meant everything to me when I was nine years old gain meaning. The light shifts around them so their shadows grow and shrink and twist, and tighten my grip on loved ones. How I learned to be vulnerable and to love wildly through her harps and guttural chanting. She wrote a thousand lines that have gut-punched hard enough that I’ve taken them in right to the burning centre of who I am. You have to be able to see the clouds yourself, but it’s art that morphs them into recognisable shapes in front of your eyes. It’s music and paintings and poems that turns the stars into constellations.
It’s not a chain of events, more like a web that everyone’s part of in some form or another. Except some of us are more like silk-spun flies than the creator. More like the ripple, a hundred miles away from its maker. I don’t believe in soulmates, but I believe in whatever force was powerful enough to make Plato believe that people walked around one half of a whole, waiting to find the other to take their hand. I believe that feeling is everywhere. It was either obsessive love or profound emptiness- both of which I believe in, right to my core. Both of which I see in all corners, in every path I do and don’t take. Neither of which I shy away from.
The first time you were in my room (or maybe the second, or third, they were all the same to me), you pointed at the postcard I have of Modigliani’s Female Nude on my wall and told me you grew up with a full sized print of it opposite your bed. When I took you to go see it in person, just an hour’s walk away from where we live our constellation lives (together but apart, forming a pattern in one another’s light), we couldn’t find the thing. Turns out they’d loaned it to Paris for the month. Hardly a wasted journey, though. You’d never seen the way Manet paints faces before, and I guess I’d never seen it the way I did after you’d pointed it out. And when I went to Paris shortly after and the Modigliani was nowhere to be seen, I was glad, because you weren’t there, and why would I ever see it alone again when I could see it through your eyes? And whose eyes was Khalo seeing it through, really? Not her own, surely. And what do you see through mine?
I muse over Rothko, his boxing off of the rust and the grass in the print that used to hang in my kitchen on the back wall. I’d stare at it as my mum cut my hair. Every time, she’d cut the first chunk and mock gasp to scare me, and every time I’d fall for it. Then she’d move me to the room that she shared with my dad so she could dry it, and I’d gaze at a print of Klimt’s mermaid until I couldn’t quite discern the boundaries of the shapes any more. She twisted before my eyes. I miss being so small that it was annoying and routine when I begged my mum to dry the water from my hair, comb it through with her fingers until I wanted to fall asleep. Now it’s a novelty that reminds us both of the passing time.
I stop in the train station bathroom to tap pigments of foundation onto my cheek. Looking up at the mirror, I catch the eye of a young girl, maybe eight or nine years old, standing behind me and staring with the look of an oracle seeing her own future. My stomach drops, as though she’s caught me doing something I shouldn’t be. I try to smile at her before she leaves. I remember being her age and pushing the trolley in the supermarket. If you run really fast behind it and hold tightly onto the handle, you can lift your feet up, and it’ll continue skidding down the aisle with you floating behind. Or at least I could do that when I was her size, however long ago that was now.
My heart feels like it’s about to give out, but I don’t want to make a scene.
Before the party I swallow down my probiotic, multivitamin, omega 3, magnesium, zinc, iodine, and vitamin D tablets. I don’t know if any of them actually work, but we all have to believe in something. I am not going to spiral tonight. I am going to be very charming and seek no attention that isn’t given to me and hold no grudges. I am going to delight. In which case maybe I should have slept more over the past 48 hours. Maybe I shouldn’t have put my coat on so early and sat here for half an hour, wrapped up, waiting to set off. Shouldn’t have practised how to engage in small talk in the mirror.
I have so many supplements in me that I’m afraid I’ll sound like a pill bottle if I dance at this party, so it’s lucky I suddenly don’t feel like dancing. Today, the only things I’m interested in are the same colour as the smear that occupies my line of sight when I’ve lain for too long on the floor staring up at the light. That magenta phantasm. I see it and my mouth is flooded with the taste of last summer. Those bubbles in my marrow popping as I sway. Sorry for not doing enough, they harmonise; sorry for doing anything at all.
The next morning, having broken every promise I made to myself, I wash my sins. Swimming in the middle of a weekday in the pool they secreted behind the façade of the old town hall, just me and several middle-aged men doing laps. It’s my first time coming here and, to my panic, I learn that they don’t play music over the speakers. There’s no sound at all. When the men synchronise their breaks at the wall I can’t even hear their arms splashing as they propel themselves, just the white hum of the vents and the sound of the water lapping against my own skin. This one has to be for a reason. If I’m really, truly honest with myself, I haven’t sat in genuine silence for years.
Laughable that it seems like anything of note, to be in the quiet for just an hour. At first I try to let the silence in completely. Maybe I can push each side of the buzz to one side and sit in the space in between. But that’s when the ideas start to come, like shapes out of clouds, like lines between stars.
As I leave through the reception, bitterly cold but unwilling to let this moment slip from between my jaws just yet, a troupe of schoolchildren file past me. I remember when my school started taking us swimming. Every other week we’d sing as a group in our assembly and then pile into a coach to the local baths, and I’d feel overcome with an inexplicable stoniness, with a gnawing at the bottom of my stomach. I started to associate the sensation with that one song we’d always sing just before setting off, the one everyone enjoyed and would keep passing around on the journey, even without a teacher to tell us what the words were. It happened to be one of the only songs we would sing that was in a minor key, about a god that the staff would pretend they expected us to believe in any time other than singing practice.
In retrospect, the association I made between what I can now see were my first physical experiences of anxiety and this quintessentially Christian song could have gone pretty badly, but I didn’t care enough to take in my surroundings to register as such. I was too busy trying to understand why the mottled smell of chips and chlorine and the feeling of skin drying on cold tiles always makes me feel the same way: a little sick, a little like I’m being dragged backwards through every year I’ve ever lived at once. Maybe if I can keep coming back here to the quiet I can clean myself of that reaction. I don’t need it anymore.
I walk home with hair dripping and a scarlet scarf wrapped around to shield out the cold, like red riding hood. Tracy Chapman begging for one reason inside my still wet ears. (Chapman inspired by Joni Mitchell, Mitchell inspired by Leonard Cohen, Cohen racing around the Chelsea Hotel with Patti Smith and turning wisdom from Yeats into song, Yeats sparked by William Blake, and on and on andonandon). These roads, the few of them between the pool and home, were mapped out for me personally before I got here. That much I’m sure of. The way the trees shade the pavement, the redbluegreen stained glass shining out to the concrete on the other side of the street, the flow of path to path. I mean it when I say you could take around every brick and plant and railing and siren and I’d still know where I was from the orientation of the glinting planets in the sky. I’ve never once been wrong about Jupiter, and I’m not about to start.
I wouldn’t have had a single celestial speck any other way. The exact placing of the stars from the day I arrived until now. The way they continue to twist around me, or I beneath them, like a merry go round: meant to be. Not because of the zodiac, but because I swear if it was even an inch out of place, things wouldn’t have turned out like this. I bide my time until the next flame jumps out of the sky for me to project meaning onto, meaning in the eye of the beholder. I keep my cards as far from my chest as I can reach. I throw myself off path to keep things interesting. And I dizzy myself looking up to see what I should do next, as if I’d ever be happy with things going as planned- even if the plan is from something bigger than myself.
thank you so much for reading <3 if you enjoyed this and want to support me to be able to keep writing, you can buy me a coffee here :)
this is so incredibly beautiful. miss you so much. <3
eve i love you so much - this is so so beautiful