writing without anything to write about

making everything about myself as cure-all

If writing comes to me when I’m decoding the things around me, there’s an obvious conclusion when I have nothing to write about: I must have figured everything out. Everything. I know all there is to know and will apply it accordingly. All I have left to do is bask in the glory of apex understanding.

My bedroom looks like it belongs to a Disney channel character, strewn with discarded pieces, unzipped, unironed, mismatched. A cream baroque bustier, red lace tights, black mini skirt, white denim dress- none of them correct. Pre-party archetypal: I have to dress to a theme whilst also dressing for an hour on the underground. 

My flatmate is cross legged on the floor listening to the playlist I made for her birthday. The first time she heard it, her face lit up with each song. ‘I love this one!’ /  ‘That’s the point.’

‘Come look at this’ she sits with a Celtic cross of tarot cards before her on our Ikea coffee table. ‘They’re yelling at me’

I clack into the room, trying on shoes to see which boots work best with the outfit (it’s not these).

Several major arcana: The Tower, The Lovers, The Magician reversed. The High Priest and Priestess. Nine of Swords. Three of Cups.

I take one look and laugh, sit beside her. We talk about whether you can miss somewhere you’ve only been to once. I gently rub rose water into her outstretched hand. We reach for rituals when control isn’t an option, contenting ourselves with the supernatural.

‘What do you want in this life?’ I ask. Although I don’t believe in another life, not really.

‘Love, I guess. To be loved.’ 

‘Have you considered that you’re loved now?’

On my way out I offer her a love heart from a packet- ‘a new kind of fortune telling.’ A pink one already fizzes in my mouth. The disk she pulls is white. Her eyes soften. She holds it out to me.

‘It just says “you are loved”.’

On the way to the party, the light in the tube carriage I’m in flashes on and off. When we stop, a girl at the other end gets up and off in a tight, pretty dress. I make eye-contact with the man behind her who intently watches her go and makes a laughing comment to his friend. I know my face betrays disgust. I don’t watch my own back when I leave.

Anyway, the city will chew you up and hold you at the back of its tongue if you let it. Pry open the jaws with shaking hands. I make nice for more hours than anticipated, by which I mean I’m sucked into the pleasure of giving people my own company, by which I mean I’m so enamoured by the state of being in conversation that I can’t pry myself away.

I wasn’t alone when I realise it. That it wasn’t suffering broad and deep enough that I could finally be absolved, it was just suffering. I was in that sickly lit room and I didn’t know that I’d end up here, with that audience and a dissolving paper cup. But we’re in polite company, so let’s euphemise it. Or nothing.

I’m no moonlight Calvinist. I don’t believe I was born sinful. I like to think I’ve been mostly good- sometimes I don’t like to think it, depending on the season. I spend every day trying to prove that’s not all I am, whilst simultaneously trying to return to that purity. I contain multitudes; I’m bursting at the seams. I’m a speck on a savannah.

On the way home, my cheeks feel tired from intense conversational smiling all night. There aren’t many hours until I have to be up. I put out feelers for someone I can text to let them know when I get home safe in another hour, to no avail. I’ve whispered all of my gossip in the corner of the sofa. My feet are aching from standing still.   

I take my boots off before I step in the door so I don’t wake the friend sleeping on our sofa. When someone you love is asleep, I think you see the world in an extra dimension, or at least I do.

‘I had a dream that we were sharing a mattress by the river last night,’ I tell my flatmate. ‘You were asleep next to me. This guy came over- a bad guy. I stood over you so he couldn’t get to you.’

‘That’s sweet.’ She replies.

‘I don’t know. I feel like I was going to tear him apart. And then I woke up.’

I cut myself a small slice of her birthday cake. It’s 2am. I eat it on the kitchen floor and hope a mouse doesn’t choose this moment to make an appearance. The jam and cream and frosting are a little sickening but I think that’s the point. I burned the pad of my thumb trying to furtively light the candles earlier and I still wince when it comes into contact with something, soothing the blister on my tongue. Under the cheap ring I’ve been wearing is a rim of blue. Run my hand over the dry ghosts of bites on my leg. Okay, now it’s 3am. Graze over every interaction from the past 24 hours and wonder if I made them all about me. Don’t listen to the people who’ll tell you it’s because I’m an only child, it’s not. Or because I’m a Leo. It’s because I feel a little as though if I’m not being taken in, I don’t exist.

The next afternoon, I clamber out onto the roof in the hopes that inspiration will strike. I’m dehydrated and my jaw is heavy. I can’t focus on putting together a single sentence because some kind of generator coolant is leaking profusely out of a tube a few metres away from me. I don’t know what it is, but I don’t think it’s supposed to be doing that. Big panelled box, lots of tubes, all entities unknown. I watch it, awestruck, and try to figure out if there’s any pattern to the timing between liquid sloshing out. Maybe there’s someone I should tell about this. Someone who knows what that fluid is and what its purpose is and where it’s supposed to be instead of spilling out onto my roof and presumably causing that whirring sound. But I shouldn’t be out here anyway, so it’s none of my business. I’ll just answer a couple of texts, check the headlines, and be on my way (going into the window is easier than coming out, if you can manage not to push the radiator off the wall). 

When I reach the point of standing in the light of the fridge like it’s a portal, licking whipped cream off my ring finger having scooped it out of a mug, in a pair of boxers and a stolen hoodie (taken from a dance society I used to run rather than a love interest, all the more romantic for its non-romance), I consider wondering if I’m maybe putting something off. But the words aren’t coming. Usually the writing writes itself and I watch.

I have something to say about the first time I was truly moved by art. About how I’ve carried that feeling with me ever since, and how the first time you experienced that feeling I was there, holding your hand. Francis Bacon reddening the beige afternoon, twisting bones and plying you with gristle. The girl behind the bar, Manet, the look in her eyes. Picasso cranially steaming whatever he saw in Las Meninas that made him recreate it 44 times. I don’t care too much for Expressionism but the Blue Riders have you. Hooklinesinker. I knew you’d like their rich colours, and their wilful discohesion, and looking at a pale deer through a prism. Everything I would walk past, wouldn’t look at twice in a crowded room. We ask after the Modigliani that’s spectred us both: it’s out on loan. Let’s stare at the 6x8 postcard on my bedroom wall instead.

I want to write about that.

But instead I write about the unidentifiable leaking box on the roof. Upon reflection, I think I’m going to keep it to myself. A ceiling collapse might raise the stakes a little.

And I don’t feel as though there’s anything to be said for self-actualization. Well, there is. There’s much to be said if you’re looking for it. But as long as the ideal keeps outrunning, outlasting the actual, you’re in the in-between, and there’s a point to you. The second the snake’s jaws clamp down on its own tail, something turns to gold; you’re as you should be. Futile and Aesopian and right. And good.