From the notebooks: visa

Snowdrops at Chippenham Park

Monday, February 25, 2013

The postie comes past my house sometime through the second cup of coffee, usually, an awkward squawk and clank as he mangles the letters past the sclerotic springs purporting to keep the cold on the right side of the mail flap. But I'm waiting for him to knock. The parcel-knock, the something-special-from-Mum knock, the online-shopping knock. The registered-letter knock. 

Today he knocks. I put down my coffee. My nose crinkles, folding up hopefulness and don't-get-your-hopes-up. A knock last week, my coat back from being rewaxed, neat and disappointing in a polythene bag.

But not today. I stand in the doorway, the postie perched on my three feet of wet crazy-paved pocket-path to the absurd picket gate that I could hold in my hands like a broadsheet. I have something recorded, he says, and I know this is it. Here it is. There it is. Right here, right now, the present, a cascading pointer pile of what-is indexicality dashing Indiana-Jones flooding-mine style all over the what-might-be. Almost, almost, almost all of me is sure the visa is inside, sure that the news is good, sure that the wait is over, sure that life can go back to being life and not the impossible fluid dynamics on the face of a shoaling wave but I have learned that my confidence is suspect, knit of privilege and luck and your-ma-is-good-looking and I am cut in half.   

I sign, a garble-glyph on the blast-proof lcd-touchscreen device. That's all for today, he says. That's all? I think. I shut the door and my hands are shaking. My nose crinkles again, wryly. It's too cinematic for words. I can feel my passports in the base of the envelope. I think about sitting down and having a glass of scotch but reptile brain has torn the envelope open and directed my eyes at the page. Words. Words words words thank you for your application, which has now been approved. 

Thank you for your application, which has now been approved. Thank you for your application, which has now been approved. Thank you for your application ...

I lay my forehead on the smooth, cheap paper against the table. Oh, Jesus god, thank god, thank god, oh my god. I press my palms to the table, a battered, delightful burled veneer I bought from Sally Ann's Salvation Army charity shop on Mill Road and brought home in a taxi the October before last. A roar in my ears like the sea without a sound. It is 10.45, and so quiet. A magpie clattering matches in its matchbox throat. Goldfinches jumping from tree to tree down the back lane. Adrenaline crushes everything into tiny spaces inside me like down coats into brightly coloured stuff sacks. I laugh out loud. Just a damn piece of paper, the paper that ties together the impossible ineffable like tufts of wool stolen from barbed wire for a bird's nest. I turn my head and see my bowls and cups on the shelves and am struck astonished by how much I have been planning them away, planning them temporary, planning them into boxes, into storage, into transit, away. I pick up a red-and-white one I bought in San Francisco. It is cool. My hands are dry and hot like leaves in the sun and I run up and down the stairs, up and down, up and down, with relief streaming out of me, adrenaline storm, tingling fingers and toes, tugging at my earlobes. An hour later I have forgotten and with a start find myself still inside the uncertainty, so used to the everyday instability that I have forgotten how to let it go. 

It is weeks and weeks before I stop packing up the house in my mind. 

Sometimes

Sometimes the thing I want most is to be left alone forever, a life so quiet I'd be awakened by blue-tit feet twig Pak saltoing the better for a bug. A house on spindly stilts carved into a mountainside with seventy-foot eucalypts washing everything's sinuses when it rained. A hut on a lake with a dinghy roped to a handful of jetty, a battered kettle, a gas-ring, pencils and paper, wine stacked under the bed and a hook hung with beads for when the water told me to look pretty. 

Sometimes I want most to know all the names of things, the crunchy ontological pith and gleeful arbitrariness of the world made language, woodwork and architecture, birds, sedges, grass, fungi, fabric and stitches, pipes and gears, yeast breads and flat breads, string, leaves, stones, feathers, bones, the pieces of an architrave. As many facets as can be polished into the loamy, windy, whirring, fleeting, squalling, glittering furl of how things seem.    

Sometimes I don't want to talk about it. Words seem appalling though the words are beautiful, awful blunt imprisoning tools of death or mediocrity or stupidity or negligent, wanton, oblivious privilege or vagueness or ambiguity or pathological clarity and ersatz definitiveness or lovely, lovely lies. 

Sometimes I want most, most I want most, to want one thing, oh, the one! The lone voice of bewitching singularity that propels all the stories, the couldn't-but-do-as-I-do, both hands wrapped around it and eyes slitted against all weathers, everything ahead knapped like flint with the right name attached: sculptor, neurosurgeon, glass-blower, biologist, cabinet-maker, writer, writer, writer. But instead I am made like a bright pile of discarded sweet wrappers, colourful and crumpled, blown into shapes by the static, television, needle calluses in my fingerpads, Stevie Nicks covers, the alchemy of eggs and butter, the dusty magicks of keeping house, cups of coffee, robins fighting, geraniums in pots.  

Sometimes I don't want anything and I watch the pigeons flirting and curl the ends of my scarf around where the wind is getting in and think about how Ishiguro wrote the lyrics for some jazz songs. 

Vanilla

I cleaned the fridge today, and wiped it with vanilla. There are blowsy double daffodils on the table. New sheets on the bed, the extra quilt folded on the top of the wardrobe because it has been on the floor three nights in a row. The variegated maple is neatly tipped with fat buds, cracked neon yellow here and there showing a tight cluster of tiny blooms like so many sun-bright throats crying allergenic anthems to the sky. I don't remember the tree flowering last year, but it must have done. So many things must have happened. 

I have a story that I tell about myself, a story like a cup of coffee for every day there is. A story that begins and writes itself like magic or the government all the way into the future and everywhere into the past. Some days it might be a true story. Some days I know it is not a true story and I cry with the frustration of all the goddamn history following me around like plastic ziplocs marked EVIDENCE which fuck with the story, making it a story that has to be about change or redemption or discovery or some shit. The stories I tell are fetishistically univocal; stories about consistency and doggedness and singular drive and cleanly defined loves like the edges of glass or new paper.

I am not like this. 

But today I am the girl who has always been the girl who wipes her fridge with vanilla. 

Ahem

I read a New Yorker profile a couple of years ago about this tech artist who built painfully meta pieces out of bits of trashed Segas and 80s motherboards and whatnot. I don't remember anything about it except the accompanying smug ersatz-metal arms-crossed photograph that probably wasn't his fault, and the fact that he'd written some code which searched the web and generated a realtime feed of all the blogposts apologising for not writing on their blogs more often. 

We hate this guy, right?

You know?

There is a lack of donuts. Inter freakin' alia, right, but donuts would be a good start.

Garble

It is a strange, unfriendly enterprise, this one, stack words in piles that make them say how things are, like stuffing cold butter into a keyhole. Casting around among the lego pieces to get a two-er for the edge of your 1:100 X-wing, nothing like the real thing, not at all, but my god so cool just like it when you're done, flying it around the room with ILM effects in your throat and miniature light sabres caught between the floorboards. Me and my big box of morphemes, winsome as the guess-how-many fairground jar of jellybeans.

Everything cocks its vast effortless eyebrow of already being how it is, apples and birds and the smell of pipes on the morning tapwater, loneliness and soap, the strangled underwater music of the upstairs Kinder leaving for school. Make coffee. Shake the box, to hear that there are things inside.

West

I went for Kaffee off Kurfürstendamm with my friend Once Was Architect today, shaking out my lungs in the frozen air, stamping my feet and my Einzelfahrschein AB against the solid comfort of German trains, zurückbleiben bitte, pink-and-purple cubist seat covers and a red button, please shut the doors on cold days.

Literaturhaus café, wonderland of dark wood and padded-leather corners, majestically average coffee for €3.20 and an arresting waitress with her pad holstered thigh-level on an antiqued belt and a rope of peppered dark hair sheafed at her collar. She thanked me in French.

Gluten

I baked bread yesterday, primal yeasty solution to everything. It smelled precise like gecko feet on glass, and was crusty and percussed crumply-cellophane as it cooled.

A loaf, my loaf, round and whole as salvation and just as prone to go stale.

Tally ho

Reluctantly packed away the Christmas decorations, winding the fairy lights around and around my hand. Incredibly they fit back into the box. Bells and red stuffed hearts and the gloss-painted birds I bought from Habitat back in the New Square days along with the Swedish garland made of straw and red cotton. Packing like dragging wet sheets out of a stormwater drain, I feel like a hibernating grub but I must plan outfits, god help me. It yawns black nylon at me with this suitcase expression like, dude, what the hell would I know about what goes in here? I'm just the one with the zippers. But lo, on the other side of this and getting bitch-slapped by border control is England, England! Sandwich shops and chocolate bourbons and laissez-faire trains and unlikely snack foods and signs that never say FORBIDDEN but just DON'T.

List

Leaky mussy black outside, winglet navigation light flickering far out past the rooftops. I am on a plane the day after tomorrow and suddenly everything is everywhere and nowhere to be found, things ordinarily peaceably resting in their places, a hairbush, this week's New Yorker, a pile of clean washing folded now a wilful barricade between me and getting away, lists on three different kinds of paper and god knows what else I've forgotten, that nippy milk-toothed imperative to capitalise on every possible opportunity, every corner of the carryon, what can you bring back in the suitcase, ten minutes for lunch, roving exhibitions, one-off that, now this who's that. Screw it! New scorched-earth travel plan. Underwear in the pocket, passport between your teeth and you're away. With your QUEUE: OTHER Ryanair boarding pass, natürlich.

Once upon a time

Once upon a time, there was a hooded crow who was in love with her accountant. Her accountant was an oyster. Really good at filtering out the crap and getting to the nitty gritty, you know? So settled and purposeful. She sat on a chimney pot and thoughtfully settled her pewtery gilet into place.

It was unrequited.

Steepled

I'm willfully ironing everything out of my days like I dare myself to have nothing left, and it is impossible, really, for everything is something, even the three cups of coffee and nothing else, unless you practise a kind of disobedient inattention. No, goddamn it, I shall not be made words! I am just a cup of coffee and you don't even notice that I am here, for thinking about me makes you wonder about Bashō and his bowl of water and heaven only knows what other stifling literary crap. Shut up! Shut up shut up! I fear how much I want you to be everything, everywhere, even in my toast and jam so I pretend that I don't want you here.

Silenced

I miss England today, my god, like frigid bathroom floor tiles under the bare feet of my loneliness and dislocation. Robins and chestnuts and ridiculous, ridiculous houses with tiny rooms and gaps under the doors and radiators in the wrong places, too-hot coffee and late trains, London and London and London, three times too much of everything and just right like the baby bear's porridge, a microscopic North-Carolina-meets-Dickens Krispy Kreme like a window-box at Waterloo where I caught the train to Dr Heartbreak, KGX and platform bloody 9 around the damn corner through the mad turnstile bottleneck to Cambridge and cobblestones and old, old trees and leaning headstones ten feet from the back-lane door of the supermarket. Bookshops and telly people in the theatre and THIS IS THE BBC and English, English my old friend, drowning in meaning hint and sledge, a glance and a laugh and a weapon and a flower. How I miss you.

Mild

Frostless blue sky out the window this morning and tits singing from the eaves with the casual glee of a beaked 1oz puff of feathers in a sudden world where everything birdie-good isn't covered with snow. A pigeon on the chimney across the Hof turns around and around and around, puffed like a Columbid helium balloon, check it, bitches, dove in the sun, woohoo! woohoo!

My hands are cold on my melamine desktop and I drink coffee and write emails and check out winter telly premieres and look at shots of my nieces on facebook as the distant spring sends me a postcard from its softer, warmer place of promises and second chances.

Fuck it

Double-slit experiment day, electron smeared out on the wall exhausted by its identity crisis. Some fucker went out with a firearm and shot a congresswoman at point-blank range in the head, along with seventeen other people, what the fucking fuck, what, what? There is too much salt in my baking today as though it has wept and my mind is thermosetting with no cure although the rage might get it there, drag it like mechanical extrusion from its stubborn formlessness and make it do something, for christ if I have not spent hours wondering whether I am a bowl or a mug or a dressing table box and people are dead on the ground in front of their grocery store.

Hungry Caterpillar

The dishwasher has hummed and hummed, for the house is host to the glassy metal ceramic flotsam of the post-party, smudged and fragile in the washy sunlight, everything vaguely shocking in its wholeness. Seaside smell of empty wine bottles, glasses with a miniature tidal trail of bordeauxy sediment in the bottom as though someone had been panning with them in a river rich in tannins. I'm slightly hung over and my calves are surprised about wearing high heels last night and everything is a run-on sentence. I eat leftover cake with one hand and open dishwasher tablets with the other and worry about things which don't seem to have anything to do with one another. I find lambskin gloves in the study, disguising themselves against a cushion so well that their owner concluded last night that he must not have brought a pair. I am pleased to see them. I have found something.

Mobius

I have a picture of the winter in my mind like Christmas lights on the other side of the window. It is cozy in here, a nest lined with your books and quilts, cake tins and 2011's closely guarded resolve, hot coffee in the morning and fluffy socks on the wood floors. But the truth is I am struggling, vaguely stir-crazy, cut and bruised and afraid now of the cold and ice outside and the glacial braindeath hard on the heels of perpetually cold feet, terrifying thoughtlessness that delivers nothing but images of the blood running blue in your fingers. My skull makes defrosting pipe sounds and my eyes are full of the grit of no new view and there are too many days still to come.

Liminal

List item, another list item. Banking. Add list item. Cross off list item. Blink blankly at emails, shift ice-hammered joints, pain and its minion jumpy braced hurt-fear in the spaces between everything until that and one too many cups of coffee sparks diffuse anxiety and uselessness and I stop to watch the great tit pilot peanuts out through the mesh. I can't get the temperature right and I clumsily bumble the house tearing off layers and killing the radiators, yanking on whatever is in reach and cranking them to maximum swearing at everything anywhere that ever had anything to do with homeostasis.

Eventually I iron some napkins and use the sticky stuff remover on the iron, which had some tidal adhesive vestige or other on it. I'd been meaning to do that.

Floored

I slipped in the snow today, forgetting for a moment the mocking treachery of winter streets in Berlin, candy-shopped with coloured light and warmth flickering from doorways and the new-year laughter of mittened groups in search of a sugared waffle on a Sunday afternoon. A cleaved second of floaty frictionlessness fucked up by a pile of bones and joints as if dumped out of a box. I look at the ice. It's right in front of my face, because I'm flat on my stomach with both palms spread wide to the gritty slush like I'm walk-of-faming it. As ever, shock delivers a weird metaexperience leaning in to read the adrenaline's newspaper. I'm impressed. I can't begin to reconstruct the sequence between putting my boot onto the slippery ice and making like a majorly penitential monk. Kudos, physics.

Closed

Bowl of soup, piece of chocolate. Buzz in the energy-saving bulb in the right-most bookshelf. I keep meaning to fix that. Taste of magnesium smoke. Fireworks so close last night I couldn't make sense of it, those far-away mystery sky-crackers, bright flame and spark-spit in people's hands, balconies, propped in the pavement snow, miniature blast patterns in the gutters on my walk home in the burnt-out hours. A cat hair or two on my coat and the display village of coupledom left behind at the party.