No.169

I don’t think that in all my winters, in all my springs, I’ve ever been quite so aware of the buds waiting on trees, on everything, and it seems as though every five minutes enough time might have passed for a leaf to have appeared—even out of my own body. It’s too early, and I know this, but it doesn’t stop me constantly looking out of the window at the small magnolia trees, their furred ends.

At this precise moment (11:07am) I’m listening to the final spin of the washing machine, wondering how people manage to make so much noise even when they’re trying their best to be quiet. I’ve been writing about noise pollution for an upcoming Orion Magazine issue, and it has left me noticing every creak of myself, every—ah, the melodic beep of the completed laundry—unnatural crash that inevitably enters the day. We underestimate a lot of the damage we are doing, but we perhaps underestimate noise most of all.

My paints haven’t been opened in over a week, which is bothersome but of my own doing. Instead days of late have consisted of peeling through the pages of the copyedited manuscript, finalising the verso (back cover) copy for that same book, drafting the aforementioned piece on noise for Orion, and trying not to tense myself too much against the cold. (As I write this, I am almost certainly tensing against the cold.)

When hands are cold, I find it’s easier for the mind to drift in time, usually back to when your hands were warmer. My own mind tends to return to the places I’ve been to that seem increasingly like dreams, places where there was great humidity, all-day mosquitoes, a sea swimmable without gasping, rivers you could lie in before dawn, or bird species that I might now never see again, and generally the uncurling that can happen when you wake in the mornings to warmth. Aside from leaving everything and everyone I know and love to run away like a ghoul to the equator, I am yet to figure out how to exist in an uncurled state more of the time. Oh, well.

THIS WEEK I FELL IN LOVE WITH:

Recent and less recent images from photographer Emma Hardy, whose work I’ve fallen in love with at least twice before, in newsletters No.147 and No.126.

The library, briefly:

On a day last week I managed to traipse up and down library corridors for almost a whole hour, not with anything specific in mind, but I like how much you can notice yourself happening inside a library. Three books exited the building with me though: Late in the Day by Tessa Hadley, I, Antigone by Carlo Gébler, and Things We Say in the Dark by Kirsty Logan.

None of which I have read, because I’m still wielding the beastly heavy Ducks, Newburyport. I managed some pages this morning, alongside—dangerously so—too-full tea and a piece of carrot cake that I had disguised as breakfast.