No.182

Illness has a nifty, near-silent way of making a lot of life feel slightly less real. Before too long you feel slightly less real to yourself, the world outside becomes slightly less real to you, and the scheduled happenings you planned to approach are either moved or forgotten or converted into dreams.

Having successfully evaded The Illness for the past two and a half years I’m disappointed to find myself struck down, and struck down pretty good. This morning, six days in, I needed roughly half an hour to locate the energy required to walk across the apartment to brush my teeth, and while I think that the worst days are probably now done with, there is a layer over everything of, as I say, unreal. It has been difficult to remember that I have a context outside of the ill one, and especially difficult to engage with the fact that my fifth book will be available in bookstores in the US in approximately 72 hours. It has been difficult to engage with food, or with many thoughts, or with most things aside from an assortment of light-to-medium reading material.

Some of the strangest feelings have been I think a result of the peculiar mirroring in terms of the pandemic and this book, as the book is a result of the past two-point-something years, all of my work within that period, and yet this variant of illness also a result of that time, and various other time-book-body-stopped-in-its-tracks overlaps that feel too uncomfortable to dissect to any depth.

There is something a small amount exceptional though, about being physically unable to think of much useful, or move more than a few shuffles in any one direction before needing to sit back down, and I suspect in this day and age of rushing and saturation and smoke it has to do with daydreaming in a almost totally marooned manner. So long as there seems a reasonable chance that sooner or later the illness will abate, then I think Claire-Louise Bennett sums it up very well in Checkout 19—“that delicate yet absorbing sense of timelessness that often comes over one when one finds oneself stranded in bed in the middle of the day.”

For now then, until some undecided later, we cough somewhat alarmingly and love each other from opposite ends of the apartment.

BOOK-RELATED NEWS:

As I have now surely exhausted us all by stating, Everything, Beautiful is out in the US in a mere three days, the UK edition following shortly after on September 1st.

I’m so proud of this book. I’m so proud that something about beauty was said yes to during the first unknown months of the pandemic and that the Great Anxiety of Everything did not prevent the writing and illustrating of its pages. The book and what it became enabled me to still continue existing in ways that should likely have been shut off, during three different countries and encompassing losing, falling, moving, and some tightly-gripped handfuls of other such verbs. The last years still feel so heavy, so ever-present, as they should, but this doesn’t mean that we don’t all deserve the kinds of beauty that want the best for us.

Everything, Beautiful begins with three quotes and I wanted to give two of those to you now. They are epigraphs, hopes, and they set I suppose a mood for the book, a mood that I trust will allow an individual person reading to begin without expectation or agenda, and for the book to find them in the ways that are needed most right now.

THIS WEEK I FELL IN LOVE WITH:

This series, titled '‘Le Temps des Anoures’, from 2016 (ah, 2016) by French printmaker and illustrator Sophie Lécuyer. Sometimes all you need is a very desirable shade of green.

“‘I don’t want to die now!’ he yelled. ‘I’ve still got a headache! I don’t want to go to heaven with a headache, I’d be all cross and I wouldn’t enjoy it!’”

— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy

(Strikingly similar to a least one of my thoughts during migraines, none of which have thankfully featured this past week.)

Also, lastly, I remembered a moment from a week or so ago, when you went outside to take the recycling bin over to the roadside and returned wordlessly to the kitchen with a large calm frog in your hands.