No.189

How many mountains do you think you could fit inside your lungs? Skin tight, your edges pressed against by altitude and all those trees you don’t know the names of. When that feeling gets too heavy maybe you can try carrying me instead.

From this height there are stretch marks on the Atlantic, and tiny ships that look like stitches, not really holding much together except men because there is little reassuring about deep water. Doesn’t it bother you, that there are likely to be pieces of yourself in places that you’ll never see, never set foot in? Colours run here and they say it’s possible to catch them—I know this to be true because I’ve seen some of them in your eyes. Put them back with paint and felt tip pen, careful not to go outside of the edges of this country, that country, their country; they aren’t going to know the back or the front of your hands.

Say what you mean but say it slowly, so that I have time to run away. What was it? Yes, I wanted to tell you just how blue it is down there but don’t have words that could even begin; it makes me feel thirsty and worried and like I might need to turn around and leave again soon. The sky looks good on you though, I can see clouds where your stomach should be and oceans reaching their arms around your back.

WORK-RELATED NEWS:

A disrupted week of half-attempted tasks given transatlantic travel, but the change of timezone and everything else that went along with it has seemingly provided a good shake-everything-up in terms of thinking—much needed after what feels to some extent like three and a half years of expecting new thoughts to creep up on me, or leap out from behind corners, or just shrug their thought-shoulders and walk away altogether. It is hard to stay and sit in the nourishing, stretched-out sort of thinking when exterior-world anxiety is always so ready and so waiting.

Seasons are also strange things in a creative context, because although you can anticipate and see changes arriving across landscapes and in the trees outside windows, it most often comes as a surprise or a disorientation when a different season of thinking appears in your mind. I’ve been attempting to contemplate what those different seasons of thinking mean, to me and to themselves, and how that translates to the things being created or the lines of thought being followed.

THIS WEEK I FELL IN LOVE WITH:

Images of starling murmurations by Danish photographer Søren Solkær, from a project and publication titled Black Sun. To me these photographs feel some odd combination of breathing room and claustrophobia, which is how a lot of things seem to feel for people these days.

I have neither needed nor wanted to travel my body a distance this long in over four years, and having slipped from one side of the planet across an ocean and then most of a continent I find myself not being able to remember how this felt before—I think it now feels much more drastic, more ripping, much more anticipated and grand, more consequential and hungry and bizarre.

It seemed so wrong, to be able to leave a small town in an afternoon and move for ten hours over all of the other afternoons happening in other lands, and from a great height, before arriving in an afternoon belonging to a large city, barely differing in time than the one I’d left behind.

For now it’s forecast snow and the daylight hours here slightly longer, somehow more filled with both skyscraper and forest.