No.195

Attached to the walls of cities I only recognise when I’m asleep, walking along what I believe to be familiar streets as the almighty red sun sinks into a stupor, I wonder how many miles my feet have walked in three decades. I am made from mosquitoes, I am made from from something everlasting and elastic, I am about to walk into the ocean.

I used to be able to see universes inside my head. I used to sit on stars while they burned, could breathe in through my nose and taste the air that had been between bird feathers. I could smell time and smoke and the heaps of dried golden wheat resting gently on whatever was left; I am still the only one who notices the late July light on winged things, but I no longer want to follow them. I have lost several degrees of urgency, my anchor to this rich soil is not as heavy or clean as before, and it is difficult to know whether I’m in love with every single living thing or none of them at all. It is difficult to know whether you are the shadows or if you are just standing in my way.

Back then, when I was living further away from the sun, I could peel words off my tongue in the same way that I’ve seen you take apart fruit. There were no holes, no lifetimes between the beginning of a thought and the words you heard me use to explain it. Sentences would wrap themselves around my neck like scarves in winter, welcome and necessary and demanding to be said aloud. I am the quietness now; I live in the gaps between the small talk, in the simpler shades of black and grey while you are screaming colour.

There are days when I can look at myself from a minute away, from across a lake, from ten miles back. Other days I am the lake itself, but you knew that and I think many of us have spent our lifetimes just searching for mirrors. You knew that this would be deep water, that you wanted to swim. It is like running out of breath before words are finished with, and we stand there wide-eyed and open-mouthed trying to drink answers from the thin air.

Wanting to know what it would be like, to read a book of your revelations and regret. As I bathe myself in this idea the sky fills with insects; they sing orchestral pieces that I do not know, in harmonies too high-pitched for me to hear. They leave me untouched, staying above the tree line where it is humid and stuck, where it is already night. Waiting as the dark blue gets pulled through branches, carefully cloaking every single leaf and creating a world of silhouettes and soft-bodied creatures. The trees around me shed their concerns and pine needles as the temperature drops, the silence becoming louder until my ears ring so badly I forget what cathedral bells sound like.

I walk out into sand dunes, which range from knee-high and unwelcoming to others so tall I cannot know when or if they ever end. In the dark it is hard to see whose feelings I am or am not stepping on, if that small shape is something with four legs or the last thing you said to me. It is the salt that gets you out of this, because it sticks stubbornly on your tongue and sure enough the dunes fall away; we walk down to a smooth curve of coastal stones and stars, which are hanging in the night on strings made from lies and spider silk. It is hard to ignore the payphone, out of place, glowing neon and insistent, so I call, and say that I would like to share you with the sun.

HOW TO WORRY ABOUT BEAUTY:

1. You will not be able to look at all of the leaves

2. All the beauty you couldn’t see because you were asleep

3. People do not love moths enough

4. Do I adore birds more than you and would you mind if I did

5. Worrying about beautiful words that mean bad things, like ‘calamity’

6. What if everything only ever gets louder

7. A day when I find myself unthrilled by a clean paper page

8. How to explain the world to those who are new here

9. Edges that will fray over time

10. The for-granted-ness, so quick to arrive, whenever anyone loves us

11. Is madness the opposite of paying attention

THIS WEEK I FELL IN LOVE WITH:

Things by the Norwegian modernist painter Nikolai Astrup (1880-1928).

— Samantha Harvey, The Shapeless Unease