I wonder whether we will know what to do when October arrives, if our desires will turn to paper and fall with the rest of the sugared leaves at our feet.
I don’t remember who, but I was talking to somebody at breakfast about the hardness of water, the softness of it, the way it can take things over with just atoms in space, in time. I rest my head, heavy from the ripening fruit inside it, on the warm wooden countertop, feeling small crumbs and other fractions of universe press their sharp edges into my face. The discomfort is comfortable, and I stay there while the world rotates, while people drift in and out of the room, picking up knives and plates and feelings.
Someone has washed strawberries, and they lie in a red edge-less heap, water collecting underneath and running towards the edge of what must feel like the end of everything. I select five, the slightly bruised ones that will otherwise be left behind, and eat them slowly over the sink. Their late summer sweetness lingers for a moment like a wrong decision, and it stains the tips of my fingers vermillion.
Lately I’ve been dreaming of deserts, desolate and harshly-carved landscapes devoid of water and life, ears covered in dust, in them the sound of stronger heartbeats and locusts. I wonder if anyone is going to come and stop me from losing my mind, but the house sings with a honey-like emptiness, and so I count off the names of twenty-eight different train stops, the route that runs like a panicked creature, middle of the city out to edge of the island. We’re in between water and air, somewhere in between the person they say you are and the person reflected in the chrome taps.
WORK-RELATED NEWS:
While working on the later stages of manuscript-mashing for Everything, Beautiful (the book announcement for this is within newsletter No.154), a FedEx packet showed up in the Scottish Highlands containing an advance copy of Close Again—the US edition of We Will Be Close Again, the book I printed this spring with no expectation of it travelling further than the 200 paperback copies I sent out myself.
This US version is being published by Andrews McMeel, in the autumn, and the editor Patty Rice took such incredible and considered care to ensure their hardback edition matched as closely as possible the specifications of my initial print run. One delightful addition being the ‘12ST Soil & White’ head and tail bands, small strips of barely-noticable beige to hug the pages at the either end.
(Accompanied by meadowsweet blossom from this morning and a frighteningly beautiful and tree-blank hillside from yesterday.)
THIS WEEK I FELL IN LOVE WITH:
Swish-filled work by Tokyo-based Natsumi Chikayusu.
“He used to wonder, he said, how it felt to leave, to go away from what you knew and put yourself somewhere else. For a while after I left, he would come out of his house each morning to go to work and would look at the magnolia tree that stood beside the gate, and the thought that I no longer saw that tree would overwhelm him with its strangeness.”
— Rachel Cusk, Transit
The end.
Desire is a tricky thing in these times, and October scares. Thank you for your words Ella!