I forgot that it hurts (Patreon)

audio for this post available here.

even in the change you want, there’s strife! I forgot. and no opportunity to remember: I was swept up by the interminable pre-move parade of bullshit end-of-tenancy tasks. I did feel like a neon sign turning off when during our goodbyes a close friend told me to ‘enjoy my new life’; it was such serious and emotive framing for an act which up until then I’d been thinking about just logistically, and it made me a little sad and aware of the passage of time, yes, I would be entering, if not a new life . . . something else, some other phase. but no matter! I was busy booking movers, applying three layers of one-layer paint, performing surgery on the corner of the couch my cat destroyed, and sleeping dreamlessly, impatient for time to pass. 

one morning the boxes disappeared. then bug and I were hurtling north on the 10:32 lumo from king’s cross. a row to ourselves, phew. I ate a pret bircher muesli, which I only ever buy to eat on trains. out the window a line of green countryside undulated like a polygraph chart.

I met a woman on the train. she was called jayne and she felt similar in spirit and face to jane goodall, which I thought even before learning her name. she wore long grey hair in pigtail braids. young-souled choices, maybe, to grow your hair long, to wear it that way. a gentle person, soft spoken, a cottony voice. we talked about ourselves and each other. jayne was a yoga teacher and a published poet, though said she didn’t write as often now. she congratulated me on the move. she recommended me a chiropractor. we revealed things about our lives. jayne didn’t have kids or a partner. I told her that’s a potentiality I've been considering for myself but not without heartache. this is a bad reason for anything, I said, and I know it, but I’m afraid to get to the end of my life without anyone to care for or about me. jayne told me she was hurt badly in a car accident in 2019 and spent four months in the hospital relearning how to walk. at the beginning of her ordeal she’d had the same fear. but her students cared for her. by her bedside, and minding her home, and offering their time and compassion and their arms for holding. I felt that idea lock into myself, that a person can have students instead of children, and the minecart piloting my life shifted violently onto a new track, throwing off the hard black kernel of fear I’ve been carrying, that I’m doomed to regret my choice no matter what it is. complete lives exist in many – all – directions. I was grateful for jayne. we exchanged email addresses. I think I will see that chiropractor.

bug and I arrived at the edinburgh flat intact in body but apart in mind. experiencing a degree of feline overstimulation inconceivable to me, bug secured a tight spot beneath a radiator to anxiously glance up from. I was overwhelmed too. but! the flat was even better than I'd remembered. what a different experience it is to stand in a home, knowing it’s yours, than to glance awkwardly around it while a stern realtor waits for you to be finished and watches you struggle with unopenable doors. I took photos of every room and sent them to my parents with exclamation points. out my bedroom window swooshed a lush green-blue courtyard, lousy with enormous bumblebees who kept throwing their bodies against the glass with little doohks (I imagined them going ope, sorry, ope, sorry, excuse me). my new life!

then a small tragedy struck through the phone: the moving guys would be arriving not tonight like we’d planned but the next morning, at 8 a.m. ok, I said, nicely, then I hung up and went uugughhhhh. my poor possessions, I thought, all pressed up against each other in strange and unnatural combinations, shivering in a truck’s belly somewhere on the m6. I took inventory. I had my laptop, a charger, some freud essays, and my headphones, which were all fine things to keep me occupied but didn’t offer much in the way of creature comfort. in a daze I shambled to the marks and spencer on princes street, bought a duvet, a sheet and pillows, then returned to my empty flat which, in the waning light, now felt cavernous and creepy. the high ceilings I was so excited about seemed to stretch out endlessly above me like in the haunted mansion pre-show room. I sensed that what I couldn’t touch wasn’t actually mine. from then the upper parts of the wall took on a kind of sinister and serious quality. and the sounds, all of them malevolent: a baritone hum from the sterile fridge, floorboards that moaned beneath my weight, a broken-sounding clickclack from the boiler. no one has lived here in a long time, I thought. it was cold. I made the bed, then experimentally folded myself into the chilly-skinned leather couch with the freud book and felt sorry for myself. 

it was all a bit much for just me. just me. regret. fear. my new life.

night happened. the chill I thought might magically fix itself grew chillier. I hyped myself up to inspect the boiler: a white plastic mass covered in strange markings and dials, letters without explanation; in its center, a caution light flashed, a triangle with an exclamation mark for a face. exhausted, disoriented, autistic in a way that’s incompatible with machines, to me the boiler might as well have been an ancient cipher, and after a brief stint of random prodding I abandoned it completely, thinking oh well, I guess there are some things man will never know. I got into bed and tried to sleep. too cold. pulled my leather jacket over my t-shirt and lay down again. sleep happened in forgotten stutters. I kept 'waking' 'up' from nightmares about not owning anything, while in the distance an appliance sputtered and nothing smelled like me. bug joined me at some point which helped. but the house noises cast me in a pall of anxiety. what am I afraid of, I thought? not an intruder, surely, and not the unknown – but the fact, savannah, that this new stimulus has been brought about by your own volition and your volition only, by your decision to have a new life, savannah, which no one has forced upon you, savannah, which you are responsible for, which now you must deal with every part of, even what is frightening, especially what can’t be stopped.

I quit trying to sleep at 6 to a very pretty sunrise, then painted the face of the animated cadaver carrying the brain from room to room. the movers came at 8:16. I asked if they needed help. the leader said, up to you. that’s what I get for asking. I helped. that’s very heavy, are you sure, they said, and I said yes, yes, I’ve got it, and I did. then the movers were gone. I bisected a modafinil, swallowed half, and in a methodical frenzy gashed and gutted each box in the cardboard sea with incredible kineticism, the efficacy of an automaton, or just someone who really really really wants everything to be normal again, and all was unpacked by two in the afternoon. I cleared the remains of the boxes and then wrapped around bug in bed, weak and strung out, but finally safe, and slept.

since I woke up from that sleep I’ve been in the grips of the Great Acclimation. today is day nine. a new realm of knowledge is accessible to me, including such information as I can only sleep with the big sliding closet doors closed, the tap is hot to the left in one sink but hot to the right in the other, and the shower floods if I run it on full blast. of course to learn all this required feeling fear, and discomfort, and being burned by hot water a bunch. as I tend to my growing pains, the home and I collaborate. together we are developing the routines and rituals of everyday life, new systems of being. domesticity . . . maxxing. even something as simple as a beautiful match box next to a candle is very exciting and satisfying to me. I love these, uh, esoteric comfort hacks, which afford you not just greater peace, but secret power (and sometimes peace and power come at once). john mulaney’s ‘you had sex with marilyn monroe but only I know where the bathroom is’: that’s what it’s all about, baby!

over the first week I felt such a violent need to express myself through home decor I thought I might fucking lose it. surely there existed a cushion that would sit harmoniously in the space that could also say something profound about me as a person, a cushion that a friend or prospective lover could get one glance at and with that once glance know me better, or completely, understand the most hidden knots of my soul!!!! anyway, I found one close to that but it was five hundred pounds, and eventually I decided maybe my, and indeed, anyone’s, interior world too complex to be expressed via cushion, and then I thought maybe I should just buy one that’s, like, green. repeat this process for even the most innocuous of household objects. toothbrush holder. hand towel. whatever. not everything needs to be extraordinary. I’ve nested to this extent in every new place I’ve lived, urgently, in a way where domestic perfection is non-negotiable and also something that can be achieved. I sometimes wish this wasn't how I am. I worry it's a lot of work and energy towards only a frivolous and materialistic end . . . or that my reliance on such particular conditions to do anything at all means my happiness, or, horror, my productivity, is only precarious. though, I don't know, I’m adaptable. I was honestly pleased with the studio, which was smaller, and objectively worse. but as our limits expand so too does our desire. maybe also in the midst of a big painful change, the idea that the home is a project that can be finished, or that beauty is something absolute, is reassuring. not everything needs be in flux, you think. the secret is that of course it does, and is. but there's room for small lies in the grips of sudden change!

anyway, there’s beauty right outside, and when I haven’t been scrolling aspirationally through the ssense homeware sale section I’ve been exploring. it's a beautiful city! I knew that! indeed the wind and the cold here are no joke . . . especially when they appear at once. umbrellas are rendered almost totally useless if not actively harmful, tetchy ship sails with airborne vortexes constantly jamming them inside-out, and so I think I’ll need to invest in some sort of deep-hooded raincoat situation. but even those days are wonderful when experienced from inside. guiltless solitude. on the sunny days I've enjoyed so much just to walk around and unsuccessfully half-smile at people. plus I have the best botanical gardens I've ever been to close by. what else is there?

this is a good place for me. calm is coming. I’ve since figured out how the boiler works. for the first time today I walked into my bedroom and it smelled like me. I set up my desk to face the window with the fat bumblebees. I felt settled enough today to write. I’m glad to be someone brave enough to further the plot, even if that bravery is sometimes blind. and soon the transition will be complete, and like at the end of childhood, or at the end of education, the threshold which lies on the other side of structure, you swallow the change with your new bigger size and your life opens again.

thanks very much to all of you for being here and allowing me the time to adjust  <{ *^-^ }>  i’ll talk to you very soon

sav