Apologies to Mr. Housman, some poetic self-analysis is required. A tremendous amount of loveliness happened yesterday and it feels a shame not to try and pluck a few trembling blossoms and smash them into my book of life.
I am recalling now just the simple act of walking with my newly beloved red boots on. We go traipsing down and about the passages, moving lightly through the city like it is becoming my city and not simply a place I continue to visit. Walking is a much more natural occurrence these days. I don’t love it yet, but I love that it isn’t something I dread. Not having a car anymore – after so many years of enduring, nay, battling driving anxiety is…well, it’s significant, darling. A weight lifted. Of course, there’s an impulse at times, and ache, to go drive to a store. Wander around and just fill a cart and consider that being social, consider it getting out in the world.
But here – here in the UK – I can also see how fatally empty that can be.
I also am keenly aware of how much safer I feel just being out on the city streets here. That nebulous powderkeg feeling of being around people who might snap, who might have guns, who might just wanna mess with you is constant. Here, it’s not gone, but diminished to a degree that I feel the difference in my nervous system.
The bar we bring our board games to play at is older than anything I can relate to. It was hosting affable souls looking to gather and get a drink before my grandmothers’ grandmothers’ had grandmothers. It is worn in ways that few things are allowed to get worn. They’re always replaced first, changed, shellacked or demolished so its historical throughline, the line of its heart, is all dots and dashes. Here, it is clean and oddly comfortable in the corner table we find. People have a drink in the late afternoon and they’re murmuring to one another, relaxing in a true third place sort of way. They’re as good here as at home and the windows let in air and light to the wooden sort of garret. Here, in this small room, we made conversation, played our games, tipped our tipples and made some new friends. Like thousands upon thousands before, suffusing me with all sorts of sonder.
Astonishing as all hell to my spirit. I’m not used to having a sense of “we” as well as a sense of place that claims me just as I turn to claim it. Who knew? Not me.
I was so certain about life, you know? I was so sure I knew the thickness of the walls of my castle, the depth of the moat, how many crocodiles swum in its murk. It was always going to be, as sure as a medieval drinking house, that I was alone, in the middle of a vast country, trapped by all that unassailable certainty in my head. And now, we are off all maps. We are outside of all documented science, all substantiated facts and there’s a life here that calls us beautiful.
And some days, we believe it.
