quitvision Pieces, Writing

The Grange

How many times did I ride past that fence ally entrance and assume it was still intact, just beyond the mouth of the walkway? One of countless mazing pedestrian threads that quietly turn off from the road to web behind the green gappy suburbs of a newish city. The opening act of my life spent dragged around these inner sections. And one of their most highly regarded corners is this play park, on one edge of a continent of fields. Against the borders of stretching allotments when sitting on the swings one way, and on a distant edge of the vast grass between the pleasantly angular lines of a prefab house horizon when spun around to the other. A weathered wooden assault course with platforms and jumps, shifting planks, and swinging cyan rope that is rough on your hands. Bars and steps over vertical levels suspended high above the bark impact below. Ankle shocks and summer sweat, scuffing shoes and aching arms, creaking chains and the taste of watermelon.

I was brought along last minute to Ivano’s after school. His grandmother convinced my mum in the school playground. She walked us over wide and familiar pavements with large flat slabs that lay cracked and uneven. We twist through the back roads of tesselating homes and down a path I haven’t seen before, opening out into fields I never suspected grew lush, veiled just off a familiar street. We played unfair games at my expense on the best playpark I had ever imagined. 

Throughout childhood, I returned many times with all kinds of close people from that part of my life. Even after we moved out, I would find myself there a few scattered times with old friends from beyond. Still, after that last afternoon sitting on the swings, looking out across the flat planes of growing up, on the edge of an old spot at the edge of an old stage of youth, talking and playing more honestly than I have often since, I have on occasion drifted past that point where the path turns off, and thought of good times.

I found out today it isn’t there anymore. I wonder how long it’s been that way? How many times did I look into that entrance, catching the shading trees, the garden fence alley, the slight glimpse of wide open lawn, and think of being a happy kid? Just finding joy in climbing stuff and falling to the ground over and over again at my favourite playpark. Simply assuming it was still there. How many times did I peer into a pathway to the past without realising that it had been built over? Without realising that the obstacles, the wood, the eaten rubber, and the fraying blue rope, the framework for a simple kind of happiness that becomes hard to come by, exists now only in the warm swimming memories of dry days, long afternoons, and yellowing grass. A much smaller world that somehow contained everything you could want, including a place as wonderful as that one park.

quitvision Poems, Writing

Changing Gear

The train flew past
And I wasn’t in my seat
This time I drove right past the station
From a loud room, with the breeze
Gust along control
Through years passed and received
Scared to change gears for my dad
But now who’ll do it if not me?
Here to be dropped
Into our small ponds, now we swim
We grew up into fins then legs
To climb out and wade in again
Between flashes
The city looks unchanged to me
And it’s dumb but I feel sad
When there’s not time to walk lonely
Through neighbourhoods that keep 
Their old meanings quietly
And I’ll try to distill an old feeling
That’s only the same in the memories
Grown to accept the hand-me-downs
You’re so surprised I’m in new shoes
And I love having dry feet
But not as much as I love you

We’ll take it all
And it’ll be all that we feared
And we’ll do it so willingly
Momentarily feels weird
And then just is
Tumble back onto our feet
The portraits still the same
But their backdrops slowly creep
Conveyer belt context
The shading shifts to throw new light
Onto dormant pains inside us
And certainty into night
Watch the scenery fly faster
Until you’re hurtling alone
The meaning slips loose and past you
And barrels lost into the unknown
Grasp into white-hot new
Reach into terrifying change
That as it holds your life in it’s jaws
The devouring dimension makes seem tame
quitvision Pieces, Writing

The Living Room Has Changed

The living room has changed. It’s nice, I admit, though I’m not great with change. I find some pain in it. I find some pain in what is lost to it. The rooms of this house are always in motion. One guest room still holds the air from my old bedroom, with flecks of the old purple paint still visible from strange angles only I would ever see. 

I came back after a difficult first few months in my new flat, an odd number of years old. A brief stay home from an unfriendly city, with an unlucky crew of strangers, in a wipe-down boarding hall. I sat in an armchair in this warm living room and had conversations with people that knew me well. I ate their food and slept in the bed my parents bought me urgently from the charity shop after I came home from the hospital with a broken leg. This bed that I’d hated as a snapped teenager was now so nourishing. Just as breaking my leg was awful as it healed, but would go on to teach me a lot, I knew leaving home was necessary. But I hadn’t realised how much I had missed this dose of comfort. If I hadn’t jumped off of that roof I may have never stopped sleeping on a mattress on the floor. If I’d never moved out of my parent’s house I may have never learnt to accept the pain of life-changing and its components becoming lost.

There was a dog and a cat I knew. We had seen each other after school, on evenings and weekends, as I laid on the living room carpet in the middle of the week, filling out applications and order forms for my dismal catalogue sales job. My darker days of deep unemployment, where they would silently watch me, puzzled as I scrambled to get dressed just before my parents returned home from work. The dog was big and black with glassy eyes to his gentle soul, calm and observant. As I stroked him he tilted his head up at me and I was reminded of how he would stare up at us when we spoke to him, turning his head to one side when we did something he didn’t understand. I wondered if he understood why on one normal day I left the house and just didn’t come home again. I wondered if he knew why I was now back. He was getting older now, his energy growing softer, no longer in his bouncing youth. When I was younger my dad would occasionally try to wrestle me on this blue carpet, and our dog would not be able to contain himself. He would be straight at the edge of the ring, licking us to try and tag himself in. I have not seen this kind of openly vulnerable friendliness while I have been away, everything has been much more complicated than this. The cat was small and uninterested, as always. After she sleeps she wants to play, and when she decides we’re done she wants to groom herself before purring into a croissant shape on top of someone. She is still young and leaps around casually, shuffling her legs as she sleeps under a stool, in chasing dreams of long grass and hiding places. Her dynamic with the dog is one of parallel running tolerance and acceptance. There is no real bond, but no conflict either, only some intrigue. 

The dog arrived here when he was four, raised by and alongside cats in a household that couldn’t give him what he needed as he grew into himself. He was the most polite dog I had ever met, and over the years of knowing him, he healed my deep distrust of dogs, leftover in me from accompanying my dad as a young child while we walked our previous dog through our intimidating neighbourhood parks. When we brought home our cat she was still a very young kitten, adopted by us from a kitchen floor crawling with multiple litters of fuzzy little futures. She had barely been handled and was very shy at first, spending a good amount of her life getting adjusted to being comfortable with people, often being known to bolt at any disturbance. Growing up, she learnt the ropes from careful and distant observation of the dog, whose cool attitude would rub off on her gradually. So we had a cat who acted kind of like a dog who acted kind of like a cat. I missed them both when I headed back after the Christmas break, to a place that didn’t uphold a trace of their non-judgemental ease and acceptance. The pain helps you grow, but it still hurts.

The halls I lived away in were a kind of home to me, in a warped way and an austere sense. I felt this only as my things sat piled and packed to depart, in the corner of the bare room as the sun cast shapes in through the twin windows. Although it meant that I would get to return to my parent’s house for the summer, I felt the hit of loss at the idea of leaving this room behind. This was my only safe sanctuary in the pioneering days of a new phase of life. This was the first place in my life that I lived away from where I was raised, out on my own. As my parents waited in the car downstairs for me, their second and only visit here since dropping me off on my first day, I felt deeply sad at the idea of locking up this room that I’d had such a hard time in. I turned and hugged the wall with tears in my eyes at the thought of never seeing this place again. I desperately hung in the silent air, taking in as much as I could of this place that only suddenly felt so sacred to me in the last hours before it was time for me to close it off. I took too long in there, unable to pull myself away, not knowing how to break the gaze of a final look at something that felt so important. I abandoned that room only when the pain forced me to. I tried to gather myself in the hallway, through the staircase and the courtyard, but each hurt me more as I saw them for the last time. As I climbed into the back of the car, my parents asked me what I’d been doing up there. I tried to hide my wet eyes and told them I’d just been saying goodbye to my old room. I did the same thing as I departed the low house against the park a year later. I’ve done it everywhere I’ve lived since.

quitvision Pieces, Writing

Singing Songs In Flat 7

I am relieved that I could finally pull together a song about moving on from the old apartment. It’s not always easy to find things to write about, especially when you live a pretty solitary lifestyle. You usually have to look a little deeper at the things that really mean something to you. If a lot of those things seem kind of mundane, you have to stare into them until you penetrate through to some meaning. It really doesn’t feel like it matters anymore. As long as you are close enough to something, you might be able to show an insight. Anything can be wonderful if it can be truly personal and real. And told in the right way.

Moving house is one of those things that is both a big change and also a pretty widely experienced event. Yet, there aren’t too many songs about it. There’s maybe ‘Sun In An Empty Room’ and then…

I spent a long time thinking about picking up and heading out in the months and weeks leading up to our moving. All the wide facts snaking through my brain in thick cables, orbited by every subtle implication, spinning off, discovered, and waiting to be. Very difficult to maneuver through with any grace, and so easy to slip through cracks and get lost in. This is how I mostly experience and process of change. I am unable to dodge or run from the infinite reflection. It’s only healthy to think stuff through and look back for a while. To avoid that responsibility to yourself is dangerous in its own way. My problem is that my mind over-indulges in reflection, going far past the point of usefulness, and sometimes so unnecessarily deep that the light starts to thin and the scale of things can warp out of proportion. I was so deeply worried, I didn’t want to forget anything about the place that had been the one consistent backdrop for the last couple of years of my life. It’s not the place, so much as the years of your life that feel so truly precious, and that’s what I get sentimental over. Not that I can’t live here anymore, but that those years of my life are drifting away and across a break in setting, over a threshold where just the place can no longer be looked at on its own to extract memories from. 

Maybe this is what familiarity is, a continuity that ties you together.

The place meant a lot to me through the lens of everyday life, the mundane and un-noteworthy ninety percent of seeing, feeling, breathing, and living. No less than the exciting remainder, blasé only in that there is just so much of this beautiful side of life that we sometimes forget how to enjoy it. A sheer plane that you need to glimpse the edge of sometimes to even know it’s there. When you approach the edges of the everyday, that is when you make out the definition. Moving house is one of these such edges, a miniature death of a version of you that in its last motions sees its entire life flash before its eyes, mourning itself before it is even gone.