quitvision Poems, Writing

Mourning This Too

I remember mourning this too. Somewhere I was, that was me. It gets left back there, someplace behind you. The scratched surface of your discarded homes. It’s harder to always see into the clutching winds that carried them away. I’m here on the acre. I dipped my intimidated toe in here at 18, left behind my innocence for it at 19. At 22 I left it behind too. So here I return to find… something. Because now, a few steps beyond this, I mourn something fresh. A wound that tears back even further than any of this. A cut much deeper. 

The last Sunday of the summer is this afternoon. I’ve spent the whole of this bright season stressed out of my mind. Pumped full of either urgent adrenaline for things moving too fast, or slow swirling omnipresent conflict and despair. April we decided, May we tried to forget, June we braced, July we broke. August we let go, between flying anxious distractions and demands. And now it’s nearly done. The last month has exhausted me more than any other, maybe because of the accumulation, or maybe because of its own brutal carouselling pains. Whichever it was, it constricted my soul like a snake. I felt crushed, unable to move, to tidy, bandage, heal, cleanse, finish off the basics of bearable life after freshly moving into a house of loose ends. No time to rewind, no time to reflect after the mind warping complexity of emotional broken bones, identity trauma, a haemorrhaging way of life. No time to be alone in space with myself. The only thing I dove into this broken glass pit to retrieve. 

At the most hurt point in my life, something came up to carry on my shoulders that I couldn’t refuse. Because it embodied the kind of life I felt I should be living, even if I wasn’t ready to yet. And I wasn’t. And I guess all of that pain I had to shelve… Well it’s been waiting there for me on the other side of all this. It happened so fast and so saturated to the margins that I can’t face them without going back, if only just to figure out where I am. So that’s why I left the awful, busy loneliness of my new apartment, to catch up on mourning the life I just moved from, and to itemise the overwhelming receipts of my emotional debts to myself ever 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.