Throwing back another

Last night we took a stroll around the Broadway to see what we could see from the hill. Tiny explosions popped and whizzed at irregular intervals, peppering the horizon and sending up small spurts of colour, while close by children called out excitedly as someone lit a succession of mixed fuses and the air sparkled maddeningly before resolving into silent, dreamy clouds.

Our own street was a friendly pall of smoke and gunpowder, regularly punctuated by the screams and crackles of unseen rockets. We’d bought some 50p sparklers, which made more sense in the context of our tiny garden and my compromised state, and we lit them up outside after tea.


It’s been almost two years since I moved to London and nearly a year and a half since Bruce and I were married. Everything is moving so quickly still, and there is hardly any time for reflection. Bruce says this is a sure sign that we’re living in the present rather than looking back or dreaming ahead. It’s a brand new thing for me, but I know that in order to catch more, I have to keep letting go of these fine moments.

Hibernation

I’ve been talking to a good friend from back home and it’s very late now but I can’t sleep because it’s snowing, and the snow is sticking to London, and it all feels magical somehow. Life, I mean, but the snow too.

Last year it finally snowed in April and in some ways it was a greater slight than no snow at all. But here it is - snow in October, just like when I was a kid and hoped very hard that it wouldn’t come until after Halloween, because then I’d have to wear a coat over my costume (some kids wore their jackets underneath, which was worse). It almost always snowed before Halloween when I was growing up.

It took a very long time for me to understand the clemency inherent in winter’s final say - this blanket statement that could take all night, but which unified every city block, tore up every disjointed summer thought and replaced it with an endless expanse of fresh parchment and the open invitation to start over.

Rain can have London, but I will always belong to snow.

Inconclusive

The past, be it near or far, isn’t the relative distance between an event experienced and our perception of that experience. It’s just as present in our lives as a book in the other room. The only difference between the past and a book in the other room is that the past remains inaccessible, behind a curtain; or petrified, like stone.

Distance is more like the past than the past is – real distance, or that which takes place elsewhere concurrently, is more inaccessible than the past, because one must rely on imagination (rather than memory) to transport us there. To instantly find oneself anywhere other than where one could reasonably be found in a matter of moments (say one thousand miles away) and hear its sounds, however mundane (children calling to each other outdoors; a dog barking; a refrigerator chugging to a halt), would be to experience the divine.

The divine isn’t another country where drifters aspire to travel one day; the divine is only that which exists on the opposite side of possibility.