15/365: Lost Things

and what would you save in the fire?

I open the door and there’s a large cardboard box on the doorstep. My doorbell’s broken and because it’s broken and because I live at the end of a long drive, the postman often either assumes I’m out, or that leaving conspicuously large boxes on the doorstep isn’t a problem. I’m cutting it fine in the same way I’m always cutting it fine and my head is full of the novel I’m writing. Not full exactly. Not writing exactly either. More it’s full of the fact I should be writing the novel I say I’m writing, and I’m not. The fact the box is long and flat gives it away as a book box, as does the giant HACHETTE stamped across the top. I know it’s a box of my author copies of Ava Anna Ada, and I know too I don’t have time to open it now.

I get home and although it says on the front to not open it with a knife I know the easiest way to open it is with a knife, I slide the blade along the longest side, and then give up, ripping the cardboard, it’s not like I’ll need to return it or worse, film myself opening the box, feigning surprise at the cover I’ve seen many times before, and then crying just the right amount before uploading it onto Instagram to boost pre-orders. Bitchy or cynical, fine line between the two, but I’ve seen it done too many times to be convinced. The cover is beautiful though and a new colour way, and I’d be a harder boiled cynic than I really am, if I was to claim I didn’t want to cry just a little bit when I saw it because there’s something about holding a book of your own that doesn’t really get old. It’s not anything at all like holding your own child, although people like to compare children to books and books to children, it is its own feeling, for me, some kind of disbelief that I’ve pulled the same trick twice, and if you’re counting paperbacks, four times, mixed with disbelief that people have said quotably nice things to put on the cover and inside.

It doesn’t feel like a body of work yet, a body needs to be larger, fleshed out, but it feels like a beginning and a beginning of exploring, by total accident, the same preoccupations. I spoke to an artist I admire greatly last summer, he said the artists he admires most are the ones who have a narrow range of preoccupations but who mine the seam of them deeply in unexpected ways. I think about this a lot. It makes me feel better about being a bore.

I decide to take a photo of both editions of Ava Anna Ada next to both editions of The Last Days, but this proves more difficult than I expected it to be. I’m not the kind of person who keeps my author copies on the bookshelf. The last thing I need is to read my book, the last thing I want is to see it leering back at me. I know there are some in the sideboard and I know there are more somewhere else but I don’t know where the else is.

I decide it doesn’t matter if the hardback of The Last Days is lost.

For a time, I lost many things.

Before my prolonged phase of losing, I was deeply sentimental and attached to things and the memories I thought they held: old photos, ticket stubs, guest passes, gallery programmes, my hospital wristband from when I was a baby, the napkin he wrote his number on before he disappeared through the departures gate, a receipt as a bookmark, bottle tops from nights out.

Sometimes, I’d go through this box, dragging out memories from wherever they were, sticking myself all over with pins or not depending on my mood. I loved this box. It didn’t feel like Pandora’s although maybe it was. And then, I lost my mother and I lost that part of my life and I still kept the box and I still kept hold of those memories but I became acutely afraid too, of losing things; so afraid, that the only solution was to pre-empt loss by my new policy of non-attachment. There is a passage in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close where the character talks about thinking and thinking themselves out of happiness and certainly I have done similar with loss in the hope that I can control it by first losing things before they lose me. Losing them accidentally on purpose, as I used to say to my mother when she asked if I’d meant to do something.

The fact I am not the sort of person to display my books is because I am afraid of losing things I love the most, and I conceal the extent of my love for them and my fear of losing them by only displaying excessive levels of distain towards them. Like most things, this makes both little and perfect sense. It is, like I thought when I saw an exhibition called It’ll All End in Tears recently at The Barbican, to know this is how it’ll end anyway, so better destroy something sooner rather than later. But this is a title, like all good titles, that can be read either way; if it all ends in tears, why not enjoy it before it does, for as long as it lasts.

Like a lot of people, I’ve been thinking this week of what I’d save in a fire. My mother always said her photo albums, keeping them near the window just in case. For the most part, phones have reshaped our relationship to photos, but I have a handful I can’t replace. This week I framed one of them, my little sister sitting perched on a fence, cowboy hat pushed low on her head. We used to have fun confusing strangers with the fact we were sisters, our faces similar, our skin colour contradicting the fact of shared genes. I love this photo with my father’s writing on the back, her young smiling face. I framed it as a protest against my disavowal of valuing things. Against my glib nonchalance there’s nothing I’d save in the fire apart from the fire, cribbed from Nick Laird, who cribbed it from Cocteau before him.

When I do find a hardback of The Last Days, it’s at the back of a cupboard with other books there’s no bookcase space for. I put it next to the other three editions of my work, maybe I’ll keep them there, for a few hours at least. the four of them, not a body, not quite, not yet.