This post jumps around in time, so it’s hard to pinpoint exactly which ten minutes a day it’s based on. But it’s been a strange couple of days. On Wednesday I left London to move to Hastings. I’m only sure what day it is now because I checked, I’m in that kind of strange out of body between place that happens after a big change, some time lag between the body being there and the mind taking a while to catch up.
My son picks his chip up, suspends it half way to his mouth. I know what this signifies. I’ve been thinking, he says, and I flinch a little bit because it means he’ll talk at me for a long time and I’ll have to follow his train of thought and I am very tired. But when he starts to talk, he talks about luck and magic and how maybe luck is just going out into the world in search of magic and just think, he says, if you always stayed at home you might miss out on your luck which is nearly the same thing I messaged a friend in a conversation on Tuesday maybe, still in London, still packing, a long distance conversation, and I remembered a Joyce Carol Oates line I love and am paraphrasing I hope not too badly where she said, we must create the improbable circumstances of chance that the yet more impossible circumstances of happiness may be revealed to us and sometimes I find I run away from both chance and happiness and the night before, Monday and I was in The Social for a book launch and I am in the back room and the room has bad vibes. It’s always cold. It feels like it has too many outside walls. It is a room I first went in by mistake and sometimes I think about this mistake and the direction it took my life afterwards, and some people would call it chance and others would call it luck. For a long time, I didn’t believe in luck. I do now. We’re in the room and we are talking about the feel of it and it’s the day before Halloween so everything feels and is thinner than usual. A friend and I swamp supernatural experiences, we laugh, aware how marginally insane we both sound but we’re drinking margaritas, which makes it ok and then for the first time this week we get around to fate and it being a thing you can prevent and subvert and run away from. But run towards it, and something that looks a lot like magic begins to happen. It is, I suggest, a matter of saying yes and saying it repeatedly, saying it when you want to say no, saying it when you’re tired, saying it when it would be easier to stay at home; saying it when you’re afraid and half aware of the consequences but saying it anyway; it is keeping saying it even when you don’t have a single fucking clue where it’ll take you but you say it anyway and two days later, I am on the train and the woman with the dinosaur photographs in her phone leans over to show me the photos and then it is Thursday and I am in the kitchen unpacking when the door goes and I go to it and I’m wearing the same leggings I’ve worn since Tuesday and my hair needs washed and my hands are black from newsprint and there she is, the same woman again, out of the blue, out of sheer chance, with a neighbourhood problem and it is the strangest thing to discover her, right there on my doorstep, after her kindness when on the train and it’s all these tiny things, my friend used to say that come as signs when we aren’t sure if we’re moving in the right direction that maybe we are. We laugh, I tell her I don’t believe in coincidence. And then later, a friend sends me a message to say they have made a massive mistake and when I discover exactly the nature of this mistake I start to laugh and will not stop laughing for some time because that too is a lot like a strange kind of magic whether you believe it in it or not, you just have to know how to recognise it.
Wonderful, Ali. Thank you. As we both know - magic is real.
It's a challenge to keep pace with your week, Ali, but I'm here for the journey. Just. November 3rd, my birthday. Spent again 4hrs from home beside my father as he receives end of life care. The internal gymnastics required to process that I am now providing intimate personal care to this man that I love dearly but who has shunned me for years. The sadness and rage at the wasted years robbed by his adherence to the cult. Still, I'm grateful he has let me in right at the end.
November 3rd. My birthday. I support his weight as I hold the bottle for him, knowing there will be no "happy birthday, my boy."
I read your post instead.