My sitting room, by the window, 13.34

the light returns

Light streams in the window, feels like the first in days. It has rained for the last week, only Boxing Day clear, on Twitter - keep forgetting to call it X- people ask if this is normal for this time of year. General consensus: no. Soon, we will need new names for the seasons, there will be wet ones and wetter ones; wet cold ones, wet warm ones. Perhaps overly concerned with the weather, now I’ve written a book about it changing.

The light; ferociously white. Working now on a different project. My agent, aware I think, that I am not good at holidays, and especially not this one, has given me a tight deadline. By next week it will be gone, three years of thinking coalescing into one thing. I say this as if it is natural. As if it does not currently seem like I am corralling thoughts, ideas, events, images. The trick is to make it look seamless. I know about invisible seams. I am good at small concealed stitches. Less good at it on the page. Spend hours smoothing it down.

For days, it doesn’t work. Think at some stage in the days of rain, of lowering grey clouds, the sea matching as if roils in out off, that I have nothing left to say. What if I’ve used it all up? What if other people are better at saying it louder? What if I’m all done? These days, they lend themselves to this kind of catastrophising.

Three weeks and Ava Anna Ada is out. Fear it will win me very little friends. In it I find my claws. Anger. Sorrow. Perennial concerns. Words won’t line themselves up well on the page as I work. Worry my thinking apparatus has again fallen asleep as a man I once loved told me. Despise my prose. That’s part of it, my agent says. No one’s meant to like their own work. Read Hesse’s diaries for comfort.

Things feel disconnected.

Must find the thread.

A thread to bind. A thread to give them some commonality.

Was once good with thread.

Fear that now, if thread was in my hand I wouldn’t know what to do with it. Worry about Louise Bourgeois’ claim a needle is not an instrument of violence. Think of the needle and the way it punctures. Think of material. Think of bodies. Think of unknotting stories, of spooling back from the end to the beginning. Think again of thread and the way it does the same.

It takes a while, to come back. After a holiday say. High days, holidays, holy days.

Some days, you have no idea how to celebrate. Some days, there are no blueprints for. Take Christmas if you’ve grown up without it. It’s not the presents. It’s not the hollow feeling when you wake as a kid, hoping that maybe, maybe, what you’ve been told was wrong, that maybe Santa will have come in the night. And how this makes you believe, how you scrunch your eyes together each Christmas Eve and wish and later ask for forgiveness for wishing and daring to believe in something so pagan. Later, you will mortify your sacrilegious flesh with pins under the sewing table. If no one is watching you will do the same with a needle, a trick you have learnt with the thicker skin on your feet, so you feel very little but just enough. It will leave no marks. Important no one sees this. If someone were to see, they might stop you and you need this trick. This will be the beginning of it. I call a chapter, All I Have is All I Am, in relation to this habit of using my body in the absence of substitutes.

No, it’s not just the presents. It’s not just the lack of Santa. It’s the tradition. How do you simply start something you have no traditions for? When is it just a recreation of someone else’s holiday? When’s it just a simulacrum? There’s a difference between doing a thing and feeling a thing.

Makes sense really, in the midst of dark to celebrate the light. That’s what this is. But the rest, feels hard this year. Feels impossible with everything else pressing. Two things can be true at once, I tell myself, but sometimes the weight of one truth begins to eclipse another. The weight of Palestine, the weight of Israel; the weight of the fact that there are other ongoing genocides we should have noticed and should feel heavy about. The weight not just of the present, but of the past, specifically of my past, leads me to the beach on Christmas Day. The haar is in, the drizzle thick, I can barely see the sea. Sometimes recovery looks as selfish as its opposite. For years, I have been afraid to be alone on Christmas Day. The first two Christmases I celebrated, it was me and a very young daughter. Just us. I didn’t know anyone else then, on the outside. Freedom comes at its own cost. The cost then, often felt exorbitant.

I stood watching the sea. Marvelling at the proximity of something so powerful. I find the weather here often satisfies my desire for extremes. One I have often satisfied in less wholesome ways. My children are at home, occupied by their new presents, turkey in the oven. There are no solitary walkers. I stake my new territory. Walk up the beach. Few cars on the road. Everyone inside would used to have caused a whole in my stomach. Not today. I like being alone.

Return home to make Cranberry Sauce. Recall as I am making it the colour of my grandmother’s, sitting in a crystal bowl, candlelight reflecting off its sharp edges. For a time, we were allowed different day Christmas at my grandmother’s house, to placate her, I now think. And then it stopped. Perhaps there was a talk about it, perhaps my mother believed this to dilute her faith. Perhaps a Watchtower. Perhaps a visit from the elders. Those heathen days are sharp in my memory, perhaps this is why now I love little more than to sit at a table with people I love, talking for hours. We recreate the times we feel safe, I tell a friend later. As we exchange messages, I remember there are still things to say. There will always be people louder, more insistent, these days of forced celebration will always be slightly strange, there might never be resolution to them, but there are also the omen days to come, the 12 days of reflection and release, of looking for a sign, recall last solstice, on the hunt for signs, signs only readable now with the benefit of hindsight but signs all the same. There is a new year, a new book, there is work that might not be working right now but there is enough experience now, to know it will, it will, it must; we find our life-belts where we can.