Homecoming

You might enjoy listening to this post by clicking on the voiceover player above.

I get this strange feeling sometimes as I move through the day that I have been packaged into a tight little box. I will just be moving or sitting, watching my hands hanging laundry or typing or pushing slices of onion around a pan, and I’ll get this sense of darkness, cracks of light just visible through the seams. I’ll smell cardboard and parcel tape and feel a sense of folding and compression. I’ll feel the jolt as I’m shifted, moved, the pressure as a label is stuck on, and I’ll wonder for a moment where I am and what I’m doing.

Once you have lived through a few decades, I think it’s rare for your whole life and body to still feel like your own. There is a sense of having been divided up. It’s as if, through the years, you were travelling on a conveyor belt and at different points a junction came along and a part of you exited, destined for some mission or job or purpose. I have watched parts of me disappear through holes in the wall marked adult and single-mother and breadwinner and writer and a dozen more, each soon packaged up dutifully and sensibly, off to do their important work. Each was needed, expected, required to do something — look, it says so on this chit here, it’s too late to change things now. Perhaps that’s what leads to those vertigo moments of compression and movement. For a moment I get to sense where a part of me is and it’s not here, not anymore. I’ve lost control of it; it’s a force all its own now, walking stiffly on its automaton legs, following its programming. Coming back to my hands typing these words, there comes a bewildering question: what’s left after all this dividing? What’s still here? And what does she want? Really?

I am trying more and more to feel into these insubstantial remains. She is an uncertain, doubtful, wispy thing, jumpy and frightened of being claimed and divided up some more. “What is it you really desire?” I try to ask her. The ghost whispers back and I struggle to hear her; I don’t think she speaks in words, this ghost.

It’s confusing: I sit down and try to feed her what I think she wants in little mouthfuls but something freezes up, the wisp closes her mouth. But you’ve always liked that, I tell her, baffled. The wisp shakes her head. Oh, right. Perhaps that was some other part, one with shinier, society-approved goals and priorities stamped right in, long marched off and away.

I have started making a list. Rather than assume I know what I like anymore, I am trying to watch and notice what gives me that warm, sunny flush of smiling and rightness. Not what I think should, but what actually does. I write these things down. I pay attention. I want to learn about this strange creature; this 43 year old who isn’t sure who she is or what she needs.

Some of the answers are obvious, deliciously basic. I like to be outside, often. I like the sunlight and water and mountains. I like watching the starlings swoop into their nest under the eaves with a clatter of their clever mouths to be greeted by the jubilant, desperate call of their dinosaur offspring. I like rolling a smooth acorn back and forth and back and forth between my fingers. I like to move. God, I love to move. I like the spiced apple tea our coffee shop serves. I like to read until I can’t keep my eyes open and the words turn right into dreams. I like folding against the body of my lover at night, feeling the weight of the cat at our feet.

Some answers are embarrassing. Look, I really, really like it when things are clean and tidy, ok? I like making a list and ticking things off. I like it when things are done properly. I like goals and schemes and schedules but turning them into games I can win. I love games. I love winning. I also like having my hands covered in glue and in paint. I like cutting and sticking. I like sucking my thumb and staring into space and no-one talking to me for a while, but staying close, please? Staying right here.

Many other answers are… inconvenient. Right now, all I really want to do is to sit and pull out long threads of rainbow cotton and stitch them in neat little rows. I want to do it for hours and hours and hours. Useful! Ask my ghost self to write the sensible, conventional thing that she’s supposed to be writing, and, look, she’ll turn to stone, but let her have a new, madder, more unconventional idea and let her run with it, seeing what she can do, and she’ll bellow with life like the birds in the nest.

I can’t tell you that these things are coalescing into one big, life-changing vision or plan. I fear that, if they were to, I’d soon find myself at a junction on the conveyor belt again and, oops, there would go another part of me, machine-stamped into solid form. Box-ready. Perhaps it’s good to resist that for a while. These learnings are leading me somewhere interesting through. I’m making exciting things. I’m having big, surprising ideas.

What’s more, I find that when I lean into these likes, basic or embarrassing or inconvenient as they are, something fascinating happens. When I sit, wiggling my toes with pleasure, as I pick my next colour thread, this one the colour of rowan berries, or filling my pockets with conkers that feel so good against my palms, there comes a new feeling. It is a creeping, whispering sort of feeling, as if things are sneaking out from their metal casings and their boxes, their labels unsticking to fall on the floor. It is a feeling of returning and fullness and company and spaciousness, fresh air all around.

Maybe all these parts of me that I’ve sent off bit by bit don’t need to run and run and run away and try to hold the world together.

Maybe they just need calling home.

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