Autumn

A little note from me:

I know it’s been a few months since you’ve had an Airhead in your inboxes. I was taking some much-needed time to replenish my creative stores and just have a rest after a very taxing year.

I’m not ‘back’ now and better than ever as I may once have promised. Instead, this newsletter is going to sloooow the f*ck down, to replicate yours truly. It’s always been something I loved and have really wanted to prioritise, so in honour of that you’ll be receiving Airhead monthly-ish. I hope that’s okay – for me, being sustainable means being slow, and gentle and considered.

You’ll still get poems here and there, but I’ve now added into a separate section so you can untick notifications to that bit in settings (click ‘manage your subscription’) if poems aren’t your thing!

The only thing that’s changing subscriptions-wise is that the Airhead archive is now paywalled, so after a month articles will no longer be visible to free subscribers.

Thank you for being here. If you have any feedback / thoughts, please reply to this email. Lots of Airhead love <3,

Millie x

In September, I visited Paris.

I feel such a pull to the city – one day I’d like to live there. Our long weekend was slow, taking in the romance of Paris while pretending to be Parisians ourselves. We spoke French as often as we could, and ate as many pains au chocolat as there were Paris mornings, crushing the buttery pastry to our mouths and closing our eyes in pastry-fuelled bliss.

A trip to the Musée Rodin brought us face-to-face with Le Baiser, where we intruded on an intimate moment. Moving just slightly around this statue changes its meaning completely – part of Rodin’s skill!

From the balcony at the Musée d'Orsay, we ignored the art and watched the people as they milled about beneath the glass roof of a building that was once a train station. Under the watchful gaze of Le Penseur, we talked about life.

Taking a boat ride down the Seine, cruising beneath bridges, I thought about Paris, and I thought about London, and I thought about Bath and Wales and the Highlands and everywhere else I’d visited and then wanted to live. I wondered how you know a place is where you’re supposed to be.

In October, I started a full-time job.

Suddenly, it was remembering people’s names, learning a new way of doing things and replacing the stretching possibility of my freelance weeks with the regular heartbeat of a 9 to 5.

I finished Chocolat by Joanne Harris, a cosy, witchy must-read given to me by my sister last Christmas (I have a very long TBR).

In John Lewis and IKEA and Dunelm and on Pinterest I shopped for furniture for a new home I didn’t yet have, imagining a blurry future life where I moved away to make a home of my own.

This bird doesn’t want to fly the nest. She’s safe where she has always been.

As an eldest child, I’m used to being first, so I knew the day would come.

Yet the more I contemplated moving, the better home appeared. Stay, the house tells me, so I answer. I’ve become an introverted creature, much more likely to remain inside than venture past the gates to a world that now feels harsh and scary.

Three days a week I live the whirlwind of city life, dressed in my Zone 1 outfits and I walk through London as if I own the world. Later I deflate, run out of steam, and recover back home, within four safe walls and a boundary of autumn-kissed trees, vibrant in their reds, oranges and golds.

There’s a rom-com series I race through – in October, everybody’s talking about it, but they’ve all moved on by the time November begins.

Their love story is charming, the main character a rare rom-com figure who is messy without caving to the stereotype of the frazzled woman who needs rescuing from herself. For once, the male lead is more than two-dimensional.

But the gestures of love and romance register to me as if they are speaking a different language on my screen.

Feet halfway between worlds, one side the blank, unwritten pages of my adulthood – new pains and new joys await me, and I am terrified of both – and on the other side a safe, comfortable life and child-self who resists the pull of change.

I’m on Waterloo Bridge. A poet once wrote about falling in love here, she one of the thousands who cross from side to side each day. It’s an ugly, simple bridge, but on that evening the natural world was the thing to be marvelled at. I felt insignificant in the presence of a sunset – something beyond myself, beyond the buildings. Romantics called it the sublime.

Each side bathed in the last glow of the evening sun before it slid behind rows of concrete towers. The City is cast into darkness; light falls on St Paul’s, my favourite building in the capital. I like to imagine it looking out over the changing faces of London throughout the years.

Now the clocks have changed and my body reacts blearily to the day. It’s dark when I disappear into the tube at 5pm and begin my daily pilgrimage home. I’m reading a novel about a housewife in Rome, who writes in a notebook, each sentence a slow awakening to her dissatisfaction with her domestic and social entrapment. I forget where I am when reading it.

In my gentle, ordinary life I am content. Finally, after a year of on-and-off pressing unhappiness, I can breathe again. I am happy, dare I write the words.

Tiredness and a new way of doing things pulls me down and I stretch myself – like pizza dough.

The stretching brings new necessities. I say no to things, feeling flashes of guilt, but remembering that self care isn’t just a face mask gives me the courage I lack.

I bake, and the middle is gooey and undercooked, so I present my creation to my father like so:

Outside my window, things stay crisp and dry. The urge to buy and buy and buy keeps hitting me, while I look at my possessions and feel horrified by the quantity of stuff that I seem to have accumulated without realising.

I put my clothes up for sale, shedding ill-fitting items. I don’t judge myself for not being able to fit into things.

By the time the temperature drops and the harsh sting of winter arrives, I am an off-season flower, slowly opening up to the world again.

Hibernation time is over; next I shall build.

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