weaving garlands from small moments

“Welcome to the Blue House Ruby! January 3rd 2022” falls out from the insides of a notebook as I unpack in my new studio.

The Blue House was blue on the outside, with a blue door, and a blue plastic bathroom with green flowers. We lived opposite a red church, who had four clock faces, but the one visible from our yellow sofa had no hands. For eleven months, the bells of the church rang and I never worked out their routine. I could say it was at 10am, 11am, 12pm and then 5pm, 6pm, 7pm but that would be logic speaking and not my knowledge. It had a secret routine. One time it rang at 6am for 5 long minutes. When we left for good, funeral bells walked alongside us. Sometimes, they would play us a bell concert. One time it was a song from the Amelie soundtrack, which was also the day our landlord kicked us out.

For the first few months, I woke up late, ate mackerel on toast, and in the waning afternoon would find myself at the charity shop inhabiting the old house under the motorway. I would carry back wicker baskets that would definitely come in handy (or so my Mother would tell me in my head), chipped porcelain plates with blue flowers, a light for the kitchen that never worked because they don’t make the type of bulb anymore. I sew, but everything I make is unwearable and the mess it makes feels like home.

Returning to oily kitchen counters – I’d look out our window to the mountain. Just when I would start getting hungry for dinner, the light would flatten the sky and the mountain would look like a postcard. We would never climb this mountain, but we would watch the cable car climb up it every day, and say that we should go up the mountain. At night, the cable car stops half way up the mountain. It looks dark, and I wonder if anyone is in that forest right now, looking out at our kitchen window.

Our neighbours come and go and we don’t see them. Their footsteps are more predictable than the church bells, but less comforting. At night when I can’t sleep, I sew in my head, drawing up patterns and trying to understand how paper translates to linen.

We would steal away to the sea to check it was still there. Candles melted as the mountain showed its cracks. The moon, the star, the sun on the kitchen table. Rituals upon rituals. There was mold growing on our bedroom wall and condensation drops onto our bed from the window. Raining. As is outside, so is inside. I missed the mold when our landlord painted over it in April.

The mold was our friend, tracing our escape plan across the bedroom wall, strategizing. It knew when we would outgrow our house. It was persistent, even more so after the paint. The landlord came to build a wall on top of the molding wall but kept this plan secret. It is hard to disguise building a wall.

The new wall preserves the old wall - archiving the damp, giving it a chance to finalise its plans, sheltering it from chlorine and paint. Someone else will live there soon, and they won’t know about the old wall. I wonder how many walls will be built until the bedroom swallows itself.

I took part in a writing course last month, at the CCA Londonderry. We read bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Virginia Woolf, Holly Pester, Annie Ernaux, Anne Boyer. I thought about life writing, and the material and fabric that surrounds me – of homes and places, and what goes on my skin, under my skin, around my skin. Word and flesh are hard to keep discreet. During these three online classes, my glitching voice was broadcast from three places. The Blue House with its old wall, my teenage-bedroom-now-Mum’s-work-from-home-office in Glasgow, and the new-wall Blue House, now no longer ours - a suddenly strange holding place before the New House, where we bumped against walls and each other, feeling cumbersome and misplaced.

I sit amongst the archive shelves of my selves. In this teenage bedroom lies evidence of milestones, brief fascinations, love-letters that meant everything and nothing, and I was the unreliable narrator who couldn’t work out a sensible chronology that led to this point now. In here, when I’m here, I hold a conference with all my former selves who peer out from their transparent boxes with flickering narrations.  

Right now, 26-year-old me is living in boxes too and the New House – also blue but not the Blue House – does not yet feel like a home. It has all the contours and promises of home. We can still see the mountain, the sides of it more than the summit but that feels grounding.

The Blue House had its own ecosystem. We got pulled into it. We were part of the condensation; we clung to the walls, the seasons changed around us, the mountain made its forecast. If you can’t see the top of the mountain, stay home. Clear sky, the outside awaits you.

I downloaded the most accurate Norwegian weather app on my phone when we moved to the New House last week. It is -4 but feels like -8, there is a chance of snow tonight, tomorrow is going to warmer than today. I can’t sleep in our new bed yet. People peer into our kitchen and I peer back at them, asking ‘does the kitchen table look weird here?’

Lauren Berlant, through the speakers over the spluttering of morning eggs, warns of the narcissistic tendency of life-writing. I consider if making my diary public like this is Sheer Egoism (George Orwell by way of Deborah Levy), or narcissism, or quite cathartic or really just very Leo of me. Is it a strategy of survival?

I’m not sure how to write. I’m learning to write as a means to track the everyday, to fathom what I can’t understand, to weave garlands from small moments. To conjure back a dream, to cast a spell. To be the unreliable narrator of my own life, because someone has to be. I’m learning to write in a way that does not pose a grand thesis, that loiters instead of hustles, that leaves threads untrimmed.

Secret routines. An archive of selves. A fragment (to consider revising).

I don’t write to get closer to the point, to deeper understand, to be correct, to know. I’m just fleshing out what’s around me, translating materials onto paper, trying to inaccurately map the coordinates of changing mountaintops. Trying to feel out the contours of the text and the house. To nestle somewhere, like the mold between the walls, like the cable car at night, like the slippers I carry from home to the studio and back, while the fabric of living shifts and points of reference mutate themselves.

I sent my dad a photo of 6 jets flying in formation over the Blue House as I checked up on it on my way home to the New House. I wrote next to the photo, ‘invasion!’ He replied, ‘they are protectors’ in his usual dramatic humor.