All the World Loves Lovers...

Sun's out; the wind is fresh. A near perfect day for this time of year. A near perfect time for a cold-blooded examination of love. It's been a while since I teased out its feathers as I dip my toes in the icy river.

     
From time to time I do wonder about falling in love again - the Big-ee, a romantic dream fulfilled, end of story, credits gliding down the screen. But I've been wondering for some time, 'is that really my story?' I've had the violins, the orchestras teetering at the edge of the mountain, that sunset to end all sunsets. Sometimes nowadays I just feel like I've got better things to be getting on with.

    
Plus, there's always after the violins. That morning when we wake to a turned back on a greying sheet, rain streaming the windows. When we realise the bird has flown. When the postman leaves the side door open and wind rattles through the house. It is colder than we've ever known before. And that cold seeps into our bones and leaves us shaking.

     
It's happened to us all. It's the point when you leave or you learn what it really means to love. I guess.

I've had the best and the worst. Maybe lived it all too soon. Now the tape reel winds round again and I'm left wondering: Can I really fool myself into believing in true love? Isn't it like pretending the chopper of death isn't really coming? Can I really do monogamy again? Can I even be bothered with the story when I already know the ending? It'll end in tears as my Mum would say.

     
But none of this makes me unhappy. It may all sound dark and gloomy but in truth, right now, my heart is shooting up with the green buds and leaping about with the floppy-eared bunnies. The sounds of spring are all around me, and they're like music. But I still wonder about these things. Hey, I'd have to be blind as a mole to not.

     
All the lovers of the world cry 'We are different!' No you're not. You're just not there yet. At that point of truth where you test whether that love is enough or not. Nine times out of ten, it isn't, it can't be. It takes a lot to love. And not just willpower and an earnest heart. It takes a special something extra that can't be manufactured, cultivated. It's there or it ain't. I've had it. And I'm not sure I want it again.

Devil's Dyke

It’s the first heat of the year, all orange on my shoulders, glowing in my cheeks. Grass is soft under my hands; the hill is cows and lambs chewing on their mother's soft underbelly. We pass ponies, bumble bees, a shrew in the undergrowth. Skylarks. Kites bent high in turquoise. My back is hot, my face whipped cool by spring wind. I can see my breath.

     
It's majestic up on the hill, the yellow flowers of gorse bushes drawing blood on my finger. Then a pub with babies on strings, dogs with big fur, yapping; men guzzling plastic pints of ale. I nibble on oatcakes, basil leaves and sometimes fingers. The land arches like a back, folds like a handful of secrets.

     
Then I am walking back, lost, wondering whether to worry that I am lost. The moon is up on my left side. As long as it's on our left, we'll find our way home. But we're turning this way, that way... left, right, all about. I look up to my left and there it is... a snowy apparition in all that sunshine.

We pass horses galloping, erratic, tossing their riders. We pass the pylon and the path that disappears into nowhere. We pass the side of the hill that looks like skin. I want to stick out my finger and touch it, taste it under my tongue, bite it.

     
A six o' clock chill creeps under my jacket. Then we're back to bricks and tarmac and some man jogging. Gardens with fountains spitting tiny jets of water. A door slashed with Happy Birthday in a gold plastic streamer, five children inside, sitting in the shadows. I stand, feet flat on the pavement, the sun once again blinding me.

     
It's the end of Sunday afternoon. I ride the packed bus the rest of the way home, sore muscles and something soft under all these bones. It radiates out from my clothes, this softness; it nuzzles up to other passengers. Of course, they never notice. I walk up a cold street. Push open the door. Slip into a warm pub full of people. Order coffee. Sit down; lift the mug to my teeth. Hot liquid hits my throat, sliding warmth down my chest. I feel it here in my belly.

Thursday evening

I've been grateful, of late, to notice small slivers of daylight still hanging in the air as I walk up Church Road, even though the clock has already struck five thirty. These tiny shards of optimism, breaking through the winter chill, warm me, and offset the heavy feeling I've had of late, the feeling of dark birds clustering at every street corner, following me home.

I can't quite separate out these last months into any tangible order; they've been a peculiar mixture of sadness, hope and bewilderment. These last few weeks have been no different, and I'm driven by the feeling that some things in my life are finally coming together, whilst the rest of it unravels.

After a drought of money and work for the last year or so, a couple of weeks ago, I suddenly found myself standing in an avalanche of decorating work and some writing work too. I could finally allow my dreams of a trip to Andalucia to surface again, as well as my vision of spending money on a new pair of jeans, a pair that I actually like (and isn't from some knock-down store or passed onto me by a charitable sister: wrong size, full of holes).

But I've not quite been right since that last trip home to Wales in January. The strain and enormity of my experience there cast a strange shadow over everything when I returned to Brighton, leaving me disorientated on buses, forgetting where I was headed to, my head spinning in all directions as I walked past cafes or spoke on the phone. A flooding in my heart, a weirdness afterwards, a feeling that my consciousness was leaving me in some way.

I realised the other day that this wasn't simply a case of me being a bit overwhelmed, but actually something very physical was up. For the last four months this strange feeling in my chest and my mind, a swamping of my senses and a disturbing feeling in my body has been coming and going, depending on the time of the month and how tired I am. Due to everything else that's been going on, I'd just seen it as another wave in the sea of unsettling experience, and got on with it. But over the last few days it's worsened, and I've had to face some facts.

So, following a conversation with my sister, who is utterly convinced that I'm epileptic, since my symptoms match hers exactly (she is epileptic) I've been back to the doctor for referrals to a neurologist and cardiologist. I wouldn't surprise me if it was epilepsy either, but it also wouldn't be a shock if it was just another form of panic attacks, frequent and savage.

The bottom line is, I have to take it easy, easy within a sudden life change of being incredibly busy. How ironic. At a time when I need to avoid computer screens and caffeine, I find myself having to spend days writing book reviews. When I need to rest and avoid stress, I'm wobbling up a ladder working to deadline, with strong paint fumes swilling in my brain. But I'm determined to go softly. Whatever it is that's going on with me, that much I know.

So I'm off to curl up in bed with a book, feel the night dragging in the sky outside my bedroom window. I'm not bothered if there aren't any stars out tonight. I just want a clear, fresh morning tomorrow, light and breezy, filling up my step and my lungs with graceful ease.

New York Dreaming

Today I have been reading John Keats, and I am choked up with feeling.
I haven't read his poetry for years, but now a soft backed book of his words lies by the side of my couch, or sometimes up on the bed, or crammed inside an ancient plastic bag ready for work; a thing of awe in itself, even to look at, even just to know the worlds that reside within its tender pages. I am lost to his beauty, and crumpled by its glorious weight.

At the same time, I feel air borne. The night welcomes me in and takes my shoes off. I'm wrapped in a blanket, little and small, my feet, two brown birds perched at the edge of my computer desk. It's cold in here, I forgot to turn the storage heating on again, and so my hands search out warmth within each other, holding to one another briefly between each sentence I type.

I keep forgetting it is now spring, and I'm strangely mourning the loss of winter, which is often my happiest time, because then that I can feel free from the anticipation of having anything particular to look forward to, and can just enjoy the solitude, the quiet intense opening that slips by without almost anyone noticing.

Winter is for pleasure behind closed doors, soft insides, long woollen scarves and hugging your knees. It is for introverts such as myself, it is the excuse we long for to just shut the door and send the troops of life away.

But the daffodils are making me smile. From the bus yesterday I watched an entire family stealing huge clumpfuls of them from the gardens just up Lewes Road. They then proceeded to hand them out randomly to passers by, and to a perplexed looking woman standing at the bus stop, before marching up the road, a trail of yellow heads behind them.

Daffodils are cheap to buy and light up a room like the first of May. Unfortunately, tonight mine hang wilted in the vase on my living room table, their sad heads crowded together in some secret act of mourning. I should throw them out, welcome in freshness with a new ripe bunch bursting with life. But I feel attached to my dead ones, to my old ones, they are poignant and somehow regal, sad and they look like they are whispering about things I can never know about, in the hush of this room, when I have gone to bed.

It's eight days until I leave for New York. I'm feeling unprepared, and I like it. I like the fact as well that I simply can't imagine how it will be. It doesn't feel real somehow, like I am about to somehow slip behind the screen at the cinema, and find myself in some Woody Allen film, being neurotic and gesturing wildly, or else becoming a line from a Velvet Underground song, trying to score smack with Lou Reed up Lexington 125.

I've so many images in my head. I've been reared on New York mythology, and so my quest is to ride the Staten Island ferry, find myself in a bookshop entirely devoted to murder mysteries, and to stay at the Chelsea Hotel. I throw that last mission in casually, as if it were some passing desire. But the truth is, the Chelsea Hotel has resided in my mind for too many decades to not feel an incalculable pull of excitement when I think of it. Probably every artist I admire had stayed there at some point; it's been alluded to in so many songs.

And so for me "staying up for days in The Chelsea Hotel writing "Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands" for you.." has become legend in my mind. Jack Kerouac wrote "On The Road" onto a twenty foot roll of paper whilst staying there, "Naked Lunch" was completed there, Andy Warhol and all his motley crew used it as a base and made a film of it, Dylan Thomas staggered about there, and Sid Vicious stabbed Nancy Spungen to death in one of its bedrooms.

If I can't afford to stay there, I shall pace the streets outside, pressing my nose to the glass beseechingly: me a writer, a songwriter, a lover of music and words - a girl from England staring into the place that has housed all her greatest aspirations, all her wickedest and most sublime passions.

And this feels like the greatest thing to do - to travel across the world to not only meet the place I have dreamed of visiting for so long, but to meet a fellow writer, whom I have never met before; except in the dream time of words, through consonants and syllables, vowels and question marks, and the occasional voice on the end of a very far away phone.

I feel grandiose, silly perhaps, but I don't care. I'm doing this for me, and I'm doing this out of kinship with another writer, and to become a better one. I'm doing it for the love of the narrative that goes like this: two people travel thousands of miles between them, to meet in a far away city, to see the lights, to drink coffee, and because somewhere there is some understanding between them, the exact nature of which as of yet is still unseen; and to live, for even only a few moments, without big reasons, but just take up a pen and let a story unfold.

Little reasons, they cut through living with a more touching beauty, they leave a fragile trail of consequence, like tiny spots from a poet's cut, like stolen daffodils from a roadside park.



" I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel,
You were talking so brave and so sweet.
Giving me head on the unmade bed
While the limousines wait in the street.
And those were the reasons, and that was New York,
We were running for the money and the flesh,
And that was called love for the workers in song,
Probably still is for those of them left.
But you got away, didn't you babe,
You just turned your back on the crowd.
You got away, I never once heard you say
"I need you, I don't need you,
I need you, I don't need you"
And all of that jiving around.

I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel,
You were famous, your heart was a legend.
You told me again, you preferred handsome men,
But for me you would make an exception.
And clenching your fist for the ones like us
Who are oppressed by the figures of beauty
You fixed yourself, you said "well never mind,
We are ugly, but we have the music".
And then you got away, didn't you babe,
You just turned your back on the crowd.
You got away, I never once heard you say
"I need you, I don't need you,
I need you, I don't need you",
And all of that jiving around

Now I don't mean to suggest that I loved you the best,
I can't keep track of each fallen robin.
I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel,
That's all, I don't think of you that often."


Leonard Cohen 1971 for Janis Joplin.