The hills we die on

Hello again, 

Often I enjoy writing in the style of Kathleen Kelly (You've Got Mail) where she starts as if the reader is in the middle of a conversation with her. The Internet has been such a wonderful place to have these kinds of distant yet intimate interactions. For instance, you are here, reading my blog and going about your business outside of this... But also we are sitting across a table from each other and talking. This is a conversation and sometimes you respond. I appreciate it immensely. But not to sound self-centred, this is also a conversation about me. 

And I remain adamant that this is the kind of conversation I want to keep having. That I need to carry on speaking to you this way because it would be a betrayal not to. There is

art and beauty in these imaginary cups of coffee and the ugly emotions that need to be discussed too. There is a place for pretty prose, the kind laced with poetry and embellished with nostalgia. There is a place for the anger and the joy. But there needs to be a place for both, or none at all. 

This is the hill I am choosing to die on. For the precious friendships I have fostered through this keyboard. Because a thread on twitter won't be enough or appropriate to express what I need to. Because there is a need that gnaws at me at night if I don't have some of these conversations.  The point is that this is what I ordain it to be. For my sanity, I must have these conversations with you.

  

For something more distant and cold, there are probably instruction manuals that would make thrilling reading. For something more structured, there are textbooks with numbered chapters and learning outcomes.  There will always be something to suit your particular need (this is the internet after all), but right now this is what I need. 

If you want to have a chat or go on a ramble through someone else's mind- there is this.  For the last seven years, it has been this mix of musing about death, marvelling at life and reflection on the journeys I am on, even when I don't know I am on a journey yet.  

Tar and feather me if I turn against this need to stay true. Because all I have is this voice. That's all we ever have. Something to say and something to stand for. When something is unpleasant to the ear, we turn the radio off or listen to something else. This is all that will play here- a loud conversation about a spectrum of emotions and occasionally a whisper of my innermost fears. You choose to listen in the same way I have chosen to let you into this messy world of mine. 

So...Would you like milk or sugar with that cup of coffee before I carry on? 

The oceans between my ribs

I used to go swimming often, around the same time mulberries would start to ripen and colour the ground beneath it. Dreaming up dragons and fanciful stories that I can’t remember. All I recall is that deep feeling of serenity that came with floating on the surface, warmed by the afternoon sun. It feels like a lifetime ago and the things that are clearer to me, feel a lot less calm.

I am waiting for hindsight to be less unforgiving, for a gracious light to be cast over things I can’t change until the details blur and the edges soften. But the way memory works is strange and cruel. It stains the way those mulberries stained your soft cotton handkerchief when you were young. You have to wring your life out, between your fists and soak it in cold water. You have to agitate it until the suds turn colour and then you try to breathe again.  A day or so in the sunshine, that’s all it takes sometimes.

I’m expecting a letter soon.

 An email, to be more precise. I wrote it on some dreary June night at some point in the last two years (I can’t remember when) but I’m expecting it to pop up in my inbox soon. It’s a thing I do, you see, I send future versions of myself emails** and pour my honest soul out when I feel conflicted and lost. When I just need to tell myself something or tell someone and not feel like I am burdening them with heavy pieces of my soul, unnecessarily.  

And in the next week, I will get the first one. From a younger version of me who was probably just reaching out and wanting to hold something that only becomes tangible much later. I can’t remember what I said. Usually, these get tangled in the memories of late night exam revision or buried beneath deeply stressful things that I bury and move on from.  I can’t even expect the softened edges or the rosy haze because it would be a voice, clear and raw. And she would have had a lot on her plate at the time. Messy circumstances and a heart that did not know itself. I have these emailed lined up for years to come. At my deepest valleys and on the peaks of my tallest mountains, they have been quickly typed and sent to a random date and forgotten about.

They are markers along a path I forgot I had taken. There are letters from the broken girl, the euphoric girl, the girl in love and the girl dipped in hate, the girl who prayed and the girl who could not remember to because she was terrified of the looming exam.

 Letters about the oceans that exist between my ribs and people who have drowned there. The oceans where I had sunk down into, trying to reason with myself and the tides that wore the jagged rocks down, eventually. The oceans where flotsam and jetsam of shipwrecked regret float. Those things tossed overboard in times of distress. 

 Letters about dying and then blooming again. Pleas to a future self to make things right again. And: I did. I made some of it right. And that was the point, wasn’t it? In writing those “I hope you love yourself deeply by the time you read this”, it was the possibility that the version of myself who read it would have those things I deeply wanted for myself at that dark moment. All the questions and hypotheticals and fears I couldn’t quite address – they are all monsters I have named now.

Whatever the letter says, I know I made some of it right, eons before I fathomed it would be possible. Conquered dragons I did not know the names of, but I know them now. I have wrung my life out until the colour ran clear.

** The service I use to send emails to myself can be found at www.futureme.org