Tag: queer

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Times and Places

I won’t give everything away

Winter began.  The house becomes warmer and brighter; it’s looking for the sun.  I dreamed of a tree house, the beech heights, being neighbours with the crows, waking to the sound of leaves and branches.  I dreamed of a tree house, but the only person I ever knew who had one burned it down as a joke.  I wish I could push my bed to the window, enjoy the morning sounds, as though I’m waking outdoors almost.

There’s a tiny graveyard down by the river.  Every time my life changes, I find myself there.  Old and new stones, the sound of the park in the distance, ice-cream van and a eulogy, perfect.

Sometimes, I hold the hand of the city much too tightly, but then it is a very pretty town.  Already, there are shapes and patterns emerging.  They remind me of things, more dreams.  Dream of the town; I remember how huge it seems in dreams like those, flooded streets navigated by slender barges, like the world ended but we forgot to be afraid.  There are deep mazes of streets in the dream town, and if you open a door in the basement, it will take you to a deeper place, down into the vaults.

There are pathways through our memories.  Here’s the place that we used to cross the road, grey underpass, fluorescent lights.  Everyone always talks about the fish tank, but I liked the dome overhead, with a slice of sky dead centre.

There’s a bright bar – in the waking world – a place that I knew the second I walked in for the first time.  A little home, a treehouse in the city.  In a dream, I might open a door in my silent house and find myself there.  In dreams, the doors (the ones that aren’t there when we’re awake) connect to unexpected places, because that’s what we are looking for, the doorway into electric light summer on a December night when too much has happened to begin to think of.  

Over there, that’s where they used to hold raves after midnight.  Over there, that’s where the bomb killed so many in the Blitz, sheltering in the cellars; they say that you could smell the flowers laid in tribute for years, long after the days of hotel dances, long after the motorways and the towers, so that the heartbreak and silence of that 1940s morning seem like a story told in class.  Over here, that’s where I sat happily watching the night for the first time in years.  And over there, that’s where we will be, all of us.

I’m really tired.  The year has taken a lot; it is in the process of giving me a lot back in return.  That bright treehouse is something it gave me.  I spent the last week alone, except of course I didn’t.  There were so many people reaching out, acts of generosity, of creativity, of absolute life.  I know that I can ask for anything – I may not receive it, but I can ask, and do you know how important and rare that is, for me, for anyone?

That’s where the summer was.  It will be there again, sooner than you think.  I remember how sometimes, the cars just seem to stop and we walk in the road, as things make way for us.  

Voices, raising in the night, words fly, a language that I know.  Sometimes I can’t sleep for the anticipation of it.  The city of deep vaults, of flooded streets and scarlet sunrises, the place where there’s a haunted house down the road, and a path to the secret sea – that dream city is coming towards us now.  I can see the lights of it at night.  Hold my hand, waking or sleeping, doesn’t matter.  If I hold the hand of the city too tightly, it’s not to hold it back or in fear – it’s out of excitement at where it’s taking me tonight, taking all of us.

It is very nearly Christmas, and I love you all.

Categories
Built Things Times and Places

Here

This is the street where it all happened.  Nothing tragic, no more so than anyone else.  This is the place.  I remember it all, every day it seems, I keep telling myself that .  We all have places like that, a street that you visit every day for a year, somewhere that matters.  Then, when a lot of time has passed, you come back to it, but it isn’t the same any more and you start to wonder if you aren’t remembering it properly.  Or has it changed?  Thinking about how that tree got cut back or how they’ve repainted the gate whilst you weren’t there and it feels like a small betrayal.  

Here.  These are our places, but they aren’t ours for long.  I wrote the above paragraph about 12 years ago, processing a huge thing that was very much happening to me, the echoes of which continued for years.  And I dealt with it (and it wasn’t really that huge, not compared to what some people deal with) by choosing my places carefully, new ones that I chose to be in, letting go of old ones.

Here’s another space.  Some random liminal retail park, but once, it was something else.  Once, I stood on this spot, right here, with a woman with very very red hair, and we drank really bitter awful coffee and smoked bitter awful cigarettes and perhaps she liked me and perhaps I liked her, but I really don’t know and it was several lifetimes ago.  I don’t remember my own face then, I don’t remember hers.  And there’s no trace left of either of us, and the place we used to sit and watch the dawn burning the frost away, that’s lost too.  

And I’m really happy about that.  I don’t want old places.  I want the new ones, the ones I’ve chosen.  Ice on the wind, and redblack mornings, oh, I remember the bitter and when I’m feeling tired I miss them, but I chose older and newer places for myself in the end.

Remember this street in that summer, not so long ago.  If it was years and years ago, things change enough to make it bearable, but not when it’s only two years gone.  Not far enough away.  A hot summer day.  Now it’s winter, fading into January and you didn’t spend Christmas here.  Fog in the air and the amber lights shining on, lonely, trying to pretend to be the summer sun.

And it was after writing these words that I found Here, an old, old place.  Fields and woods, looking down over a valley.  Old graves, hidden stones, water breaks the land apart.  The wind screams sometimes, speaks to the skin like a knife, teaches the joy of magpies.  Suddenly, that old world of amber lights was just a dream.  Here is where I’ve always been, Here is where I always will be.  In the places that I choose, that weren’t just arrived at.  Queer, expressing my love without expectation of response, or need to have it returned.  Freedom for the heart that’s been hidden, and kissing anyone who likes to kiss me.  In this place.  Here.

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Times and Places Uncategorized

Rain expected 8PM Sheffield

For a bunch of witches

…so normal and everyday, just a piece of the world that’s always happening, a mundane magic that calls through me like the song of a wineglass, and the roads shine in the last of the sun, and it’ll be full of an enchantment too big for any one heart to hold alone.  So hold hands with me, my loves, and we’ll go walking, shiny second skins reflecting the stars as they come out one by one.

And then there’s the other side of it, the dragging silence of late Sunday.  Full of school ghosts. It’s full of longing, if we’re fortunate, and regret if we are not.  This is what it costs – the Sunday night trains that haunt me, the empty last bus, the traffic lights that change themselves over and over, remembering the crowds.

Do you know what it is to be yourself, to wear yourself in all your colours?  How precious that is?  Oh you do, you do, and you know it well, and it was dearly bought with pain and starlight. And still, it’s such a simple beautiful secret, so simple and so radiant that I want to rush up to each and every high street stranger, to see what light’s in them, to ask with a desperation that borders on mania, is this you?  Look at us, look at this, you can shine, please, if what’s in you is the need to shine, then be radiant, because Sunday night is always coming and the best of times are just little splinters, tiny and bright sharp things, that get swept away before you even feel the scratch.

 I want to put all the shards together again and build something new, something that holds the light

The absolute perfect silence of a Sunday morning and the cold that accompanies it, right through to the bones.  The light that diffuses through strange clouds, taking forms of things never seen.  This city becomes alien, but perhaps we start to reflect a little of that ourselves, maybe that fractured sunrise reflects in our eyes.  Oh, and it’s a hard road back from the shores of night, we all know that, and it’s a steep harsh climb back to the oppressions of Sunday late dark; the empty house, the unmade silent bed, and more wineglasses than you’ll need till next time.  But once I’d come to the beach and looked at the ocean, I never doubted the worth of throwing my heart into it.