spiritual in the city
pisces season has me levitating
Parties aren’t the same as they used to be when you were seventeen. Now you walk into the room at twenty-three and although you haven’t spoken a word, you feel you already know every single person in there. Still alive with possibility, but in a less desperate way. Although some things don’t change, you’ll still have a wine just to have something to hold. Sometimes the best part is the walk home alone. You feel held by the quiet and the moon.
Now that you’ve had a sip of sweet solitude you can’t get enough. It’s hard to think about sharing all your weekends with someone. It’s hard to imagine sharing anything with someone. You realize maybe this is the ugly remnants of being an only child. But there’s always a party waiting, more friends to meet, a whole day in your bedroom to play your favourite music and paint. You can try on a different persona everyday. It’s normal to crave things that are tangible. But know that some things ought to be fleeting and just leaving trails of yourself behind, in an art gallery ticket or a link to a song, won’t make things last longer than they reasonably should. You feel a multitude of things every day but the most prevailing is that nothing will ever be the same again.
This month I’ve cried more than usual. The past floats up like bubbles, bursting at the top when they meet air. The urge to infiltrate other worlds prevails, both through ingesting liquid poison and other kinds of madness. The longing to fall into the arms of someone you shouldn’t prevails a little stronger, too. Less and less through reading. Transcendence is easiest and quickest to reach on the dancefloor but the consequences much more unpredictable than other pursuits, like writing and, unfortunately, exercise.
When Maggie said I see horses and I know there’s a way and when Florence said and for a moment, when I'm dancing, I am free and when Lana said I’m not bored or unhappy I’m still so strange and wild.
I’ve been thinking more than usual about gates, doorways, and portals. Points of passage. Entryways from one world to the next. When I was a child, they were all around. All I had to do was climb the steps from one field to another, or to the top of the rocks on the beach, where earth and sky meet. Now I’m on the lookout, like a detective. In my hunt for portals, I see my bedroom window, where I can see the blue blue sky. The sky from my bed. The sky in my bed. The metro doorway, people moving in and out of view, framed for a moment by my world. A painting, in which there is a mirror, reflecting back the world of the painting, reflecting back the world, reflecting. There is a definite danger in looking at things only as they are, or as they seem to be. More and More I realize that the longer you look at things, the more they shapeshift. And somewhere in between the cyclical ebbs and flows of work each week, more and more of these moments offer themselves up to me. Moments of clarity feel like glitter, everywhere and difficult to get rid of, once you pay attention.
I’m called toward the messiness of womanhood. Being a woman used to mean a constant. I’ve become more and more suspicious of anything which aims to keep me contained and less and less sure were the boundary lines fall. It’s within us to be in a state of overflow. We bleed red red blood. We create life in our bodies. I grow out my armpit hair (not for the first time) it makes me feel sexy (for the first time). Womanhood for the first time not through the eyes of a man but through myself. Visions reach me of the woman I want to be. She’s inside, incubating, waiting to take her first breath. There is peace in cultivating her - in the recognition that you are the only one who can take power over your life. As you get older womanhood begins to feel like an expansive, spacious thing, like something with legs that can run.
I’ve been writing poetry again and it feels a little bit like praying, which I haven’t done in a long time. How else to reach those places that feel so unreachable yet so essential? Who am I speaking to, when I place words on a page? It feels like speaking to something. Kind of like dreaming, you start and don’t know the way things will go, but truths are always revealed. And I think maybe there are secrets so innate to the world that can only be revealed by language.
In the school where I work, Lost Things are stuck to the reception window pane - a ring, a metro pass, an earring. They float, mid-air and on display, like entities all of their own. And like lost things hanging right in front of you - you realize the answers are uncomplicated. Fresh fruit and veg. A walk and the feeling of fresh air on skin. The release of laughter with those you love. Going home early sometimes.
I think a lot about what Arundhati Roy says, the writer I studied in my final year of university: “Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.” I think I can hear her too. More than that I can see her and feel her. Like a buzzing, a warmth leaking into everything, through the cracks. In an inevitable togetherness that they can’t stop.
This past month came in a series of observations. As someone who grew up religious, I often find myself gravitating towards experiences and feelings that mirror that sense of connection and ritual. This seems to sit in paradox to life in a big cosmopolitan city. But I’ve found that sense of spirituality to be more durable than expected, showing up in the strangest of places, like on a dancefloor, or in the faces of strangers on a busy metro carriage.
monthly mixtape
Almost as much as the writing itself, I’ve been loving putting together monthly playlists for each theme. This one features all kinds of floaty, dreamscapey tunes perfect for solo walks home at night and man-made dancefloors. Here it is.
kisses & until next time —
B x