starting over

endings and emptiness

source: Pinterest

Summer comes to an end and I once again find myself at the precipice, standing still in the warm breeze before everything changes.

This was a line I wrote in my journal a few weeks ago.

In May I returned to The Caravan. I had not set foot there since I was fifteen years old, since my grandmother was alive. Upon returning I saw that everything was the same. The curtains still the old seventies beige with orange patterned flowers and the velvet upholstered seats stood unchanged.

I felt out of place. I felt the gap of nine years since I had been there. Everything digital felt clunky and out of place in this place that belonged to a time before Wifi. To afternoons spent looking out the window and colouring books. To real, true boredom. And I felt strange, eating breakfast in the empty living room as an adult, when I was used to being awoken by a chorus of chatter, TV whirring, dog barking and kettle boiling.

“I have done nothing all summer but wait for myself to be myself again.”

It was Giorgia O’Keeffe who said that, but it might as well have been me. Even sitting down to write this has taken multiple attempts. I’ve been trying to find my words since Spring, because I honestly hadn’t been feeling… well, like myself. It’s taken me until now to understand that sometimes you have to see a process through to its end before you can write about it.

Although there were beautiful moments, I spent a large proportion of it coughing my lungs up and as a result being miserable. This miserableness lent itself quite well to self-reflection, although not the kind I had envisioned for my summer by the sea in The Caravan. Moving back home from Spain brought a lot of things to the surface - I didn’t realise how much I had changed until I was confronted with the cultural norms and expectations of home. I started to see quite clearly the parts of myself I had outgrown but I did not know how to change. I felt stuck in my ways, uninspired, horribly limited and blocked.

Eventually summer comes to an end, as it always does, and this was an ending of drastic proportions. In the space of 24 hours I had packed my bags, went through a breakup, left my job, and moved cities.

A week of change. People and places fall away in an instant and all that’s left is a void and silence. I ride the bus in silence and I notice everything: the sound of the branches hitting the top deck, the colour of the rain in the window, the temperature. I spend the whole day walking around this unfamiliarly familiar city taking in the overheard strands of strangers’ conversations. Everything looks the same, but I feel completely different.

It’s been a long time since I’ve been truly alone.

In Madrid, I used to awake to the sounds of shutters being pulled up on the bustling streets outside my first-floor apartment in Madrid. This summer, I awoke to the sounds of squawking and banging at 6am. A seagulls webbed feet smacking against the caravan’s tin roof as they proceed to stomp across it for twenty minutes, announcing the arrival of day.

Now I live at the intersection between a fire station and a church. I awake to sirens but I look out the window and see the sunlight illuminating church windows. Our front door has a stained glass window and when the light shines through colours dance along the hallway walls. It’s an interesting place to call home, a place suspended somewhere between this world and the next. Life and death and the after.

It’s strange how refreshing a new space can be. After months of living between spaces filled with memories of summers past, moving my things from place to place on a daily basis, I find myself in a somewhere unburdened by expectations or past versions, a place to set things down for a while, for my things to find a home. The walls are freshly painted and blank. The bed is mine and mine alone.

As any writer or artist knows a blank page can be rather daunting. It raises the question: what is worthy enough to fill it?

I have learnt that a space never stays vacant for too long, and soon new things, people and experiences rush in like water to fill the gap. The last few years have been a whirlwind, and while sometimes I cringe at the thought of sharing these parts of my life online, I’m growing increasingly grateful to have this little diary of my twenties to look back on. I’m not sure what’s next, but for now I’ll take a little time to savour the emptiness, sit on my bedroom floor and feel the morning sun on my face.