Familiarity

Things I know.

A man handed me the wrong coffee this morning and I am convinced he can see through me. In reality he is just a man - a person who has made my coffee, a person who is making coffee for people at 7 in the morning, moving fast between coffee bean grinders and espresso shots - but I am one of these people at 7 in the morning, teetering between someone who has woken up happy and someone who has woken up blue and someone who is still getting over last night’s dreams. I live in the triangle between these people, trying not to be so angry at such a small thing before teaching squeaky clarinet and saxophone students whilst slightly out of breath from the 20 minute walk up the hill.

Why can’t I write of apple-blossom faces, of valentines and bedsteads, kitchen fires? Because there is too much wrong with the world, and the old ways are not the way out, Patricia Highsmith writes in her notebook in August 1942. I am reading a collection of her diaries and notebooks, The New York Years, which called out to me in a bookshop around the corner from my old flat in Dalston. Hey, New Yorker! it yelled. If this is her 1941 to 1950, what will be your 2041 to 2050? In truth I have been reading it for almost a year but have enjoyed the process of flicking through a few days of her life every few weeks, wondering how Patricia has progressed as I have, seeing the shifts in myself as gradual, sometimes not apparent at all, sometimes feeling so out of reach, especially on days like today.

Much of my being has been in the ‘wrong’, focusing on all that goes wrong even in the going ‘right’. It is easy to, with the world being and feeling the way it is, a level of helplessness and panic entangled with the motion of constantly going - down the road, up the stairs, on this and that tube and out again; running to go somewhere, to be something, running rather than sitting in the moment. It is not that my words are dry but tired, falling at rest, waiting to come alive again. Pockets of them have fallen dormant, craving to sleep like the rest of my being within the old chill that has come back into the air, lingering over the mug of coffee I have just poured, have just poured into its vessel and drank too hot before running back out the door again. They are waiting for me to come back, to settle down from my movements, to return.

It is hard for me to see the necessity of this recuperation, even with the glowing aches and pains both literal and imaginary, running through my being. The mysterious pain in my foot that cramps erratically before fading away, the dry ache behind my eyes after many days of wearing contacts, the cloud that arrives at my feet each night, sweeping me from gig to bed, desk to bed, pub to bed, melting into the duvet in an instant all are trying to tell me something.

I am getting older, I have discovered. Not just by way of the grey hairs that have moved from a state of a poking up as teeny tiny sticks to being present, sparkling proudly through the strands of my black-brown hair, but this tiredness that lives on a bit longer, tired, that word that I always come back to. I’m tired, said after a long day, marking the work that has been done. I’m tired, whispered as soon as I rise from my bed, a sign of poor sleep. I’m tired, groaned at 2pm, the peak of the mid-day slump. ‘I’m tired’ living through the whole day is easy, a default filler word, comfortable within the spaces of ‘like’ and ‘um’, I’’m tired because I have been busy’ becoming a phrase that I clutch to when talking about how I am, which is true, I have been x because of y, but I can only hear it so many times leave my mouth before I need to take a look elsewhere.

But it is the time of year again where I look to the sky, actually, as if to seek out my own fortune. Will you turn blue, will my mood then instantly improve? I fall in sync with the weather, becoming reclusive in the short span of hours where the wind roars through the shoulder blades of my jacket, hurling me down the street, towards my house, the world begging me to put my key in the door and peel off my layers, to wash my hands with good smelling soap and start unloading my bag, to grip the butternut squash in my hand, to feel around the countertop for a cutting board, a peeler, bags of spices to dip weighted teaspoons into and listen out for grainy, seeded streams fall into the rhythm of the pestle and mortar. I come back to something I know, cooking something slow and easy but deliciously warm, both in flavour and temperature, softening the chill that once covered me, that will take me back to that bit of sunshine, to the puffs of blue sky we had and will have eventually.

In times like these, full of my fictitious and ever-present aches and pains, I once again become familiar with the person sitting across from me. What she likes becomes more interesting to me: what leg she will cross under her to sit taller on her chair, or at least a little more still. I know she will want the deep blue mug at the back of the cabinet for her first coffee of the day, that she will notice how stiff the coffee bean grinder is feeling today, that she will tilt her head towards the left and a loud click will emerge from a pocket of air in her neck. Seeing her in front of me reminds me of all the cycles that I live in, this particular one rampant and fast towards the eventual slowness ahead; ‘I am tired because I have been busy’ being so repetitive that it wears itself out, my tiredness in the world, my need to re-invent or at least take a step back, to what I know, to what knows me.

Maybe it is because I am a musician that I know these cycles well; slow periods at the beginning of the year leading to the middle months picking up swiftly, Christmases either hectic or silent, usually some haphazard combination of the two. My attunement to my own cycles has been skewed slightly, with the newfound freedom of being able to stay here has been just that, a rebirth of all the things I do, every stop of the organ pulled out and shoved back in: ready, set, go! You can go! I am making up for lost time, discovering the freedom of doing this whatever it is without waiting for a scary email from the Home Office and I feel I must go in all the directions at once, losing the familiarity along the way of stretching myself through the taffy machine.

But it comes back; because it always comes back. It is part of me, the familiar, the knowing, the maps I carry in my head of my paths, artistic and literal. I once wrote about my life according to the tube map from a broken down bus in Stratford bus station, thinking of all the stops and branches that meant something to me, to my own understanding of London. I have lost my way slightly to enjoy those paths, I realise, whilst cycling to the sauna on an early Thursday morning morning and seeing the expanses of the Walthamstow Wetlands emerging from the narrow cycle path. Slowly, these become part of the knowledge I once wished to accrue all at once.

My body comes back to being familiar and loads new data into my understanding of place, my place, downloading the coordinates of my steps to take in where I will have my clarinet lesson and unlocks to my a whole self of knowing what this feels like, the preparation in the travel to the lesson, how to feel, how to tuck myself into a window sat on the train afterward and write it all down, what happened, what didn’t, with a space to abandon it if I want too. I seem to forget the words that live in the pages before and the ones that come in bursts, when I order a coffee, when I tell a story to my housemates, when I write down ideas or add to stories that have already been written, yes! It all makes sense even just for the moment itself before I go back to work or teaching or folding my laundry, adding to the parcels of knowledge that constitute a self, collecting and experimenting as I go until things remain, sticking into place, finding a way of belonging.

It is the first of April. Mama will arrive tomorrow and a wave of knowing washes over me. Familiarity sets me free, into the world of imagination through what I already know, allowing the growth to come through new spaces where I do not have all the answers, for new knowledge to seep through the cracks. As I sleep I wake up knowing we’re coming towards something I know, the blue skies feeling closer towards launching to summer rather than the grey depths of the winter we just had, again disappointing my irises and keeping the house cold, my hands in a perpetual state of stiff but sensing I must do something again, people are coming, pogača will be made and the imaginary babe and tete will flood my kitchen again.

Maybe the familiar is familiar for a reason, the cycles in the stories we tell offer a new take each time. Maybe I will spend my life telling variations of the same stories, looking for that meaning myself. Maybe being familiar isn’t so bad.