It was sometime in April, after spending too much time alone and feeling uncertain by the transition I was making in life, that I started to write about it. A few months earlier I’d made the dizzying decision to step away from the glistening chimera of a creative career I had spent nearly a decade chasing — to go back and study in a different field. As a writer, this was something I wanted to explore; but for the first time in my life, words were failing me.
April, 2024
I have been struggling with my words for some time; with knowing which novel to complete and which to forget. Sacred Hearts has been weighing on me; six years a chrysalis, slipping further into the realm of impossibility with each month that passes. As I grow older, I become more distant from Marie — who is really someone I used to be. I simply didn’t think that perhaps a novel started then could not be completed now, because the author has fundamentally changed. But perhaps that’s the task of the writer: to be constantly catching up with who they are becoming. And yet, for all my distance from it, I can’t bear the idea of not being able to finish this book. There is still a part of me, and some delusional, limerent undercurrent running through this prose, that knows it is a story worth telling. So why don’t I write it here instead? In whose world am I dreaming, anyway?
I have been sitting on Sacred Hearts since 2018. In that time, a series of novels, screenplays, films, degrees, day jobs, residencies, relationships, moves, pandemics, wars and genocides have all contributed to a growing sense that the narrative itself has evolved. I suppose there’s a part of me that believes that in the 2020s, the only way to write is experimentally, tenuously, with the knowledge that our work is as precarious as the world from which it was borne. When the future is so uncertain, perhaps writing requires a fluidity, an ambiguity that can exist amid the vagaries of our time. And with any luck, perhaps our art will survive.
I’ve been spending too much time alone lately. I have been commuting three hours per day from one side of London to the other, which after a while becomes intensely isolating. On my way up, I practice mindfulness, acquainting myself with the route from south to north, two worlds separated and united by a formidable river. On the way back down, late night country ballads soothe against the low howl of trains roaring through the night, where wires cut across the sky smudged with cloud, dimly illuminated by the polluted moonlight. At midnight, when I am walking home from the station, I am confronted with the sweet jasmine which climbs a wooden trellis beside an old brick house. I wonder who lives there and imagine that they must be rich if they are to be growing jasmine beside an old brick house on this particular street. I walk past the park, which by day is bright with tulips and sundials, the bounce of a football upon a path streaked with pastel-coloured hopscotch squares. But at night, I am now listening to Tibetan bowls, sonorous beneath the heavy moon which hangs over a house opposite the park; the house feels unreal, like a cardboard cut-out, a shadow-house.
That’s how a lot of life feels to me at the moment; as if a veneer has been stripped back, and I am being shown something beneath the layers of reality that I’m unable to articulate — I think this is what Lacan calls the Real. This didn’t happen spontaneously, of course. No one wakes up one morning to find that they see the world completely differently; not without some catalyst. But is trauma really interesting to anyone besides those who have suffered it? I could go on here about what happened last year, and what brought me to this state of solitude without yearning, stripped of any of the delusional limerence that pervades Sacred Hearts — and all of my earlier work, but that would be missing the point. The point is that until now, most of my work has featured the same protagonist: an aloof, intelligent, deeply melancholy young woman who cannot see herself as anything other than a victim; is this really the role I was writing myself into all those years? A sense of amazement overcomes me that it was.
There is a man right now, sitting on the other side of the coffee shop in which I am writing this. He’s dressed in all black, with a MacBook and a preoccupied gaze that seems partly distracted by the fact I’m half-watching him, and he’s just realised it. My cheeks flush hot with embarrassment as I can’t bear to be perceived and I stare even more intently at the document in front of me until his attention loses its grip. He closes, then again opens, his laptop. I wonder why he does this. He has one leg crossed over the other, his tongue perpetually in his cheek as if consumed by a singular thought, and it crosses my mind that he may also be observing me; perhaps if I were to go over to his table and look over his shoulder, there would be a paragraph written about the young woman with the dark hair and turtleneck who is glancing at him from across the room. He must know I’m writing about him — I’m terrible at hiding it. Although, there surely can’t be anything written on his laptop, because he hasn’t typed a single thing in the entire fifteen minutes he’s been sat there. And now, he gets up, tosses his pastry bag in the bin, pulls on his coat and leaves — the mystery!
Lovely writing! Please keep at it. You're very good!