Everything Is Romantic

The privilege of living a life sometimes means living the repercussions of a life.

It started in the autumn, a chalk strike thick through the summer. I unboxed my things into a one bedroom flat and knocked nails into flat-pack furniture. I stuck an ombre of greens and blues across my wall with one hand, whilst the other haphazardly clutched the spirit level app I’d installed on my phone. The sound of people at the pub down the street was a buzzy collection. A hum with liquid-loose intonation. It was company where I had none, but proof that life existed beyond me. That whilst I was not a part of it that day, maybe I would be tomorrow. 

In winter I wrote essays at 4am — awake from fitful dairy dreams. The White Russians from the preceding hours frothing all up in my brain. I began to buy real coffee that didn’t stain my teeth, ate pastries on Saturday mornings. I started to notice how I would miss Nottingham when I was away from it. A reassurance that I was in the right life, even though it is not always easy. Even though I am regularly the only one at the function who lives not only out of town but out of county, who is always dashing off, always on the run to return to that thing we call home. A comet, a metaphor of the chase, searching and seeking and finally — finding. 

Spring came and I built a routine where I could be easily witnessed performing the role of a person moving through a life. Where patterns could be detected and where I could be known to be found in certain places between certain hours on certain days. Available to be found and sometimes now, even sought, arms tied around my waist. Baristas knowing my order without asking, bartenders saying, Esme, right? 

There is a not so distant version of myself that would have deliberately reconfigured my day as to throw off any potential predictability. To conceal my identity, to slip by undetected, unnoticed. Switching up coffee orders and changing up routes so to not be someone anyone could attach ideas to. Before the pandemic rendered pause, I lived perpetually somewhere between the past and the future; never quite that thing resting in the middle. In London people asked me of home, at home people asked me of London — no one ever quite able to land on my exact position because I was already reaching for the other. I wanted to be gone before I could leave an impression. I wanted to be untethered from questions and I suppose, expectation.

Now I am less afraid to be known. The full force of my weight, deliberately leans into space, expands myself into presence, into being seen. The advantage of having a room of one’s own means having the autonomy to seek company on your own terms rather than exhaust it all in places you wouldn’t, by choice, choose to use up your lot.

This summer came primed with another chalk strike thick through its centre. I spent the entire season sick. I lost the thread a little. A false god stuffed false prophecy down my throat and there it remained until I ended up hospitalised, oxygen unable to get past all that had clogged my windpipe. Most months my bank delivered a tiny threat: you are overdrawn. And most nights I sat in my bed, turning my phone face down, grateful for this roof over my head. 

It is Autumn again, the earth has completed another trip around the sun. It is a miracle I have stayed in one place, in one piece. My friends and I drink eleven cocktails each and then take the tram to Forest Fields, knock back shots for the road. We climb aboard the Waltzers, we ride the Ghost train, we jet about on something that is billed to my debit card as ‘The Extreme’. And I am giddy and silly and unrelenting to the ups and downs of life as I fly around myself up and down. And then we sober up and need suddenly, urgently, burritos, which are so overfilled they are really just soggy foils of collapsed innards. 

Sally Rooney describes it better than I can. This year for me was, as she writes in Intermezzo: “a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking”. 

Last year I would pick up the phone to my sexual assault case worker, our calls my only punctuation of time passing, my life in suspension from my body, my voice a faraway thing: I don’t know what to do, I don’t know what to do. And she would always reassure me that there was time to figure it all out, that there was only one thing for me to do at that moment. To go out there and live my life.

For so long that life felt like one long low hum of bad. It was always in pursuit of recovery in some shape or form that it didn’t really have the capacity to be plugged into much of life’s ordinary glory. Where life could be found in the morning, or at the kitchen counter. It was only tuned into the frequency of survival; the basic daily machination of holding on. But the seasons have eclipsed and in the illumination there has been a key change. I’ve been compensating for the lost year of my life, seeing how much my life can hold inside itself without breaking. Testing the theory, devouring it as it once devoured me. 

I think the answer is it can hold a lot. Sometimes I have to steady myself at the amount. At all that can transpire within a day. One minute I find myself with my hands dirty in the heat of love, and in the next I am isolated for a week, feet muddy in the thick of disease. One morning I find myself in hospital because I cannot breathe and in the next breath — literally — I am plunged into a lake, swans drifting nearby, the tide lapping into my face, my body renewed. So many scrapes, near breaks. 

Sometimes the extreme nuance to come and go in a day almost topples me. How the good mixes with the bad, all submerged and sodden on this spoonful of life. How we have to endlessly reconfigure, to trepidatiously reestablish. It is impossible to take readings of the day’s position. To land on feelings in stasis. My friends keep on kissing me and my lovers keep on leaving me. I am learning that the privilege of living a life sometimes means living the repercussions of a life. 

Back in February I wrote: “I haven’t quite figured out how you’re supposed to learn to live with the bad in favour of the good. What it means to feel everything and nothing. Or how I am both okay and not.” 

I think this is something I am still warming to. It takes a certain amount of stamina to accept this juxtaposition as the substance in which we become alive. But I am surrendering to it somewhat. Which is why I walk, the October sun tickling my face, and I laugh under my breath. I laugh because I have to. Because in spite of my health apparently still lingering on the outer curve of a question mark, there is still beauty in the world. Like how it’ll sometimes be 1am and I can be found sat on the fire escape in the beer garden down the street.