How to Make Life Reappear
Sometimes you have to write yourself back into liking life
You head down to the raspberry patch with your dad, taking care as you separate the drupelets from their core. The fruit’s entrails exposed; not too dissimilar to how it feels to put yourself on the page.
You let the dominoes fall one after the other, dismantling life as it appears in black and white. You send the email and you walk down the street. Your gaze cleaved from the computer screen, your exhale shaking from the freedom.
You embed yourself within the walls of your city, remember its tremors under your toes. You book the supper club, the open mic slot. You remember how life can be found in the reception of strangers, in the firing line of fear.
You rotate yourself around different coffee shops like a lazy Susan, your eyes prized open only by the smell of morning coffee moving towards your nose.
You eat vegetables from your dad’s garden. Put into your body that which was grown from the earth you were raised. So your bones remember where you came from. So however far out you may drift, there are vines wrapped around your ankles, grounding you to your roots.
You drink wine and get high. You paint your boyfriend and he paints you. Your best candles melting in the window, your best music filling the space between the two of you.
You cry in the bank, asking in a single breath for pounds and euros and dollars. You cry on every homeward bound train, to the apartment that has never once stopped putting you back together. You cry and every tear is a necessary death. Another drop in the ocean of all that is ending.
You listen to your favourite writer talk in the basement of a bookshop, a cheap glass of fizz in your hand, her new book in your lap. You reconnect with your purpose, that slippery old thing. That slippery old thing that so easily gets torn from your chest when life gets a little hard and money a little sparse. You whisper something to her that you have not told another and the book’s inscription you find later reads: find your pleasure.
You apply for the thing. You get the thing. You are a person who walks around in the invisible pleasure that you are the only thing you ever wanted to be. You feel it. You know it to be true. You are a person that, before you are a daughter, before you are a partner, a friend, you are a writer. So you write. You write through it all and find your words are a missive to staying alive.
Thanks for reading. Please hit reply or send a comment telling me all the ways you make life reappear when ‘alive’ feels put on the back-burner. Until next month, Esme x