The Cure for Sleep: Stay This Moment
Season 3, 004: Tell me about a time of great love or purpose in your life that you return to often in memory. An experience you might choose to stay inside forever (if such choice were ever given us)
I wasn’t able to release a monthly prompt in June as my mother was admitted to hospital as an emergency. And I’m already about to travel again from Sussex to Cornwall - for the last stay now, however long or short. The district nurses think it will be only a few weeks now, perhaps less. But my exchanges with all of you mean so much to me that I’m sending this month’s now before I go, at a different time in the week and perhaps with mistakes. But connection matters more than perfection - and so…
We’ve been having such long and loving talks about the past, my mother and I, during our daily video calls. If you’ve read The Cure for Sleep you know that she was happiest in the time before I was born, so that I’ve been learning glorious stories of her younger life through all of my own. She doesn’t always remember that though, and so memories of hers that I already know by heart (and have put in the book!) are being told me again - luminous as ever.
There’s a Joanna Newsom song I play often called Time, as a symptom. All the lyrics are moving, but these in particular pull at my imagination:
The moment of your greatest joy sustains
Not axe nor hammer
Tumor, tremor
Can take it away, and it remains
It remains
I hope that’s true when I reach my dying time, as it seems to be proving for Mother in hers. My near-death at thirty-three was - as many of you know - suffused mainly by sharp and shameful regret, so that all my life and work since then has been about feeling different when my final moments do come.
Towards the end of The Cure for Sleep, I invoke these words from Woolf:
If one does not lie back and sum up and say to the moment, this very moment, stay you are so fair, what will be one’s gain, dying? No: stay this moment. No one ever says that enough. Always hurry. I am now going in, to see Leonard and say stay this moment.
This is something I’ve been trying to do since the book was published: to live more in the moment than the past. But I have still - by nature or nurture? - a backwards-looking sensibility. Hence a recurring phrase/desire in The Cure for Sleep - a wish to have certain times in my past be ‘perpetual’: a sort of snowglobe or glass paperweight or willow pattern plate I might stay inside.
I think many of us have these: poignant places in our memory relating to a gone job or relationship - or maybe only ourselves in our bodies - that we wish could have sustained. Which brings me to this month’s theme for you…
your invitation to write
In 300 words or less, tell me about a time of great love or purpose in your life that you return to in memory. An experience you might choose to stay inside forever, if such choice were ever given us...
[Please read the guidelines for contributors if this is your first submission to the project.]
you can’t write a book in the hope of it winning love…
I answered questions about the craft and consequences of memoir, as put to me by poet, mentor and memoirist Wendy Pratt and her writing community. I invite you to read my responses, and wholeheartedly recommend that you follow Wendy’s Substack Notes from the Margin (if you don’t already).
about tanya
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He doesn’t deserve these words I don’t think. To be spoken about and made real again. To acknowledge his existence in mine. To dig deep into the tiny locked box in a corner of my heart that was slammed shut 25 years ago. My wild drunken self and his wild drunken self. My young shy, unknowing self from a tiny caged town. I dreamt of him before I knew him. He rocked my life, my heart in a city on the other side of the planet.
We met in a pub, drunk. He was always drunk. Suntanned, blonde, brown eyes. He made the blood rush to my head, wobbly, uncertain, electric. I regretted sleeping with him that night. But then I did it again and again and again for a whole year. We shared a magnetism, a connection that I couldn’t put down. I kept going back. He was so damaged and closed, confused and chaotic. He didn’t love me. He couldn’t let me in. But he wouldn’t let it go either. ‘Friends who have sex’ he called it, on his terms because it’s all he could give. A shut down heart but a wild open body. The second night we spent together, he showed me his passport photo. And I knew I loved him.
I went travelling around the vast, red, parched ancient land to escape him. I kissed other boys, propped up bars in outback towns and worked on farms in baking white heat to try and get him out of my heart. He had someone new for a while.
I had to go back to the glistening blue harbour city in the end and straight back into his bed. He sent me crazy with desire and pain mixed up with booze and confusion. I lost myself in him. I had to come back to the U.K. in the end, to recover. To lock him away before he broke me. A piece of him lives in me forever.
In my memory, I am sitting alone on a mound of grassed earth, on a recreation ground overlooking a mental health organisation's headquarters.
Every Friday afternoon I came to this building to counsel clients for the organisation. I was studying to be a counsellor, making up hours towards my qualification.
Back then, the purpose of what I was doing in my life was clear and sure. I would complete my placement here, then write my case study and qualify. After that, who knew? Private practice eventually and employment hopefully.
Right at that moment, sitting there on a late summer’s afternoon, waiting for my ride home, music in my ears from earphones, the atmosphere quiet and still all around me – I wanted to stay here. To bask, is that a word for it? Yes, to bask in the peaceful knowing of this time, where I felt some surety in the direction things were moving in. Things were not perfect, I knew that, but there was a positive sense of possibility in my life.
To stay in that sense of possibility for a while, the sun getting lower in the sky and that sense of peace in a day well used, yes I would most definitely want to sit within those feelings again. Before the lingering burnout, and the overwhelming presence of loss and sorrow that has permeated so many parts of my life in recent times.
I know that time has passed now, for me. Innocence lost is not so easily regained, if that is even possible. And yet, am cautiously hopeful for other such moments of purpose in my future.