I am from a long line of women who never got good at themselves, women whose personality changed depending on audience, women of undiagnosed depression, women of this is just how life is, women of it could be worse, women who tried to speak their minds like the books say but no one listened and they didn’t know what to do with that sense of being stuck. Women who put up with it. Women who maybe dreamed, but tried not to. Women who gained weight or didn’t, prayed to Catholic saints or sent money to Oral Roberts or played Jesus Loves Me on the organ and sang along or didn’t. Women who sat until the arm of the couch wore out watching soap operas. Women who smoked Winstons and Marlboro Lights and, in an effort to save money, but not her life, generic ultra lights. Women who have been told to wait. Women who have been told they were crazy. Women who have been told to be quiet. Women who only get asked about what’s for dinner. Women who learned to sneak packages in the house. Women who learned to count calories and keep their stomachs sucked in, sucked in tight, and to suck opinions right in there too. Women who learned to be silenced. Women who learned not to mess up the cupboards, to keep things tidy. Women who learned not to be late. Women who learned to keep the kids quiet. Women who worked hard to not get upset him. Women who were eager to please. Women who said yes, just not to themselves. Women who asked for permission. Women who didn’t follow through. Women who hid. Women who swallowed tears whole and whose bodies turned anger into cancer, diabetes, autoimmune disease, obesity.
Nest
I became the Goddess of Responsibility. I will make the bread and simmer the soup. I will cut vegetables, so many vegetables. I will give the kids a schedule and a chore chart. I will get approval from teachers and pediatricians. Why do you care so much what the pediatrician says, my husband asks, you know you are a good mom. It’s still nice to be validated, I explain, you don’t understand what it’s like to not have your level of confidence. I will start eating breakfast and throw out the scale. I will make eggs for my son every morning because cereal would never last him until lunch. I will make kale smoothies. I will keep track of story hour schedules and school schedules and hockey schedules and soccer schedules and musical schedules and immunization schedules. I will read stories before bed. I will buy the gifts and get them wrapped. I will make sure bills are mailed on time and drawers are full of clean socks. I will make sure the animals are fed. I will get them to the bus stop on time. I will make them laugh every day and I will make sure we have plenty of insurance. I will always have a Plan B.
Oh this is fierce, impassioned writing. Yes, yes, yes, to all of it. And what makes it superb writing of course is the painful, precise detail of your women added to this universal injustice - that chair arm worn down. The cigarette brands. As ever thank you, thank you, for your words. Txx
Ah, now this community I'm trying to make here wouldn't be anything if it was just me and the intention to share the space! It's the trust/risk you and others take in sharing your words that make the magic happen... Txx
It’s a risky business calling the gods down for dirty, corporeal work in real estate but here I am, making a silent but desperate plea to the universe. “To whoever is listening, I know you don’t tend to work in the realm of material wealth, it’s not really becoming of the other-worldly, but if you can, I’d really appreciate a little help with this one. I promise I won’t ask for help again…”. But reader, here’s a spoiler, she would need to ask again, and again, and so many times until she’s on her hands and knees and looks back on that cursed house on the hill that was supposed to be the beginning, and the end, but was really just the middle.
The house is out of our budget and is really quite unnecessary but I am on a quest to fix a haemorrhaging marriage with country air, rolling hills and garden vegetables and I’ve decided this is where I’ll start. I want views, and open fires and a range for the endless cycle of bread I’ll be making. A village cafe with tea and scones, bunting and a summer fete. Rhubarb crumble and autumn woodland walks, and a local nursery with a whimsical playground. A pub where everyone knows your name and an annual book festival. A post office that’s still a post office. So I’m praying to my gods and spirits to align this world for me. To manifest. Just one more chance.
Starting again is what I do. I’m all about fresh starts, new year’s resolutions, the divine lights of solstice, sunrises and if in doubt, a house move (preferably across oceans but out-of-town will do too). Any therapist will tell you this is good old fashioned escapism at its finest and most pathetic and I am a master of the craft. H’s default setting is the path of least resistance; to acquiesce to my maniacal grand plans. This is a tale of denial and we are unhappy.
The lichen, yellow-splattered, blooms on the detritus of the already mottled rock. It doesn’t seek permission to grow here; it doesn’t check if its presence is having an impact on others, if it is worthy of their company or their notice; it doesn’t justify its existence in any manner at all. I scramble down through the long grass of the headland to sit with the rocks who hold up the more fantastic lives of the moss and of the lichen - the rocks who hold their space in silence and with a solidity of being that I understand. Here are my kin. I press my hands onto the rock and seek a steadiness in this connection I feel - for I, too, hold up the lives of others; I, too, allow others to flourish on the foundation of my existence.
And yet … and yet …
I find myself yearning for the courage to be the lichen, to have what is within be seen without. There is a life that is being lived inside my mind, a life that I have always revelled in in glorious anonymity, safe and steady as rock. But now I am feeling such anger and frustration at the disparity between the world of the mind and the world of obligations - that ‘real’ world where it seems that I am so necessary to the daily functioning of others and yet so invisible to them at the same time. I look to the rocks, to the lichen, to the words on the page. I cleave to solitude and books and quiet. I dwell in the possibility of one day living my inner world here in this one - of being both the lichen and the rock. I don’t know how to do this yet.
Emily! How did I miss this when it came in. Im sorry. What a richly-textured piece of writing this is: I will add it to the archive with pleasure tomorrow & come back on here with the link when I have. Tanya xx
with apologies again for the delay (I've needed a couple weeks largely offline to restart an important new health/fitness programme)...here is a link to your gorgeous meditation over on the book's website. https://thecureforsleep.com/october-issue-on-desire/#Emily
I so hope you will contribute to more themes! Do let me know if you'd like your last name added (and what it is if so!) Tan xx
The forces that forged the earth, it's collisions and crashings fused the very molecules that is me. My primal desire reaches deep into nature's fold, its carved into my human rock and embedded in my psyche. I am Fire. I am Earth. I am Water. I am Air. I cannot deny my lineage. I cannot exile myself from nature, it would be a betrayal of my origins.
Everyday, I breath in the truth of who I am and expel the mystery from within. The magic thread that binds us all together was blown in on a cosmic wind; one long breath of life. I have a calling echoing through my DNA strands; a desire to feel beauty and to articulate the songs of nature. A thirst of mind that feels the ebb and flow of the earth's natural forces; a sense of gut inner knowing.
I wrote a letter to the spirit of the land, exposed my true colours and gave breath to my desires. I pronounced my unfaltering longing to seek out it's secrets; walk gently upon it's mantle, leave no footprints and tread softly in the footsteps of Edward Thomas.
The "Green Man" came for me, tore me from my concrete bunker; whispered rainbows in my ears and re-tuned my broadcast and sharpened my eyes. My frame of reference is the rock I stand upon, the seasonal changes that twist and stretch my perceptions. I have no sense of isolation, only a feeling of unity and connection to the equinoxes and solstices that rhythm the land
Steve, how much I love it when responses from you come through. This one is thrilling to me - how it's written, but also this experience you have. I've had this to a lesser degree and am removed from it now. Your words make me want to be back out long hours in solitude. I've already curated it over on the book site - here is your link: https://thecureforsleep.com/october-issue-on-desire/#steveharrison
Thanks Tanya for giving me a space to open up and vocalise the whispers that echo around nature's spaces. It's been a lifelong nurturing relationship that centres and grounds me, allows me to breath and face the waves of challenges we all have to wade through. Springtime is the best.
I wanted to belong somewhere. Belonging was promised to me by a teacher who knew I didn’t fit in at school, although he didn’t know that I was not wanted at home either. I would find people like me at university.
Keen to escape, I went as far away as I could, to be forever reminded by my family that I was the one who left my roots. They were as weak as a weed’s, and as fickle, as it turned out.
Most people had come a short train journey from London. Having grown up together, they had ready-made social connections that were hard to break into. They went home at weekends to friends and family and marvelled over the existence of sheep in the fields next to the university campus: as a Welsh girl, far from the sheep-strewn fields of home, there was little common ground. The middle-class kids had an ease in each other’s company that I could never feel, but could observe with detachment and judge as superficial, immature and lazy. I didn’t have the safety net that would catch them when they fell, and I wasn’t sure I wanted it. The few working class had either arrived via grammar schools, working their way up to the position of Head Girl, or were chancers, wheeler dealers: things I had wanted to be, but circumstance or temperament failed me.
Belonging wasn’t meant for me. It was tiring to try for it and devastating when it wasn’t felt. Being shameful to admit to (this was also not - I discovered - a good strategy for attracting invitations to belong) I learnt to pretend. I belonged everywhere, so no-one could see I belonged nowhere. I danced in the dark.
I started writing one thing and this other thing demanded airing. I share it uneasily because I don't normally write things like this (far too much vulnerability required) and because while it is daydream material the other woman IS real, and I still get caught up in the old horse chestnut "what will others think of me!?" I'm trying to get at more than just the fantasy here, though...a little of the pain behind it, and what chronic illness has not let me explore in the fully adult way I wish. To just act with abandon an fall into bed, the pursuit and the chase. My imagination lets me conjure a mirage when needed and helps me get through the difficult moments, gives me the illusion for a small period of time that I'm living another life. I would never have had the courage to share something like this had you not gone first, Tanya. Certainly this poem is not finished and polished, but when it is I imagine it won't be skating on the surface so much.
********************************************
Daydream Professor
It’s always summer term when we meet
on the sidewalk outside the library, she invites me
to an impromptu dinner, “So we can discuss your writing
without the normal interruptions.”
I drive her the short way home
since her bag hangs heavy on her shoulders
and my car is parked steps from where we stand.
Behind her door we shed our sandals
she opens a bottle of wine
hands me a glass and encourages me to sit.
‘Don’t worry—I remember
you don’t like cheese,” she jokes
and that she remembers this small bit said in passing
stops me mid-sip. We share a long gaze
until my face flushes and I look away.
A lock of hair falls across my eyes and
the slow motion tumble begins.
We are alone but she shakily whispers it as
she tucks the errant wave behind my ear:
“I want you in my bed.”
The flush rushes down my neck and
further still when her hand comes to rest
in the V of my shirt.
I can’t meet her eyes so
I settle on the arthritic knuckles of
her other hand that reaches for mine and
pulls me to follow.
It’s easy to follow her
to undress her, let her undress me.
The extra pounds from illness
and inactivity are gone.
My hair is wild and long
instead of medication-thinned.
This daydream doesn’t demand the
energy of real-life fumbling and sexual pursuit.
I am free of real-life’s inflammatory cytokines that
So moved by this. ‘Imagination’s magic’. It means so much to see that this space has given you (& a few others) a way/a place to articulate experiences anew. I will add to the website over weekend & message again with your link. Txx
Amy, I think there is such courage and insight in this piece: it's both pleasure and perhaps pain to imagine this kind of closeness when one's body is rarely available for such closeness. So moved by it. Here is your link... Tx
I thought I’d write about sex - I once had a lot but not now, and although they say that if I stop looking, people will flock to my door, I can’t and they aren’t.
Anyway, now I’m all consumed with getting my book published. I still am, after all this time. It would be easier if I let it go, let it lie under a hedge like all the balls that have ever rolled down the hill in Sara Baume’s A Line Made by Walking, unclaimed. Or let it float out to sea and just watch it getting heavier, changing colour and sinking slowly, unnecessary.
But I simply cannot.
I am giving up a nice life for this, I am risking penury for the thrill of penning.
Many women through the ages have shown their desire to write. Radclyffe Hall worked on her first book, aptly named The Unlit Lamp, for 3 years; Patricia Highsmith used a nom de plume, Claire Morgan, for The Price of Salt. (That was the book that excited the film, Carol.) Like Hall, M A Caws wrote that Vita Sackville-West’s “essential quality was her great and lasting courage”. I know what lies behind that: desire.
We’re old lovers now, my reworked manuscript and I, dedicated but no less desirous. I still wake in the night in the ecstasy of an idea, I continue to fondle her paragraphs until they’re all spent and we sleep again, only to wake early and stroke her page, coax meaning from her, tempt the topic all over again. I am lascivious for phrase and metaphor, I quiver for words which describe and portray, I am simply voracious.
Can I sustain such desire? Two years in and we’re getting a little tired of our own company, we’re considering a threesome – she, me and, ooh, an agent?
This is wonderful, Tamsin! So recognisable. How I love, 'We’re old lovers now, my reworked manuscript and I, dedicated but no less desirous. I still wake in the night in the ecstasy of an idea, I continue to fondle her paragraphs until they’re all spent and we sleep again, only to wake early and stroke her page, coax meaning from her, tempt the topic all over again.'
Oh Tamsin, this is delicious from you. So erotic, this aspect of writing - absolutely how it felt to spend the last two years with mine! Love it. Thank you! Here is your link... Tx
Smiling. I can't write as openly and fully about my physical life as I'd like in the book - I'm mindful of my two children being still at school; that's a constraint I placed on myself and the story - but that self-imposed limit has had interesting side effects: I've found other ways to speak clearly to the really strong erotic drive I had in my art and living all through my forties once I stopped hiding and playing too small. It infused and drove my everyday actions, my writing...
Standing among thousands near the reflecting pool on the Washington Mall, all words were suddenly knocked out of me. I saw her for the first time in almost a year, and I knew: I loved her. I loved this woman with a depth I had not yet known for anyone, and what I knew about myself fell into pieces and began to reassemble in a different shape.
I didn’t speak again for a week. Protesting with throngs, long night on a bus, and then home, where I retreated to the tiny two-story tower that was part of our rented attic apartment. Windows all around. Day after day, mounds of wet clay took shape in my hands with an energy I did not know was mine. She was not mine; she was linked to someone else, and anyway, this turmoil was about me, not her, not really.
My art professor looked at the pieces, and at me, back and forth, silently. Exposed, vulnerable. I knew. I couldn’t have made anything else.
At the gaping firebox of the full kiln, my friends and I stoke wood into flames for 24 hours, heat melting the hairs around our foreheads. Stars above, searing orange within. Shakuhachi flute playing somewhere in the dark. Smoke-enveloped, soot-marked, stories shared. Silence.
A long day’s wait for cooling, and then we gently pull the warm bricks out of the wall. Inside, the pieces I made in the tower have blown into unrecognizable bits, air and passion having expanded in bubbles within and exploded, flinging shards against the bricks. It was exactly the right ending. Heated to over 2000 degrees Fahrenheit, so much raw emotion could do nothing else. I tossed the fragments into the shard pile, and moved on.
Amy - this is such a beautiful and powerfully written experience from you. Thank you for it. Truly. Here is your link to your piece in particular on the book site.
If you have a social media account or a personal website you'd like me to link to on your name there, let me know and I will update it with that as soon as I hear from you.
PS and I meant to say how much your Birds of Firle contribution meant to me and the project. It has such deep soul & truth to it. When I can one day do the physical exhibition, your swallows will be, yes, a real soul & centre of it. xx
When I first saw this, it seemed impossible. I have blocked myself from feeling too much desire. I have schooled myself to not want too much.
And then I remembered the day that I cried at the beach.
We were with friends this summer. It was a glorious day - we don't get many of them - we relish them when we do. Everybody was in the water, but me. I had a Hickmann line sticking out of my chest. I had to stay dry.
Now, I'm not a strong swimmer. I'm lucky that my nearest beach is a long, shallow beach. I can stay in my depth and feel safe. I have no eyebrows any more, so I struggle with keeping water out of my eyes. I do what my dad would call "canal stroke" - breast-stroke with my head out of the water. But I do it all year round. In November, when the sea is as grey as the sky. In February, when your feet and fingers go numb.
It's my reset button. In there, there's nothing in my head but sea. My body is all sensation - the sound of the water, the buffeting of the waves, the taste of salt-water. I am entirely in the present.
I try to carry that present moment with me, like a child might carry a pebble home from the beach.
And I cried for that, on that sunny beach in Wales.
Just to reassure you - I'm back in the water. I have a new, sub-cutaneous line - my skin is intact again. I have a window when my immune system is at its strongest. I take my moment. I allow the overwhelm. I relish it. I have that pebble in my pocket again.
It's when you have been knocked back, isn't it, and sometimes the power of it. I can understand that that sort of swimming is what might trigger it. Great reading.
Sarah - yes, how much that speaks to me: not letting yourself feel too much desire. Which makes your writing this month still more meaningful. Thank you. I’m delayed in setting up the page on the book site but as soon as I have I will send your link. Txx
You have inspired me once again to dip my toe into the writing pool!
The Amber Man
A very long time ago when youth and desire to eat the Apple shadowed my everyday and fed off my internal female being, a hunger never satiated, I found myself waiting for a train in Jackson Heights. I had recently moved to NY and was going to the city to look for work. Everything was new to me. The noise, smells, the patchwork of people and cultures, all a maiden voyage filling my senses with possibilities. As I stood on the platform I noticed a man who noticed me. He was aglow with vibrance, his amber eyes seduced me at a glance. No words were exchanged . A train pulled up, alas not mine. As the doors slid open he moved forward and as he boarded he turned and sought me out. I stood and gazed in mounting disappointment as this perfect man was about to glide out of my life. He quickly shot his head out and said “ You are beautiful” with that the train sped off. No compliment has been so fine so honest so accepted to this day.
Thoughts of this man occupied me. In my mind he had been heading to Rockaway where he lived in an apt high up that faced the Ocean. We lay on white sheets on a sunlit bed. Bird song, mingled with human passion. Wordless space with no intruding thoughts, just a perfect blend.
In time my Amber Prince faded and the place where life approaches perfection melted into a distant dream to forever be a part of my internal landscape and memory of a desire based on escape to Shangrila
I avoided that platform for some time as reality could never be the dream.
This is wonderful, Louise! I love how the day and that person all combine - cocktail of sense memories. And it reminds me of a very few rare moments like that in my own life and the lives of friends. Thank you. I'm ill in bed yesterday and today but I will be back later this week with your link on the book site... Tan x
Pre-nest
I am from a long line of women who never got good at themselves, women whose personality changed depending on audience, women of undiagnosed depression, women of this is just how life is, women of it could be worse, women who tried to speak their minds like the books say but no one listened and they didn’t know what to do with that sense of being stuck. Women who put up with it. Women who maybe dreamed, but tried not to. Women who gained weight or didn’t, prayed to Catholic saints or sent money to Oral Roberts or played Jesus Loves Me on the organ and sang along or didn’t. Women who sat until the arm of the couch wore out watching soap operas. Women who smoked Winstons and Marlboro Lights and, in an effort to save money, but not her life, generic ultra lights. Women who have been told to wait. Women who have been told they were crazy. Women who have been told to be quiet. Women who only get asked about what’s for dinner. Women who learned to sneak packages in the house. Women who learned to count calories and keep their stomachs sucked in, sucked in tight, and to suck opinions right in there too. Women who learned to be silenced. Women who learned not to mess up the cupboards, to keep things tidy. Women who learned not to be late. Women who learned to keep the kids quiet. Women who worked hard to not get upset him. Women who were eager to please. Women who said yes, just not to themselves. Women who asked for permission. Women who didn’t follow through. Women who hid. Women who swallowed tears whole and whose bodies turned anger into cancer, diabetes, autoimmune disease, obesity.
Nest
I became the Goddess of Responsibility. I will make the bread and simmer the soup. I will cut vegetables, so many vegetables. I will give the kids a schedule and a chore chart. I will get approval from teachers and pediatricians. Why do you care so much what the pediatrician says, my husband asks, you know you are a good mom. It’s still nice to be validated, I explain, you don’t understand what it’s like to not have your level of confidence. I will start eating breakfast and throw out the scale. I will make eggs for my son every morning because cereal would never last him until lunch. I will make kale smoothies. I will keep track of story hour schedules and school schedules and hockey schedules and soccer schedules and musical schedules and immunization schedules. I will read stories before bed. I will buy the gifts and get them wrapped. I will make sure bills are mailed on time and drawers are full of clean socks. I will make sure the animals are fed. I will get them to the bus stop on time. I will make them laugh every day and I will make sure we have plenty of insurance. I will always have a Plan B.
Oh this is fierce, impassioned writing. Yes, yes, yes, to all of it. And what makes it superb writing of course is the painful, precise detail of your women added to this universal injustice - that chair arm worn down. The cigarette brands. As ever thank you, thank you, for your words. Txx
https://thecureforsleep.com/october-issue-on-desire/#sheilaknell
Yes, so much pain in the women in my life, my life, like yours, was able to be different. So much gratitude for you and your generosity in replying.
Ah, now this community I'm trying to make here wouldn't be anything if it was just me and the intention to share the space! It's the trust/risk you and others take in sharing your words that make the magic happen... Txx
It’s a risky business calling the gods down for dirty, corporeal work in real estate but here I am, making a silent but desperate plea to the universe. “To whoever is listening, I know you don’t tend to work in the realm of material wealth, it’s not really becoming of the other-worldly, but if you can, I’d really appreciate a little help with this one. I promise I won’t ask for help again…”. But reader, here’s a spoiler, she would need to ask again, and again, and so many times until she’s on her hands and knees and looks back on that cursed house on the hill that was supposed to be the beginning, and the end, but was really just the middle.
The house is out of our budget and is really quite unnecessary but I am on a quest to fix a haemorrhaging marriage with country air, rolling hills and garden vegetables and I’ve decided this is where I’ll start. I want views, and open fires and a range for the endless cycle of bread I’ll be making. A village cafe with tea and scones, bunting and a summer fete. Rhubarb crumble and autumn woodland walks, and a local nursery with a whimsical playground. A pub where everyone knows your name and an annual book festival. A post office that’s still a post office. So I’m praying to my gods and spirits to align this world for me. To manifest. Just one more chance.
Starting again is what I do. I’m all about fresh starts, new year’s resolutions, the divine lights of solstice, sunrises and if in doubt, a house move (preferably across oceans but out-of-town will do too). Any therapist will tell you this is good old fashioned escapism at its finest and most pathetic and I am a master of the craft. H’s default setting is the path of least resistance; to acquiesce to my maniacal grand plans. This is a tale of denial and we are unhappy.
The lichen, yellow-splattered, blooms on the detritus of the already mottled rock. It doesn’t seek permission to grow here; it doesn’t check if its presence is having an impact on others, if it is worthy of their company or their notice; it doesn’t justify its existence in any manner at all. I scramble down through the long grass of the headland to sit with the rocks who hold up the more fantastic lives of the moss and of the lichen - the rocks who hold their space in silence and with a solidity of being that I understand. Here are my kin. I press my hands onto the rock and seek a steadiness in this connection I feel - for I, too, hold up the lives of others; I, too, allow others to flourish on the foundation of my existence.
And yet … and yet …
I find myself yearning for the courage to be the lichen, to have what is within be seen without. There is a life that is being lived inside my mind, a life that I have always revelled in in glorious anonymity, safe and steady as rock. But now I am feeling such anger and frustration at the disparity between the world of the mind and the world of obligations - that ‘real’ world where it seems that I am so necessary to the daily functioning of others and yet so invisible to them at the same time. I look to the rocks, to the lichen, to the words on the page. I cleave to solitude and books and quiet. I dwell in the possibility of one day living my inner world here in this one - of being both the lichen and the rock. I don’t know how to do this yet.
Emily! How did I miss this when it came in. Im sorry. What a richly-textured piece of writing this is: I will add it to the archive with pleasure tomorrow & come back on here with the link when I have. Tanya xx
Thanks Tanya - I did just kind of sneak in the back door of an earlier post. Xx
with apologies again for the delay (I've needed a couple weeks largely offline to restart an important new health/fitness programme)...here is a link to your gorgeous meditation over on the book's website. https://thecureforsleep.com/october-issue-on-desire/#Emily
I so hope you will contribute to more themes! Do let me know if you'd like your last name added (and what it is if so!) Tan xx
These themes are giving me just the motivation I need to allow some of my words to exist outside of my notebooks. Apologies are not necessary.
My surname is Tamas and, whenever you are able, I would like it added. 🙏✨☺️
Hi Emily! Your piece now has your full name and here is your new link... Tan xx
https://thecureforsleep.com/october-issue-on-desire/#EmilyTamas
The forces that forged the earth, it's collisions and crashings fused the very molecules that is me. My primal desire reaches deep into nature's fold, its carved into my human rock and embedded in my psyche. I am Fire. I am Earth. I am Water. I am Air. I cannot deny my lineage. I cannot exile myself from nature, it would be a betrayal of my origins.
Everyday, I breath in the truth of who I am and expel the mystery from within. The magic thread that binds us all together was blown in on a cosmic wind; one long breath of life. I have a calling echoing through my DNA strands; a desire to feel beauty and to articulate the songs of nature. A thirst of mind that feels the ebb and flow of the earth's natural forces; a sense of gut inner knowing.
I wrote a letter to the spirit of the land, exposed my true colours and gave breath to my desires. I pronounced my unfaltering longing to seek out it's secrets; walk gently upon it's mantle, leave no footprints and tread softly in the footsteps of Edward Thomas.
The "Green Man" came for me, tore me from my concrete bunker; whispered rainbows in my ears and re-tuned my broadcast and sharpened my eyes. My frame of reference is the rock I stand upon, the seasonal changes that twist and stretch my perceptions. I have no sense of isolation, only a feeling of unity and connection to the equinoxes and solstices that rhythm the land
Steve, how much I love it when responses from you come through. This one is thrilling to me - how it's written, but also this experience you have. I've had this to a lesser degree and am removed from it now. Your words make me want to be back out long hours in solitude. I've already curated it over on the book site - here is your link: https://thecureforsleep.com/october-issue-on-desire/#steveharrison
Tanya xx
Thanks Tanya for giving me a space to open up and vocalise the whispers that echo around nature's spaces. It's been a lifelong nurturing relationship that centres and grounds me, allows me to breath and face the waves of challenges we all have to wade through. Springtime is the best.
Steve, it’s a pleasure. Each of your pieces are a bolt of pure energy. Thank you.
I wanted to belong somewhere. Belonging was promised to me by a teacher who knew I didn’t fit in at school, although he didn’t know that I was not wanted at home either. I would find people like me at university.
Keen to escape, I went as far away as I could, to be forever reminded by my family that I was the one who left my roots. They were as weak as a weed’s, and as fickle, as it turned out.
Most people had come a short train journey from London. Having grown up together, they had ready-made social connections that were hard to break into. They went home at weekends to friends and family and marvelled over the existence of sheep in the fields next to the university campus: as a Welsh girl, far from the sheep-strewn fields of home, there was little common ground. The middle-class kids had an ease in each other’s company that I could never feel, but could observe with detachment and judge as superficial, immature and lazy. I didn’t have the safety net that would catch them when they fell, and I wasn’t sure I wanted it. The few working class had either arrived via grammar schools, working their way up to the position of Head Girl, or were chancers, wheeler dealers: things I had wanted to be, but circumstance or temperament failed me.
Belonging wasn’t meant for me. It was tiring to try for it and devastating when it wasn’t felt. Being shameful to admit to (this was also not - I discovered - a good strategy for attracting invitations to belong) I learnt to pretend. I belonged everywhere, so no-one could see I belonged nowhere. I danced in the dark.
I started writing one thing and this other thing demanded airing. I share it uneasily because I don't normally write things like this (far too much vulnerability required) and because while it is daydream material the other woman IS real, and I still get caught up in the old horse chestnut "what will others think of me!?" I'm trying to get at more than just the fantasy here, though...a little of the pain behind it, and what chronic illness has not let me explore in the fully adult way I wish. To just act with abandon an fall into bed, the pursuit and the chase. My imagination lets me conjure a mirage when needed and helps me get through the difficult moments, gives me the illusion for a small period of time that I'm living another life. I would never have had the courage to share something like this had you not gone first, Tanya. Certainly this poem is not finished and polished, but when it is I imagine it won't be skating on the surface so much.
********************************************
Daydream Professor
It’s always summer term when we meet
on the sidewalk outside the library, she invites me
to an impromptu dinner, “So we can discuss your writing
without the normal interruptions.”
I drive her the short way home
since her bag hangs heavy on her shoulders
and my car is parked steps from where we stand.
Behind her door we shed our sandals
she opens a bottle of wine
hands me a glass and encourages me to sit.
‘Don’t worry—I remember
you don’t like cheese,” she jokes
and that she remembers this small bit said in passing
stops me mid-sip. We share a long gaze
until my face flushes and I look away.
A lock of hair falls across my eyes and
the slow motion tumble begins.
We are alone but she shakily whispers it as
she tucks the errant wave behind my ear:
“I want you in my bed.”
The flush rushes down my neck and
further still when her hand comes to rest
in the V of my shirt.
I can’t meet her eyes so
I settle on the arthritic knuckles of
her other hand that reaches for mine and
pulls me to follow.
It’s easy to follow her
to undress her, let her undress me.
The extra pounds from illness
and inactivity are gone.
My hair is wild and long
instead of medication-thinned.
This daydream doesn’t demand the
energy of real-life fumbling and sexual pursuit.
I am free of real-life’s inflammatory cytokines that
make washing and dressing a burden.
Here
I am wanted.
I grow incandescent
beneath my professor’s gaze.
More alive with the pass of her lips
over my heated skin.
Stronger with each touch.
Imagination’s magic:
I map and explore her body
without exhaustion.
So moved by this. ‘Imagination’s magic’. It means so much to see that this space has given you (& a few others) a way/a place to articulate experiences anew. I will add to the website over weekend & message again with your link. Txx
Thank you, as always, for creating this space. Only one change: I left the title at Daydream, removing Professor. —AM
Amy, I think there is such courage and insight in this piece: it's both pleasure and perhaps pain to imagine this kind of closeness when one's body is rarely available for such closeness. So moved by it. Here is your link... Tx
https://thecureforsleep.com/october-issue-on-desire/#amymillios
Here's my rift on Desire:
I thought I’d write about sex - I once had a lot but not now, and although they say that if I stop looking, people will flock to my door, I can’t and they aren’t.
Anyway, now I’m all consumed with getting my book published. I still am, after all this time. It would be easier if I let it go, let it lie under a hedge like all the balls that have ever rolled down the hill in Sara Baume’s A Line Made by Walking, unclaimed. Or let it float out to sea and just watch it getting heavier, changing colour and sinking slowly, unnecessary.
But I simply cannot.
I am giving up a nice life for this, I am risking penury for the thrill of penning.
Many women through the ages have shown their desire to write. Radclyffe Hall worked on her first book, aptly named The Unlit Lamp, for 3 years; Patricia Highsmith used a nom de plume, Claire Morgan, for The Price of Salt. (That was the book that excited the film, Carol.) Like Hall, M A Caws wrote that Vita Sackville-West’s “essential quality was her great and lasting courage”. I know what lies behind that: desire.
We’re old lovers now, my reworked manuscript and I, dedicated but no less desirous. I still wake in the night in the ecstasy of an idea, I continue to fondle her paragraphs until they’re all spent and we sleep again, only to wake early and stroke her page, coax meaning from her, tempt the topic all over again. I am lascivious for phrase and metaphor, I quiver for words which describe and portray, I am simply voracious.
Can I sustain such desire? Two years in and we’re getting a little tired of our own company, we’re considering a threesome – she, me and, ooh, an agent?
This is wonderful, Tamsin! So recognisable. How I love, 'We’re old lovers now, my reworked manuscript and I, dedicated but no less desirous. I still wake in the night in the ecstasy of an idea, I continue to fondle her paragraphs until they’re all spent and we sleep again, only to wake early and stroke her page, coax meaning from her, tempt the topic all over again.'
Thank you, Michelle, I'm glad it struck a chord.
Oh Tamsin, this is delicious from you. So erotic, this aspect of writing - absolutely how it felt to spend the last two years with mine! Love it. Thank you! Here is your link... Tx
https://thecureforsleep.com/october-issue-on-desire/#tamsingrainger
Thank you very much - for your comment and adjustments and for publishing 😊
Oh that's a turn on and full of scary recognition at the same time! - oh ohh ohhh!
Smiling. I can't write as openly and fully about my physical life as I'd like in the book - I'm mindful of my two children being still at school; that's a constraint I placed on myself and the story - but that self-imposed limit has had interesting side effects: I've found other ways to speak clearly to the really strong erotic drive I had in my art and living all through my forties once I stopped hiding and playing too small. It infused and drove my everyday actions, my writing...
Standing among thousands near the reflecting pool on the Washington Mall, all words were suddenly knocked out of me. I saw her for the first time in almost a year, and I knew: I loved her. I loved this woman with a depth I had not yet known for anyone, and what I knew about myself fell into pieces and began to reassemble in a different shape.
I didn’t speak again for a week. Protesting with throngs, long night on a bus, and then home, where I retreated to the tiny two-story tower that was part of our rented attic apartment. Windows all around. Day after day, mounds of wet clay took shape in my hands with an energy I did not know was mine. She was not mine; she was linked to someone else, and anyway, this turmoil was about me, not her, not really.
My art professor looked at the pieces, and at me, back and forth, silently. Exposed, vulnerable. I knew. I couldn’t have made anything else.
At the gaping firebox of the full kiln, my friends and I stoke wood into flames for 24 hours, heat melting the hairs around our foreheads. Stars above, searing orange within. Shakuhachi flute playing somewhere in the dark. Smoke-enveloped, soot-marked, stories shared. Silence.
A long day’s wait for cooling, and then we gently pull the warm bricks out of the wall. Inside, the pieces I made in the tower have blown into unrecognizable bits, air and passion having expanded in bubbles within and exploded, flinging shards against the bricks. It was exactly the right ending. Heated to over 2000 degrees Fahrenheit, so much raw emotion could do nothing else. I tossed the fragments into the shard pile, and moved on.
"..fell into pieces and began to reassemble in a different shape." Lovely. Thanks for writing this, I really enjoyed reading it.
Amy - this is such a beautiful and powerfully written experience from you. Thank you for it. Truly. Here is your link to your piece in particular on the book site.
https://thecureforsleep.com/october-issue-on-desire/#AmyBoyd
If you have a social media account or a personal website you'd like me to link to on your name there, let me know and I will update it with that as soon as I hear from you.
I'm going to go read it again now...
Tanya x
Still no social media, Tanya. Thanks, though! I'm glad you appreciate this little piece.
PS and I meant to say how much your Birds of Firle contribution meant to me and the project. It has such deep soul & truth to it. When I can one day do the physical exhibition, your swallows will be, yes, a real soul & centre of it. xx
I really do. It's extraordinary - and not at all small!
When I first saw this, it seemed impossible. I have blocked myself from feeling too much desire. I have schooled myself to not want too much.
And then I remembered the day that I cried at the beach.
We were with friends this summer. It was a glorious day - we don't get many of them - we relish them when we do. Everybody was in the water, but me. I had a Hickmann line sticking out of my chest. I had to stay dry.
Now, I'm not a strong swimmer. I'm lucky that my nearest beach is a long, shallow beach. I can stay in my depth and feel safe. I have no eyebrows any more, so I struggle with keeping water out of my eyes. I do what my dad would call "canal stroke" - breast-stroke with my head out of the water. But I do it all year round. In November, when the sea is as grey as the sky. In February, when your feet and fingers go numb.
It's my reset button. In there, there's nothing in my head but sea. My body is all sensation - the sound of the water, the buffeting of the waves, the taste of salt-water. I am entirely in the present.
I try to carry that present moment with me, like a child might carry a pebble home from the beach.
And I cried for that, on that sunny beach in Wales.
Just to reassure you - I'm back in the water. I have a new, sub-cutaneous line - my skin is intact again. I have a window when my immune system is at its strongest. I take my moment. I allow the overwhelm. I relish it. I have that pebble in my pocket again.
It's when you have been knocked back, isn't it, and sometimes the power of it. I can understand that that sort of swimming is what might trigger it. Great reading.
Dear Sarah, with apologies for the delay in posting your fine words on the booksite, here is your link for the October issue. Tan x
https://thecureforsleep.com/october-issue-on-desire/#sarahconnor
Sarah - yes, how much that speaks to me: not letting yourself feel too much desire. Which makes your writing this month still more meaningful. Thank you. I’m delayed in setting up the page on the book site but as soon as I have I will send your link. Txx
You have inspired me once again to dip my toe into the writing pool!
The Amber Man
A very long time ago when youth and desire to eat the Apple shadowed my everyday and fed off my internal female being, a hunger never satiated, I found myself waiting for a train in Jackson Heights. I had recently moved to NY and was going to the city to look for work. Everything was new to me. The noise, smells, the patchwork of people and cultures, all a maiden voyage filling my senses with possibilities. As I stood on the platform I noticed a man who noticed me. He was aglow with vibrance, his amber eyes seduced me at a glance. No words were exchanged . A train pulled up, alas not mine. As the doors slid open he moved forward and as he boarded he turned and sought me out. I stood and gazed in mounting disappointment as this perfect man was about to glide out of my life. He quickly shot his head out and said “ You are beautiful” with that the train sped off. No compliment has been so fine so honest so accepted to this day.
Thoughts of this man occupied me. In my mind he had been heading to Rockaway where he lived in an apt high up that faced the Ocean. We lay on white sheets on a sunlit bed. Bird song, mingled with human passion. Wordless space with no intruding thoughts, just a perfect blend.
In time my Amber Prince faded and the place where life approaches perfection melted into a distant dream to forever be a part of my internal landscape and memory of a desire based on escape to Shangrila
I avoided that platform for some time as reality could never be the dream.
Dear Louise, with apologies for the unusual delay in moving your brilliant words to the booksite, here is your link for the October issue. Tan
https://thecureforsleep.com/october-issue-on-desire/#louisenewman
Thank you Tanya! Hope your all better and bushy tailed! xx
This is wonderful, Louise! I love how the day and that person all combine - cocktail of sense memories. And it reminds me of a very few rare moments like that in my own life and the lives of friends. Thank you. I'm ill in bed yesterday and today but I will be back later this week with your link on the book site... Tan x
Oh I hope not a wipe out for you Tan!! Wishing you quick recovery xx
Beautiful Tanya! Your senses burn the page.
Thank you for reading, Louise. It's exciting to think there are only a few months now until the book can be read as a whole, and in sequence!
Really exciting and we were so lucky to witness parts of your journey! With hope for all the best to come Xx