windows and rooftops

Some pictures to get me writing something lengthier than fragments or blog posts. (About summer and bicycles and endings, I think.)

Incidentally: I would like to sleep in a hammock. I would like to have the sea just outside my window.



(Also, there is this. A video from the London riots. Sky News reporter Mark Stone approaches looters in Clapham Junction to ask them if they're proud of themselves. This whole thing is so sad and fucked up I can't even.)

(i find this strangely comforting)

"Sometimes you climb out of bed in the morning and you think, I'm not going to make it, but you laugh inside, remembering all the times you've felt that way."

Charles Bukowski 

on love #3

 

(Sometimes I need poetry. Need it with a heart-shaking fist-clenching urgency, buckets of words poured in through the eyes, they settle deep in the throat and wander to the safety of my ribcage and burn on a low flame, or run down my spine like drops of mercury.)

day by day (old joy comes back to me)

So here we are, well into August, and the familiar melancholy-tinged end-of-summer nostalgia is hitting me like a freight train.

Endless rain and nights too cold for bare feet, a prep course in Swedish for my final exams, the approaching start of my final year in school - it's all slightly too much. (And I do know the days still swelter with heat and there are warm days to come, but nonetheless there's no escaping the blues.)

For the past few weeks I've been intensely unhappy and disconcerted, in the familiar shaky-hands way. Unable to sleep, listless and vague. Clinging to the idea of summer having flown by without much of an impact. (Forgive me my maudlin tendences, this'll get brighter I swear.)

And then last night, at the seaside with music and friends and a sunset, I got to thinking about everything I've done during the past two months, how undeniably and inexplicably happy I have been.

And so maybe there's nothing to be sad about. Maybe what I need right now is a good cry and a shoulder to lean on, and then I can face this mystifying concept of autumn with a heart less faint. I aim to be prepared, this time around. With wellies and jumpers and fingerless gloves. I'm already waiting for the cooler days in September, the darkening night and coloured leaves.

And in the meanwhile, I have ten more days of (almost) absolute freedom, to be spent with friends in that glorious sunshine.

move

One of the most stunningly beautiful videos I have ever seen. (And oh, the things I'd give to go travelling right now.)

small joys and freckles

An eternity ago in early May, as a consequence of sunny lunch hours spent on the school lawn, I discovered a smattering of freckles high up on my cheekbone, near the thin blue skin beneath my right eye.

It was just a light dusting of them, an area I could cover with a few clustered fingertips. But there they were, improbable and exciting and new.

Blandly blonde, with a complexion the colour of skimmed milk, I have always longed for skin like a star chart. Back in playschool I had a friend with skin as pale as mine, but an explosion of rust-coloured dots scampering around her face. She was spectacular, with her polka dot eyelids and misty hairline, and I was desperate enough to paint clumsy circles onto my cheeks with a brown felt tip.

So there they were, my first true freckles, proudly pointed out to all of my friends. My mother, who nonchalantly sports freckled arms and shoulders every summer, calmly remarked that my pigment must have altered with age.

Freckles suggest days spent in the sun, a certain carefree je ne sais quoi. An entirely different attitude, a better life. Freckled people are infinitely more beautiful than the rest of us, it seems, a group somehow more adept at life.

Or so I thought, naive as I was.

Although my collection of freckles remains small (in addition to cheekbones and nose, a few flocks have settled onto the backs of my hands, my forearms and my knees), I have lost my delusions. There's always a gut-wrenching nostalgic sadness in watching childhood dreams flicker and die, and even more so when they were dreams of eventual happiness.

Because last spring, although sublime in many ways, almost convinced me of freckles being the shadows of tears. And along with the steady accumulation of the little brown dots, although this summer has proven to be better than many of the ones before, has come the realisation that no amount of freckles will result in happiness. (A silly notion of course, but a solid one.)

And still there's the small pang of joy every time I notice them, a fleeting glance into a mirror every morning, a jolt of energy in my veins. Small joys build up to happiness, after all, so maybe the constellations of my skin will eventually show me the way.


Drawing by the always wonderful Daniela Henríquez.