kikiest-things

[kikiest-things]

I watch all these people who are doing things they love and I am slightly (or very) jealous. Why can’t I do what I love? What is it that I love? I am not sure what it is anymore. 

I love learning and this is what I have been doing since I became a mother almost 4 years ago. Right now, I feel like doing nothing. 

I have spent a lot of energy, time and money learning the things I know at the moment and I am not doing anything with it. Why do I have to be so stingy? 

I hate to think of myself as stingy. 

And right now, I feel like doing nothing. I don’t have the energy to do anything. I am over $10,000 in debt and I am not doing anything to bring in money for myself and my family. 

I am a mother and mothers are inherently generous - why can’t I be generous? 

My name is Sara and I am waiting to find myself. I am thirty-three and I still haven’t found myself. I can only best see myself through the eyes and mirrors others hold for me. 

[kikiest-things]

My father came to me in a dream in New York City one day. 

I was walking down a busy street at the time, so it was something of an inconvenience; but I hadn’t seen him in years, so I kept calm and carried on. I kept the rhythm of my steps, and I continued to avoid the fast moving obstacles of people and traffic. I began to hum to myself. It’s a thing I do to manage stress, or distress - which is an odd thing to identify upon re-uniting with your own dad, but it was present none the less - we hadn’t seen each other in over 15 years, and this was a waking dream after all. 

I hum to myself in the dentist’s chair when they get the drill out. Or anything else that buzzes menacingly, but they told me they don’t mind, and I think they and the assistants are quite amused by it. It beats screams.

Though he did not buzz menacingly, I hummed to my father, there on 2nd Avenue, and he hummed back. He kind of resonated. Words rang out with great eloquence, but the consonants never formed. The words simply vibrated, and I tried to find harmony with them. Sometimes perfect 5ths, sometimes clashing 7ths and 4ths - sometimes in a uniform lockstep beat, in time with my heart or the steady pulse of unrelenting Empire State footsteps - ever forward and constant; other times in challenging cross rhythms and alternate timings that teeter on the brink of chaos, the very edge of loosing all apparent form before suddenly completing their cycle and resolving again into a perfect fractal image.

In this way, we talked.

I couldn’t tell you exactly what he said, and I wouldn’t, it was a private conversation after all - but he left me with a song.

****

Soon after, a close friend, Jack Brown, had just gotten married, and text me a series of tender chords he’d strummed out on his honeymoon (he apologized for his playing in the voice note, explaining that he was unaccustomed to the ring on his finger, and it was making him stumble over the frets. I thought that was just about the most adorable thing I’d ever heard.) He wondered if I could do something unexpected with them.

I kept humming around the streets of New York.

******

A month before the death of George Floyd, I was in London and I reached out to an old colleague, Lanre Malaolu suggesting we finally got round to connecting in the way we’d put off for years and collaborate while I was grounded on a rare trip back in the UK. I had just finished this complicated sort of anthemic lullaby about love, legacy, loss - and how men particularly, deal with such vulnerabilities - with my brother (together we go by the musical pseudonym ‘TUNYA’). Lanre’s recent work exploring tenderness within Black masculinity seemed a perfect, unexpected, and exciting match to explore the themes of the music visually.

By the time of filming in August, the world had been brought to a screaming halt by the rawest, largest, and most powerful display of Black community, pain and activism since the Civil Rights movement of the 60s. A palpable sense of communal grief had dominated every conversation, on a global scale, magnified and brought to boil by the losses and fear of a world brought to its knees by COVID-19. John Lewis had died. Colston was dumped in the sea, and confederate monuments were armed battle grounds - defended by white militias and conquered by Black ballerinas. Chadwick Boseman died. I missed my dad. A world full of uncertainty lacked leadership and compassion, and each new week brought new, unresolvable heartbreak. The core team involved in the film had been privately trying to learn how to be grieving, vulnerable, Black and publicly on display for months, and the piece grew to reflect that. The responsibility as artists to share what light and answers we’d found and contribute that back into a community fractured and isolated by social distance, thrust not only a sense of purpose on the project, but a guiding momentum. It could now only be this.

Joshua Nash is an extraordinarily sensitive performer, and his unique blend of abrasive power and overwhelming vulnerability guides the piece through a physical embodiment of his own personal journey through a universal grief. The battle for control and suppression, the desire to tidy away a past too painful to confront, and the ultimate realisation that the only escape from the trappings of an eternal fight - is to allow oneself to feel it. To accept the pain of past battles, honour it, and through that knowledge, gain the peace necessary to thrive and progress beyond it.

To a world seemingly divided into two camps, both struggling to address a painful history, a cancerous personal and public legacy, I hope the piece’s foreword (unpublished in the end, written late one night between rehearsals, trying to pin down our direction) offers a guiding light toward its redemptive resolution:

“Those who fell before you fought,

For you

Not to be bound in mourning

But to free your life’s celebration”

In the end, like them all, Don’t Wait is simply a love song. It is about finding the path through life’s necessary, good trouble, to life’s intrinsic celebration.

More love, always

R

x

Watch the video here

(Photographs by Helen Murray)

————

DON’T WAIT

Sweet, sweet sun

Shine!

I couldn’t wait

Darling

To hold you in these arms

I couldn’t wait

I couldn’t wait

Darling

To keep you

Quite as warm,

Warm as I would have liked

But I’ll soft speak

On the wind

And I

Won’t let you fall apart

If you hold me

Inside

Sweet sweet sun

Please

Shine

The first time I met you

I felt that I could fall into the sun

And still feel the light

Of your eyes

To guide me home

The first time.

The first time I met you

I felt like my life had just begun

Born again,

A better man, a better man

For you

And I’ll be around

On the wind

And I’ll guide you through the night

If you

You call me out

I will hold your hand

I never meant for you to

Stumble

Stumble

and fall

Without me

Oh, there’s a song in you

All that I never taught

I never thought

I’d have to

I wish I could

More than anything

I want to hear

Oh,

What a song you are

And don’t sing

Like you let me down

You couldn’t

Let me down

And don’t feel

Like you let me down

You could never

Let me down

Don’t ever feel

Like a fool

In those blessed moments

When you fall into the truth

Sweet sweet sun

Of mine

Shine.

[kikiest-things]

my writing usually comes through as freestyle. I don’t edit, I might revisit, yet I feel it takes away from it. 

As a child, I would always keep a journal, and my mother would always go through it. It’s a habit she had developed until I started to spend more time outside of the house than inside because it didn’t feel safe. I live in my own house now, and Moleskines have become horrendously expensive for me as I no longer have a job and the one USD is worth 16 Egyptian pounds. So no more Moleskine for me. 

That’s not what this is about. 

This is about boundaries. You see, I have been in multiple situations where my lack of boundaries has hurt me, a lot. I have led people on, I have had people over-ride my no, I have hurt people...to name a few. 

Boundaries felt constricting to me, and it took me a long time to realize that boundaries are actually preserving. They are honoring. 

I am not sure if I am yet able to hold boundaries that are healthy and fluid and malleable, I still tend to building protective walls and feel threatened by most people and things. 

It’s a work in progress. 

[kikiest-things]

My Writing, Revisited

Friends of the internet, it’s been a while since I shared my writing and I am starting to. At this point, I am revisiting old pieces that I am updating and editing. Enjoy! Once upon a time; Once upon a time, I thought: I am too old for “once upon a time.” Once upon a time, I believed myself and I stopped believing in dreams. My dreams became nothing but an escape from a reality I so desperately wanted to run away from and no longer something that I aspire to be.When you stop believing in “once upon a time”, reality becomes set in stone, and you lose the will to change things, you lose the strength to think something into existence. I lost touch with my imagination.This is how you grow old; And weak;

And helpless.

Once upon a time, I walked around with that notion in mind, like a crown declaring my sovereignty, heaviness deeply set in my heart and lungs and upon my shoulders, and I met a boy.Yes, a boy, not yet a fully grown man. He brought randomness back into my life. And randomness, to me, stood for everything that is young, everything that I thought I was not. 

Young is random, and reckless, and unplanned for. 

Young is the fool.

Young is full of surprises.

He asked me questions with the curiosity of a child, the kind of questions where he actually expected and waited for answers, he even listened! Once upon a time, my answers mattered, they were, somehow, worth listening to. Once upon a time, I felt like I mattered.

Then, that boy no longer was a boy. Maybe it was time for him to grow, and that growth was further away from me. This is not a story, this is not about love; this is just about how some people can unintentionally change you. That boy left a little him-shaped hole in my heart. 

The truth is, it really doesn’t feel like a hole, because it doesn’t hurt, it just makes me smile. I put my hand on my heart and I feel all the him-shaped holes and cracks that have managed to open it, and I am not so lonely anymore. 

He had old eyes, he was the cusp of autumn; the September equinox.

As the rain fell on a cloudy London, he allowed me to understand that the beauty of art lies in its imperfection. Beautiful art is often imperfect and incomplete, and some people are beautiful in that imperfect kind of way; with parts so bright and colorful and others that are so dark they might break you. These people are the kind that changes your life – most often without realizing it.

It was during that time that I discovered how memories are made. It is a very simple process, really, simpler that one might imagine. To me, memories are in essence a potion made of eyes and smiles. Memories are made in slow motion; you look up and capture someone’s smile and keep the snapshot, frozen in time, etched in your memory for as long as you wish. Some memories prematurely fade, and others stay when they are no longer welcome. 

What I know for sure is that they can grow stale. The colors washed out by the sun of day after day rising and setting on a memory that once warmed your heart.

And if this happens, you might or might not, grow cold. The sparkle leaving your eyes, the color in your hair fleeting and you, alone. Aware not of what surrounds you, only yearning for what was, once upon a time.

Once upon a time, I met a boy who redefined beautiful; he redefined art, and love and hatred. He redefined friendship for me.

And once upon another time, I met a man who spoke as rhythmically as chocolate, and his giggle sounded like innocence. That man put his hands on the small of my back as we watched the skyline dance in the colors of sunset and it was beautiful – in that imperfect kind of way. 

That man, he had a talent so special yet so sad, he had the talent of allowing the moment to pass. And this is how I learnt of the place where moments go after they pass.They go into a void in the universe, the void of “What Never Was” guarded with a gate that looks eerily familiar. It is a gate that I advise you to not go beyond; for it is a sad, sad place and you might never be able to go back. “What Never Was” is a place that is humid and loud; reminiscent of unspoken thoughts rushing through your head, on a hot summer night by the sea, every wave arriving with a vast array of possibility.

That man had magical fingers that I shall never forget; he did not mind grass that was damp. He was so beautiful it hurt; because he never knew.It was fresh and colorful, the kind of thing ended before you know it. 

I would find myself sitting in the late afternoon light; the kind that hits only one half of everything…drawing warm golden shadows around the room, and I would think of him.I would picture myself walking into a room with old wooden floors and a big, big window through which you can see the city you are so in love with – and the sunlight fills the room leaving no space for words.

He was Spring.

Once upon yet another time, I met a man from a land far away. Sick for a home and for a family that he never knew. Longing for a friend, for something different – skin that is a few shades darker, hair that curls and winters that are not so cold – he travelled in search of a fresh start. That man was everything I ever knew, everything I ever wanted, only in another lifetime.

He was midsummer; when days are long and eventful, when you forget everything else and make that one person your world. Days when it was too hot to look beyond what lay before me, apple trees in bloom and misty T-shirts hinting of curiosity. 

Tall, jaded and handsome, he taught me what it feels like to be wrong. When you are wrong, nothing you say will make anything better, so you just retreat and give up on (your) words. And what do you have when you have no words?

(An emptiness in your heart, and a heaviness in your being – that’s what you have, in case you were wondering.)

Once upon a time, I decided to listen. To listen for words that were not spoken, music that has not yet been made, I would listen out for a bass line and for a hum that strums the strings from which hearts hang. 

I was learning to attune to nuance and subtlety, a language so new to me.I listen closely and I hear that sound, and I am sure if someone else is listening, too. 

No one in this life is truly alone, aloneness is not real. Observing while not being observed, in the observation itself you are relating and in relating, you are never alone. I listen even more closely and I remember a song with violins. Violins that feel like home that I am yet to find once again and, in my head, someone reaches out for my hand ushering me back into reality, and I look at them and smile.

Once upon a time, words were spoken of how much of a daydreamer I am. I remember that as I catch myself doing it again and realize I am smiling. It’s the thought of something that never happened – but a thought of him, and one of you and one of her whom I expected so little from before she finally left.

Things that never were make me forget to breathe sometimes, and my chest is still… and my heart, my heart…It twists a little.

Then my eyes shine with youth that I pray will never run dry as I realize it is all part of a bigger picture. All chapters of a book…and in “once upon a time,” I believe again.

Once upon a time,  I believe – again.