wherejoshwent

[wherejoshwent]

tulips that unfold slowly, and then drop all their petals suddenly and at once when brushed past

an unraveling

[wherejoshwent]

Past Lives (2023)

[wherejoshwent]

Margot at the Wedding

[wherejoshwent]

In the past month or so I have been feeling happy, making a special effort to not take the things and people in my life for granted. This was triggered by a conversation with a friend, which made me realise that the things we think will be our problems never turn out to be the saddest things in our lives. Now, if I am getting hung up on some work issue or worrying about the logistics of my relationship, for example, I think to myself, I should be so lucky that these are the only things I have to worry about. I know there will likely be times ahead where I will have real, deep sadnesses, simply because they are a part of life, and I’ll look back on all the fretting I experience now and see it as trivial.

Today I went to see my Dad. I haven’t been to see him in months, so I was surprised when the receptionist at his home did not ask who I was there to see when I came in, only got someone to take me up straight away. I did not have to give his name, and then when they didn’t recognise who I was referring to, to clarify I meant Horse, which is the name he asks people there to call him. This was a relief.

When I knocked on his door he asked who was there. When I said my name he told me to come in but then looked warily at me from his chair. ‘Is it really you, Is?’ I noticed that he had torn out of the wall the neat unit installed there for him to buzz for help from the nurses, its wires dangling behind him. His guitar had been snapped at the neck and lay broken alongside one of the walls.

He was less talkative than usual. He was experiencing great tooth pain; when I said he ought to ask for a dentist he said there was nothing wrong with his teeth. He told me the problem was his mouth had been filled with metal fillings, which ‘they’ were using to administer electric shocks to him. He kept opening his mouth wide, pulling it wider with his fingers for me to see, his eyes furious. I was surprised that when I told him that the people in the home were there to care for him and help him, he calmly told me it was simply the way he saw it. He wasn’t willing to debate.

We talked about the nice things about where he lived. I told him I thought it was glamorous to have an ensuite bathroom, and he told me what he’d like to get an interior designer to do with the place. He’d have a chaise longue by the door, and some sort of wall or screen so people couldn’t see his bed as soon as they opened the door. He thought he might find a lamp for his bedside at the car boot sale. ‘When I was there the other day, I was looking for… what was I looking for?’ he said. We looked out his window, across the allotments there. ‘It would be nice if I could just take a walk, but there’s only a lift to get down, which would be great if it works, but it doesn’t work, does it?’

I felt guilty when I realised the lie the nurses must have told him; more so that I didn’t correct him. My dad lives on the 3rd floor of a home for adults with complex needs. Nobody may leave or enter without a nurse’s pass. As far as I am aware, my dad has not left that corridor since he came to live in the home about a year and half ago.

There had been a question I wanted to ask him. It was something I had been wondering about recently. I knew I could ask him with the safety that he would not remember me having asked after I said it. My parents married when they were 23 years old after having known each other for 6 months. It was my mother’s second marriage. My father left 11 days after they were wed, but my mother was able to persuade him to come back to her. But he always had a bag packed under the bed. So I wanted to ask him, if you could go back and do your life again, would you still get married and have children?

He paused and considered the question. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Not necessarily in that order, but I would.’ This was a great relief to me. That my dad did not regret having had us as part of his life. I had, despite my guilt and sense of betrayal at doing so, recorded this conversation on my phone. When I listened to it back when I got home, I could hear another patient sobbing loudly from another room.

My Dad is only 57 years old. When I look at this photograph, which is in his room, of him and his mother with my sisters and me, it gives me real bodily pain. To look at us all there, oblivious of what was to come. His paranoia, his addictions, the physical harm that would come to his body as a result of his psychotic episodes. I can’t help but just feel so unbearably sad.

I never imagined then what my parents’ involvement in my life would be when I was older. All my dreams were about myself, some including my sisters. My parents had split up long before I was old enough to consider them as people in their own right, and the futures they might have when taking care of my sisters and me was no longer their main priority. So I never imagined how he might be as a grandfather, for example. And by the time I would be old enough to consider this, I would already know that the care my father needed would be equal to or greater than the care a child needs. That makes me sad too, now — that even in my imagination there has never been a future with him in it participating as a father normally might. I feel so much grief tonight for that. For what I’ll never even be able to imagine.

[wherejoshwent]

the angels of love

the angels of love were ones who began to fall and got stuck somewhere on the way down hung by the collars of their shirts on the spires of churches  and the tops of trees or up above a drinking fountain — anywhere a forgotten plastic bag might get caught on a windy day that sweeps the rubbish from the streets. 

those angels not fully fallen belonged to no element and spread their own suspense in thoughts of imaginary lives that seemed more real than anything that had been lived

the same impulse that would make you save the wrapper from a complimentary mint you received after dinner a token of the night — that’s what love is

clinging to things, or having something that lives on in the imagination something you can never look at full on in the moment but which gathers beauty in a rear view mirror, diminishing in size on a horizon fished out from the bottom of a shoebox you keep under the bed beneath the letters that haven’t been read in years which it would take a death to make you read again

desire is only made possible with empty spaces it needs nothingness around it, it needs absence. imagine a ballroom with just the one thing you want at the other end of it the ballroom is filled with water and you can walk through it only slowly and only far beneath the water.

are you listening to what i’m saying?  to get to what you desire you must fill your lungs with the air up by the chandelier, sink down to the bottom and walk across the room while holding your breath you always only get so far. and it always seems like on the next go you can make it.

and why do you want to go there in the first place? just for a couple of days in which the sun happened to be shining, which made a new way of living seem possible? a day you were far from your ordinary responsibilities, and ate new foods for breakfast? is that all it takes? would you stop breathing for this?

why don’t you just feel the depth beneath you as you float on the surface? someone painted beautiful frescoes on the ceiling centuries ago

why can’t that be enough for you? why must you always want to go under?

there are other rooms here; you haven’t even seen them yet. the angels of love are the devils you know — 

why don’t you just let out the breath you have been holding and scream for the devils you haven’t met yet, who you might discover are nothing  to be feared after all:

come all ye unknown devils — show me that i do not know anything at all — i am not afraid to learn that my own life is something so completely beyond me. i imagine and yearn to do one thing while doing something entirely opposite. it seems i am on the way; that in just a short time i will be living the life i imagined the life those angels of love sang to me before i knew the same song had been sung to everyone: only the fools like me thought themselves to be the sole hearer. what is beyond my comprehension is that i have been living all along!  this waiting has been my life. its beauty has been the candelight on the surface of the water far above my head, which has called me up again each time

yes i am ready now to go on. to see what i haven’t seen before or else to continue to see the same thing over and over again  but this time without delusion. this time breathing in and out and knowing that one day it must come to an end and that there isn’t a stone angel in this city that can save me

[wherejoshwent]

[wherejoshwent]

[wherejoshwent]

I spent the day lying on my bed with my curtains drawn against the heat of the sun, dreaming fever dreams that mixed with the sound of children playing in the gardens outside. Last time I had this app and wrote on it I was living a very different kind of life. One that I was in the end only able to keep up a few months, despite all my talk of being adaptable.

Before the year had finished I was sat in the front seat of a van between two men who I had hired to move all my things down to London again. My cat was in a case on my knee, all my possessions in the back. The driver asked me what my 5 year plan was, and seemed surprised and a little disapproving that I didn’t have one despite being older than him by 3 years.

There’s still no plan, not really. There are lives I think about, but I fear they may be just like that life I imagined and then went to live in the seaside town — one that I had to get out of, no matter the consequences. It was maybe the first time in my life I just acted completely selfishly, and I did it only because I felt there was no other way things could go. There were other ways in theory, but I was not able to live them out. It’s the age old problem — you can run but you can’t hide. 

Maybe there’s no need to be so dramatic about it after all. I struggle to admit when I am lonely, and perhaps that’s all it was. It was loneliness; I was ashamed to be so lonely. To depend on people around me. But I was, and I couldn’t stand it. I had to admit that I couldn’t be alone any more. 

I’ve noticed I write about myself more when I am wasting time. In the months and weeks that I’m minding my own business, writing fiction and keeping healthy, my diary sees no updates. I went to see a performance from a choir accompanied by a cello and while the music played I had this image in my head of a door banging open and closed in the wind. And I felt that is what I wanted to be like. Not hanging on to one way or another. Putting up no resistance, just existing and moving with the wind. Not clinging to anything. No anxieties for the future or thoughts of the past, just being in the present. Letting things come and go. Destroying any idea of my own ego, not wanting to be liked, not wanting anyone to think anything of me at all. I want to embrace my own insignificance. 

[wherejoshwent]

— Excerpts from “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” by Walt Whitman

[wherejoshwent]

[wherejoshwent]

Now I can leave my desk and drift down through the park, down the stone steps through the trees, past the bowling green with the sprinkler watering the grass there, across the field, up to the strip of concrete they call the north sea wall until I’m standing in front of the water, looking out at the waves different every day. 

I am the kind of person who adapts to new ways of life with relative ease. I used to envy others who felt that some part of the world was where they belonged, who had a home town they swore they would never leave or would any way end up again, a place they knew they wanted to live forever. I have no such place, but now I feel maybe that is a gift in itself. The ability to move anywhere and feel after a week or two not just that I could stay there forever but that this is the way it has always been. Standing looking out at the sea it feels as though I have done this every day of my life; it is hard to imagine that less than a month ago I lived in the busy capital city crowded with others. All the old lives feel just like dreams, half forgotten, only this one in the present seems real. 

I appreciate the quiet, the only sound out the window the cries of gulls in the air. It did used to bother me, the constant noise of cars. I think perhaps I am supposed to live a quiet kind of life. My housemate and I went out walking down to the part of the beach that isn’t visited by tourists, where there’s a grassy beach. We had to walk through a field to get there and she asked me what kind of landscape I felt at home in. I said I didn’t know. She said she always imagined me as someone who belonged in the kind of one we were in, wild grass and yellow wildflowers. When I imagine those kind of scenes it is only from a car window, the kinds of fields you see on a busy motorway; in the distance you might see a big white house by itself on a hillside. I remember when my sister went to school in the north of the country and we would drive through the peak district, the winding roads, see the huge hills awe inspiring at dusk. It could be in the future I live that way I suppose. 

I listened to a podcast with the poet Shira Erlichman. She told of how when she was younger she and her friends would choose at random a letter of the alphabet and go on a roadtrip to a random town starting with that letter. The fun was just being somewhere with the people you liked, it wasn’t related to the destination. She pointed out that that’s all life is anyway -- even if you have an idea what you want, you don’t know what it will be like when you get it. So you might as well have fun with the unknown. It made me feel a great relief. I was out running at the time, the sky was overcast, the sea beside me was rough and I cried a bit. It’s fine to just move around and try different things. There’s no need to have some ultimate plan or have to have in mind when you meet people some end goal with them. You can just be with people and places, and get to know them and see what that unfolds as the unknown becomes more known. 

[wherejoshwent]

“I wanted to tell you that…Wherever you may end up in this world, I will be searching for you.”

Your Name (2016)

[wherejoshwent]

[wherejoshwent]

my arms, tree’s arms

[wherejoshwent]

walking at dusk, the end of winter

[wherejoshwent]

Whisper of the Heart (1995) dir. Yoshifumi Kondō

[wherejoshwent]

same tbh.