Wednesday, 08:04, London
The ritual of the morning pages. Still resistance, still keenness to craft. Each day I get closer to a place that’s a platform to step off from. It feels closer now than it has. Yesterday’s conflicts have been moved through, mostly. It was the time alone. Solitude. Space to be completely myself, unbeholden, to make decisions at my own pace, to hear my emotions and needs in the silence of myself.
I’m trying to remember the weather. Not methodically. Slowly, loosening my focus to try and let memories surface. Like walking out off the path in the park into the field, as I’ve started doing on my walks home from work, to reveal the wide angle view.
They don’t come willingly. That’s not really how memory works. Something dramatic needs to happen for us to remember the weather. We need a story to scaffold a skyscape, or dramatic conflict to shock the imprint into our bodies.
A few are coming…
A sunset in the Azores twelve years ago. I was there with an ex and her family. It was a trip to mark graduating from university, the last holiday with her mum before the Alzheimer’s took hold. We were walking after dinner before driving home on the north side of the island. I’d sensed something building. I told them, excitedly, shyly, something like, “I think there might be a really good sunset if we stay round this side of the bay”.
The scale of it was colossal with an unending horizon across the Atlantic. The drama of an exploding cloudscape under which a setting fire lit a thousand oranges and purples. I remember being proud, thrilled, and unbound. On a precipice of youth and wildness.
The clock’s ticking on my duties for the day…
A thunderstorm at Glastonbury the first or second year I went, early twenty-tens. Sheltering in the campsite and opening my mouth wide to catch water streaming in ribbons off the roof of a gazebo.
Thunderstorms rolling behind the stage while we watched Bjork perform at sunset in Victoria Park on a stiflingly close August Saturday.
Thunderstorms in Croatia a year or two before that, up in the top nook of the Adriatic, every night walking back glowing from a festival to our apartment. Giant balls of supercharged electricity sparking every second.
Thunderstorms come easier it seems…
On Lake Bled, before that festival in Croatia, we had to scramble down a hill after making the vantage point and seeing a supercell building up behind the mountains to the north. I can still feel my body clench imagining the racket that storm caused when it breached the peaks.
On Lake Geneva, in 2012. A bolt of lightning struck the lake next to where we were sat and I thought we’d been hit. I walked around the city for half an hour after feeling I must be a ghost.
A retreating summer storm at Steph’s 30th dragging rainbows in its wake. That morning out my skylight in Sheffield where it rained crystals against a pure blue sky without clouds. Watching towering pillars shed showers across Sheffield from the Arts Tower instead of studying. Cloud shadows racing across countryside fields. Thick snow falling in floodlights.
Our minds must be filled with the weather. But it’s only bound in stories they surface with clarity.