On finding, searching, walking, and ripening ears.

Recounting May

For the past year, I have managed to keep up with the monthly Instagram dump. More than the curation of the photographs and its neat bundle of visual cues for my supposed audience, what I look forward to is writing my long-winded caption. Somehow the caption space felt safe, in contrast to all my other writing which would be publicly or privately scrutinised. This month, I decided to take things up a notch. Write my Instagram caption for this Substack. I can immediately feel the difference. Writing on my phone, for the caption, feels effortless and my words seem to come unbidden. Here, I have already typed and retyped this opening paragraph three times.

Anyway, it is time to get on with it. For the past couple of months I have been very slowly getting through Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust: A History of Walking (2001). I have my specific reasons for engaging with the text, but I am also enjoying her prose, paying attention to how she’s divided her chapters, and love the idea of having a footer that runs through the book with quotes on walking from people like Yoko Ono, Charles Dickens to Voltaire, though I suppose that gives you an idea of where she is placed geographically and mentally.

I came across a quotation quite early on in the book, that I have been reciting often to myself. Perhaps it is trite, but for me, as I wobble on thresholds and drink uncertainty, I have found in it a grounding prayer that allows me to keep moving. Solnit writes,

“To travel without arriving would be as incomplete as to arrive without having travelled.”

I had a wonderful start to the year. I defended and even delighted in my thesis, I went home for two full months and it was lush with friends, family, and a return to the bare but necessary rituals of being a performer. But when I came back to the UK, all I wanted to do was leave because I had nothing to do here. I mean, I did. I had the job-hunt. And that is what it felt like; a hunt. A need to stalk, corner and thrust a spear into flesh before someone else did, because if I didn’t, I was going to go hungry, I would be seen as the weak member of the pack. Something like that, sometimes I shouldn’t overextend analogies to keep its bite. Sorry. I’ll change imagery and get back to Solnit.

Essentially, all I wanted was to arrive without travelling. I wanted the universe to drop a job in my lap. I decided that the PhD had been my travel. But unfortunately that PhD was the arrival, of an entirely different journey. This job thing, it was going to be a new सफ़र (suffer). My jokes have no peer, obviously. Anyway, the good news is, that by making absolutely no effort for three full months, and having savings and supportive (if weary) families I am ready to travel and suffer again.

And travel this month, I did, thanks to kindness of friends lost and found. Walked along the Dorset coast with field flaming yellow on one side, and the sea a shimmering blue duvet on the other, and the sky puffing clouds above. Then another walk swallowed whole by the wind in the moors, sheltering under ancient rocks piled flat on one another to spite the wind, and I could almost obviously see Rochester striding across the landscape. And walks along the London canals, the city’s little water bracelets.

I gave thanks to public and other libraries where I could always find a desk to work, and learn a little more about the part of the city I was in. I ambled into museums and wondered about how I had been to museums about homes, and homes that were museums in the same week. I discovered the joy of bus rides on the top-front seat of the double-decker watching the city build and scatter around me. I attended free art events, listened to people sing, made things out of trash, petted a cat, aggressively DMd near strangers to meet and hang out with me, and launched myself into life once more. I wrote emails, filled in Google forms, and small things glinted in the hard rock of life once again, and I picked at them with swollen, scabbed fingers and pocketed them.

I find myself travelling again.

Also the thing about ripening ears is because in Malayalam the word for a wound getting infected is for it to ripen. A piercing I got last month has been acting up, and tbh I have been thinking of it as my little ear fruit because of this association and just wanted to put that out there. Saline rinses, hot compresses, chamomile tea bags to the rescue.

Also I have noticed that some newsletters end with what the person is reading or watching or some cool thing that happened so I am going to do the same. I think I am going to call it Book, Place, Animal, Thing.

Book: I am currently reading my first Anuradha Roy All The Lives We Have Never Lived and find myself cradled and held by her beautiful prose.

Place: I went to Book Cycle, a second-hand charity bookshop in Exeter where you can get up to three books and pay as you like, and the proceeds go to building libraries around the world.

Animal: When I went to drop the last of my books at the University Library, I met Odysseus the cat, but I couldn’t pet him because he got scared by a leaf-blower.

Thing: I got a new mop this month and it’s a game-changer and I love mopping.

Okay bye, thanks for reading on here if you did.