Writing, for me, will never be a straightforward process.  I’m realizing this lately.  I’ve reached a stage in The Book whereby everything about the project disgusts and repels me.  Even a single sentence has the power to fill me with so much doubt that I tell the Man, calmly and confidently, that I’m thinking of just giving it up altogether.  I’ve become a Queen of Melodrama (”where are you going?” I cry when he gets out of bed, puts his trousers on, and heads downstairs).  Mostly what I think to myself when I sit down to do some work on the wretched project is: I wish I was writing something simpler. My next book will definitely be a novel.  No more genre-crossing, mind-bending, intertextual nonsense.

Then I remember that even if I was writing a straightforward novel, I would be struggling just as much.  I do have one, hidden in a folder on my computer somewhere.  I’ve never written a single bit of it in a logical way; it’s all bits and pieces, tied together by the tenuous string of a single character.  And every few months I decide to make a massive change to the entire premise.  Which means that though I’ve been thinking about the book for years, I may as well have cooked up the idea yesterday.

On days filled with denial, I like to think that it’s anxiety that makes me like this, that if I had a steady income, a stronger foothold in the literary world, I would be able to sit down with my laptop on a Saturday afternoon like today, listen to the wind and the rain and the overgrown tree in our front yard lashing against the window, and push forward.  But I’m inherently doubtful and inherently scattered in my thinking.  That, in many ways, is the whole premise of this book.  And it’s not a bad thing.  So remind me, will you, next time I say something in a telenovela-worthy tone of voice, like, “that’s it, I’m starting over, this just isn’t working,” that my process isn’t any better or worse than anyone else’s.  It’s just mine.

*see here

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Yesterday we woke in a converted manor house somewhere near Cheltenham.  The sky cracked like an egg over the lake.  Silver light flooding the morning.  This house was translated from a dream of mine, I’m sure of it.  When we drove up in the taxi on Wednesday I felt a little like I imagine Charles Ryder did on seeing Brideshead for the first time.  The lake, the gardens, the rolling green humps beyond.  I went swimming.  An indoor pool; the air thick with warm mist.  I’d forgotten what it feels like to submerge your body, to float, to push against the water.  Things I used to know so intimately, lost in the move.  Remembered in an evening.  We ate in the dining room, sipped after-dinner drinks.  Slept thickly.  In the morning, we read the paper and drank fresh-squeezed orange juice while looking out onto the grounds.  He skimmed news headlines while I read a story about child welfare officers in London.  A family of seven, a self-harming mother.  Squeezed into a single room.  And here we sat with all this space.

After breakfast I went for a stroll around the grounds.  Found a swing overlooking the lower lake; snuck past a slumbering swan.  Sat on a bench in the garden batting away insects.  Sank my wellies into fresh grass.  Gazed up at the house itself; precise, stately, exactly measured.  Touched the stones with my toe before I came back inside.  Somebody built this place.

Then trains.  Maybe it was the rhythmic motion, maybe the journey on that swing to childhood and back, maybe the unusually early hour at which we woke, but I fell almost instantly into sleep.  Awoke in Swindon, hating the sound of the word.  Swindon.  Listening to a man on his mobile saying, “I can see you but I don’t know how to get to you.  I can’t get out of Swindon station!“  Slept again.  Didcot.  A concrete jungle.  Gone were the yellow fields of rapeseed; the same rapeseed we’d seen driving to Bath at the weekend, the same yellow, the same green.  A doze.  Oxford.  Oxford under a heavy sky; will it rain?  He had to go to work so I got on the bus by myself, carrying my bags wearily now.  No glamour in the journey down the Cowley Road.  The corner of Leopold failed to interest me as it usually does; the murals only looked depressing under the gloomy light.

I started to think about this schizofrenic existence we lead.  I have one foot in the manor house, one foot in the poor house.  My last day of school yesterday, indefinately; but have I ceased being a student because of it?  I think my mind is having trouble catching up, my body struggling to adjust to how swift, how vast, the changes are.  I suffer wanderlust in this season and have dreams of hot, fragranced places; but also, I’ve taken to wearing a six-year-old pair of shoes whose heels have rubbed off because they smell less than the rotting ballet flats I own but seem more seasonal than the boots I wore all winter until the soles began to peel back.

It requires great leaps, this modern way of living.  Great leaps of the mind, great leaps of faith.

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The Man and I are taking an impromptu midweek holiday.  We’re spending the night in a swanky Cotswold hotel (one of the more unusual perks of the Man’s unconventional set of jobs).  So of course the morning dawned cold and wet.  Already late for work, I spent twenty minutes reading Sharon Olds in the dark house.  Then got on my bicycle and swam through sheets of mist.  Remembering something a friend told me last night about using the balls of my feet for more power, about imagining not that I’m pushing the pedals but that my legs at each revolution are being lifted up.  Maybe it was my imagination, my willingness today to believe all things are possible, but I think I expended less energy than usual getting to the office.  This feeling of possibility started yesterday evening, after I’d spent hours hard at work on The Book and we were at the pub.  Blowing off steam.  Live acoustic music.  Somehow listening to that music gave me a strange sense of power.  Or maybe it was the red wine. 

But now, here I am, hours away from what should be a much-needed romantic and relaxing getaway (nothing better than abandoning the week halfway through, pretending to live more spontaneously than we do), trying to mentally pack, and all I can think is this (and I know it’s shallow, but somehow the fate of this experience seems tied to how well I’m dressed when we arrive):

What on earth do posh people wear when it’s raining?

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Bare legs under a dress. The itch of grass touching skin.  The way it feels to be in a city where you have absolutely no sense of direction or context, except perhaps a ten-year-old memory that is mostly hidden by the cobwebs of the mind and characterized, when it does glint, by the utterly mundane.  What a long, straight road looks like.  That a little bit of height, in a country such as this, gives you more perspective than you think you deserve.  Lots of people in a tiny kitchen.  That the garden, though it may have slept through winter, needs tending again.  The importance of a good book.  A bath, a trashy magazine, wet fingerprints left all over the celebrities’ faces.  How wild and fickle a strong wind can make you.

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I’m watching a horsefly circle our room in a panic.  He came in through the open window, can’t get out again.  Do you ever want to tell insects to just slow down a moment, to look at their surroundings, to remember that if they got in, surely they can get out?  Last night as I sat on the toilet a moth came suddenly alive on the wall beside me.  When we were nine or ten, a friend of mine who had rescued a dying bird from the old bathtub in her mother’s garden and was now trying to capture a bug to feed the patient had a moth fly into her eye.  She shrieked, ran in circles like the horsefly.  After we laughed about it.  You have a moth in your eye.

Things, in that cyclical way that they work, need repairing again.  My bicycle, my computer.  We need to mop the stairs, hoover the hallway.  I forget that the objects in my life, the major ones, need as much attention as the people in my life sometimes.

Yesterday after work, even though it was Friday, even though it was a glorious day, all sun-and-clouds-and-wind, I found myself in a state of deep despair.  Every human interaction seemed a transgression.  I started to hate people, hate things, in equal and powerful measure.  The streets turned ugly and mean.  Women handing out flyers, beggars with their lopsided eyes and plaintive cries, schoolgirls in slutty skirts sharing illicit cigarettes on the circus that is Cornmarket in the afternoon, a lone man with a deep voice standing in the center of the crowd, saying, you must embrace Jesus, or all is lost.

So I did the only thing I could think of: I went home.  This is more complicated than it sounds.  The ride, along the High street, round the roundabout, up the wind tunnel of the Iffley Road, along uneven, potholed James Street, is familiar enough.  It’s been memorized, done at every conceivable hour, in every conceivable season, in rain, flurries of snow, rare and undiluted summer sunshine, but it’s more about a state of mind than knowing a route and coming to the end of it.  At home I felt ill at ease even in the study, my usual sanctuary: the view into the garden only put me in mind of things to do.  I needed to burrow deeper into the nest.  So I went upstairs, into the bed, even though the hour did not warrent this.  Under the duvet.  Received, as I lay listening to the windowpane rattle in the springtime gale, a message from the Man that put my mind at ease enough to drift into sleep, and when I awoke it was because it was his footsteps on the stairs, his presence in the doorway, his body next to mine.  And how comforting, later, to walk down the road to our pub, to see friends and then have dinner in our neighborhood.  To feel a sense of ownership all the way from late afternoon to late-at-night.  To lie giggling like children in bed after midnight.

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This morning I awake thinking of the first apartment I had in Boston.  Two years of dormitory living, tiny, stinking communal showers, no kitchens, wizened mice snacking at students’ discarded potato chips, sounds of sniffles, phone calls, drunkeness, DVDs and music, careless, inept sex.  I sought refuge in the views from windows, of bridges stretched across the Charles River, of seasonal beauty in the botanic gardens.  I’ve never been quite so lonely as I felt those first two years, living in disgustingly close proximity to hundreds of other disillusioned youths.

That first apartment, in Kenmore Square, was too expensive for what it was; an impulsively signed lease at the end of the semester.  A one-bedroom converted into a two-bedroom, so that the living room was only a strip of hallway, the kitchen only a black-and-white tiled place to stand and eat toast in the mornings, gazing out at the tip of the Prudential Building piercing a dynamic Boston sky.  But I loved it anyway.  Up three flights of creaky, carpeted stairs, a hovel of my own, with views of my own choosing.  Custom shelves installed crudely by the man the realty company sent to repaint in September.  There was a moment, I remember this moment so clearly, in early September.  A week after I’d moved in, perhaps.  Boston still shedding the heat of summer, but with characteristic grace, so that the days, slightly windy, unbelievably clear, felt almost too mild, too gentle, to be true.  I’d been out with a friend, having lunch perhaps, and I came into my apartment, opened the bedroom window, sat on my new futon bed, felt this strange elation.

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