Junk Drawer

11 March 2025

The longer I stay away, the harder it is to return. The old, sticky thoughts creep back and get stuck on a loop. I recently took a Mental Health First Aid training course and we talked about our “stress signatures”—the behaviours that indicate we’re feeling stressed. A dismissive and judgemental internal monologue is one of mine.

I’m on a new commute, from West Norwood to London Bridge. It takes the same amount of time, but goes through Peckham and South Bermondsey. New vistas and windows to peek through as I pass by.

I put off writing about the biggest things. It’s easiest to document a microcosm: a simple observation of feeling or surroundings. It’s a satisfying exercise.

17 March 2025

Florida sun. An empty house. An empty flat. The train tracks visible from our bedroom window. A wall turning from white to tea-soaked biscuit. Boxes. Facebook Marketplace.

A bad back has forced me to sit down for the first time in a few weeks. The longer I’ve been away from writing, the harder it is to return.

We went to a funeral in January.

We moved out of a neighbourhood we loved in February, into a home that we own.

The thing I was worried about happened, that life would get busy and I wouldn’t make time to write.

But the pressure to write is my own invention. I can never shake the fear that I’m going to forget how it feels, how it felt. That if I don’t capture something while it’s happening, I won’t be able to capture its purest essence, the most organic expression of that time lost forever. As overblown as this seems, it does make me feel sad.

I guess I wonder what I miss when I try to capture a time after it happened, the detail of those unique thoughts, words, interactions now a blur, replaced by the more vivid and immediate present.

It’s also easier to process the big through the little. Noticing the sky or the wind, or the scene directly in front of you gives you the present moment as the starting point. Then your mind guides you to what it wants to express.

7 April 2025

Florida sun. An empty house. Ashes in an urn. London grey. An empty flat. Boxes. A wall turns from white to tea-soaked biscuit.

Saying goodbye to our second floor flat. A neighbourhood we loved to live in.

Mayow Park just down the road, past the cardboard cutout of Stanley Tucci in a neighbour’s window. A beloved Mum friend a little further. And just a little further, pre-natal yoga in Sydenham and the little bookshop that does mulled wine in the winter. Back the other way, Forest Hill superstore, the best corner shop in the world. The beer shop, the wine stop, The Grand Palladium, Forest Hill’s premier venue for Nigerian weddings, where The Rolling Stones once played in the 70s. Across the tracks, our brunch spot. The pub in an old post office where we threw Luna’s first birthday party. The refill shop, the deli where I spent some key moments of solace in late pregnancy and early parenthood. The pool where Luna and I floated together.

It’s so precious to love what life looks like exactly the way it is.

But now we have a different view out the kitchen window. I chop potatoes as a neighbours walks past and waves. I’m grateful for this moment of connection.

From our old kitchen window, you could see the train tracks just past the garden of our building. I loved hearing the trains go by, seeing a flash of the Overground through the trees. Luna would point and shout her word for train, “ge!” every time she heard the whoosh and clack.

I was really going to miss this view. It was unexpectedly hard to leave this flat. Forest Hill was the first place we chose, the place that made us say “we want to stay here”. This is an odd feeling for two people who grew up moving around. But home slowly dawns on you, and here we were.

It was painful and thrilling to walk around the empty flat, like we had never been there, now waiting to be full of someone else’s life. How will everyone know that this is the place we took Luna home to? Where she spent her first year of life?

A few weeks earlier I had wandered around another empty home. The house my grandparents used to live in, in Windermere, Florida. A beautiful house on a lake, with huge windows, lots of light and 70s wood panelling.

After my Baapa died, and the siblings all assembled, my mom and her sister stayed on to painstakingly disentangle the family from the home. They kept what felt too important to lose, and then made sure every piece of furniture, art, and Meema collectible went to a loving home. Great Grandma’s shell collection was split between two avid shell heads, who sat admiring and dividing their treasures for hours.

Walking around that empty house delivered the most grief I had felt all week. Everything else was a performance, the interning of the ashes, celebration of life, looking through photo albums as a big, extended family. A heartfelt performance, but the stuff we were supposed to do and say.

Memories project themselves into every room, overlapping, merging, jumping in time. Playing “The Game”(an infamous board game Meema cut off a cereal box) at the kitchen table, running a “cafe” on the porch and charging $4.50 for Diet Coke that our customers had purchased for the fridge themselves, pestering Baapa in his chair to tell more stories about his fictional boyhood dog named Meow. But the emptiness is even louder.

Tan carpet with indents from the guest bed.

30 April 2025

And this whole time, days and weeks and months are passing.

When we moved in, the wavy branches of the corkscrew willow in our garden were bare sticks. I looked up and they were coated with caterpillar-green fuzz, which has since shed and left us with bright, curly leaves.

I’m still fixated on time passing. Or the perception of time passing. How you can open up one moment for hours and then lose months. How the cycle of the seasons never stops.

9 May 2025

Writing clarifies when things are swirling, as they have been lately.

Nothing original, balancing work and life. As Luna becomes a toddler, new flavours of magnificence, challenge and tiredness introduce themselves. The world is scary and increasingly exclusionary.

I don’t write and build the dam of excuses back up that I finally busted through when I set this blog up almost a year ago.

This was never supposed to be polished or complete. This was for me. An escape, a deepening, a portal, a pause.

I need the constant reminder that I can never capture it all, never say it perfectly, and whatever I manage to document in the moment or recall after the fact is valuable.

Short is not bad, it’s something.

Incomplete is not failure, it’s something.

Not knowing, fear, messiness, grappling, just figuring it out, is real and the place from which we grow.