Junk Drawer

12 May 2025

Yesterday we spent all day in the garden.

I weeded a completely concealed plant bed, pulling deep roots one by one from a tangle of overgrown green. I occasionally stood up to take in the increasingly large share of neat, eager soil that remained.

I cut back a rose bush drooping heaving over our patio.

Part of me resists the idea of weeding, loving the wildness of the branches and awkward shape they continue to grow into. I want to let these gently living creatures take up the space they demand.

I am a beginner at gardening. I have many houseplants, but their survival is down to my trial-and-error and their resilience rather than any specialist knowledge.

I love the project of the garden. Regular care and maintenance. I have grand ambitions but I could also let it be. It will grow and evolve over time, reflect the changing of the seasons, be a place where I can choose to tend or to rest.

16 May 2025

It’s a tightening. Limbs suspended above the ground, strings attached to nothing. Pit in the stomach, peach pit, plum pit. Cillia flailing. Just feeling weird.

Blue sky. Sun on skin. A train ride.

I can’t quite define the boundary between my journal and this space. My journal is often stream-of-consciousness. Working out a thought. I don’t need to explain further.

Maybe I don’t here either. But I do value a space for the most tender of explorations. Writing by hand. Notebook therapy.

This is a little bit therapy, a little bit practice, something undefined.

1 June 2025

I spent one night on my own at a hotel.

I feel conspicuously alone. Like it’s glaringly obvious that I wouldn’t usually be. Mothers with buggies hurry past the window. I feel sympathy and schaudenfreude. That’s not me today.

I sit on the couch in the lobby to read my book. I am highly aware of my last moments of aloneness, how I occupy time and space are not a negotiation with anyone else. No need for communication.

I feel like a child’s imaginary version of an adult. Two dimensional in that this story only lasts 24 hours. There’s not a plot, just being.

I feel strangely exposed. It’s only me. But also invisible, just quietly existing with no specific aim. As soon as I leave, I will join the crowd and only my body’s impression in this couch will remain until it doesn’t.

7 June 2025

Luna took seven steps towards me when I picked her up from nursery yesterday.

9 June 2025

I went to a friend-of-a-friend’s gallery opening. We started in a corner, sipping our free drink, watching the art crowd perform.

Another artist asks, “Are you an artist?” “Not really,” is where I land.

We look at her giant canvases covered in bold oil pastel marks, vibrant colours, textures. We talk about the colours we liked, a deep purple, electric indigo. She felt like she was inside the mouth, I thought the jaw was floating in purgatory. I want to go there too but I’m afraid. We admire how it takes up the whole wall.

I want to know: how do you know it’s finished? Are these strokes instinctive? Or is this meticulously planned, are their multiple drafts?

“And NOW is when we need to kick you out of the gallery! Thank you for coming! What did you think? Oh it’s your FIRST time here? Please DON’T let it be your LAST!”

The gallery director looks directly into our eyes and straight through them.

“Oh, you’re a friend of the ARTIST? You must MUST come to the pub round the corner, drinks on me!”

It takes me to another place. Where every scribble makes sense, where feeling is set free to find a colour. It’s not verbal, it’s instinctive bodily exciting sensory raw blah blah blah COLOURFEELINGGROWL

18 June 2025

When Luna goes out into the garden, she sits on the edge of the grass for a moment, delicately patting her knees, surveying the scene.

Then she crawls over to the hydrangea bush and sticks her head straight in. Submerged, she speaks to it in a language I don’t understand, but I’m sure the bush does. The first petals of the hydrangea are popping from the tiny pea-like buds.

Luna is not a baby anymore. I know this because there are moments that strike me as so similar to when she was. When I’m rocking her to sleep, she is heavier, takes up more space in my arms, but sinks in to my body the same. Watching her eyelids get heavy in the crib. When her eyes fill with tears and mouth curves into a perfectly formed frown revealing the inside of her bottom lip, it’s the same face that she made as a newborn before unleashing an almighty wail.

But outside of those moments, she is a different being. I find myself pressing her cheeks to mine, squeezing her forearm or foot, noticing how it feels like a separate body to mine. I didn’t realise that we felt like the same body until we didn’t.

This year has gone so much faster than the first. I have felt too caught up in the whiplash to process the big and little ways she has grown.