Nostalgia

It is almost a week after the autumnal equinox, the air is crisp and there is a thickness in the sun’s shine as if it holds things, maybe memories of long gone times. It warms my thoughts with a welcome and familiar nostalgia. A heart felt place in which I reminisce on this moment eternal. I imagine it as an endless line or point in time colored up and made unique by transient elements, intuitive in design.

I sadly wish that I had been more present, conscious and aware of the passing nature of those aspects and beings which gave my moment its depth. The sweet sound of a bird, the tick of granny’s clock, the murmur of cars moving around on the outside, the smell of black board, her chalky fingers, that first day on my own, the wax wrapped sandwich, the school ground’s red sand, the loneliness, that yearning song and, years later the softness of your touch, your understanding hand. 

I had recently qualified as an architect and began working for Urban Solutions. It’s a sunny Saturday afternoon; I’m on my own at the office in Newtown working in an unnecessary extra hour or two. I’m working on my sense of purpose; I’m working on my dreams. The mysterious moans of Siouxsie and the Banshees’ anthemic ‘killing jar’ call out to me from the eighties reaching through my G3’s small distorted speakers in the early 2000’s. I sit at my desk overwhelmed by the heaviness of hope, a dark nostalgia and a desperate regret at having missed out on the revolutionary moments belonging to magnificent others in magnificent times gone.

I dream of my night to come, what it will look like, what it will wear, its dance, its disco of desire, its stolen glances charged with drunken self expression and freedom of movement. I escape there weekly and I begin to live. Each time discovering more of me, each time intoxicated and uninhibited I furiously confront the beliefs which have kept me small and hidden for all this time.

death, the idea is attractive today 
tired i am of not fitting

At some point in my childhood I wondered into a forest, dense and dark. Inside it I felt ugly, uncomfortable and extremely alone. Later on I sought out guides that would lead me to beautiful clearings, optimistic open spaces that I had no idea existed. Today I find myself back in the thick of it and am overwhelmed by the fear, pain and sadness of this disorientating and thorny place within me. I am my own guide now and am uncertain that I can navigate my way back to that clearing.

this clinical landscape made up of
fake words and meaningless likes,
forced emoticons
shining soullessly in blue and white

Shade Her

Chord

I was born a day late following an 18 hour labor, a poignant premonition of a hesitant attitude prone to agonizing and procrastinating yet to develop in my psyche. By the time I came along my parents had been married for five years, my young mother’s tubes were blocked and she had had to undergo various procedures before she could conceive. It eventually happened only a few months after the death of my great grandmother on my Italian side, Nona. This poetic piece of information which spoke of death and re-birth acquired a precious place in my heart. I believed that it gave me a special connection to that which came before me, a supernatural umbilical chord uniting me directly with her and, with my ancestry. 

As I grew, this magical chord quietly coiled its way around and within me, weaving worry and weariness into my developing wisdoms of the world. With a snide snaking strength it squeezed my small organs as if intent on abstracting any lingering of purity or free will. A serpent-like keeper of all things past (and therefore to come) it swallowed me into moments and lifetimes cut with sadness and self loathing. Building a dark inner landscape in which the slightest sense of self lay violently obscured by innate repressed anger. 

Today as an adult I find myself naturally at the forefront of the ancestral lines, enquiring. I look back with untamed black eyes, like those of a heretic compelled to dismantle the archaic and accepted workings of an internal cellular landscape transmitted to me chronically on compulsory and instinctive levels.