Falling

I think I have cried every day for the past month. Silently flowing things, the kind that falls like a leaf flutters in the season where the sun can be bright, sharp but thin and the air is crisp on your skin. I have moved into my new home and I love it, it’s the house that love built, late night, 5am bedtimes, tears and skipped dinner plans, pep-talks from my mother, encouragement from my girlfriends, frantic emails to editors and producers and me praying on my knees whispering , “I have a lot to say, my chest weighs with it, please let me say it,”. Pouring and pouring and belief, ardent belief.

There is a tree outside of my house that’s of suburban magnificence, one that would look good with a white picket fence, one that would look good in a film where a beautiful teenage girl is thought to be a loser because she wears Docs, a tree that calls my England ‘New’, and makes me feel like I am in a Hallmark output called ‘Fallin’ In Love’. Golden, umber, yellow, the leaves fall onto the path that leads to my house and the front garden. It occurs to me that as an adult, I should get what my mother informs me is a “leaf blower,” and when my boyfriend comes by he asks me where the giant outdoor broom my mother bought for me is, so he can part the golden-red sea, which sounds like erotica, but what he really did was sweep the path briskly. For some reason he decided to do this when our Uber had arrived instead of the many hours he could have done so before, as if to prove a point. Well the point he made to me is that he loves me a lot, so he really flopped on trying to be sassy.

I have let those leaves fall and form a carpet, and I really should move them before they start to rot, but I want them to rest for a while; they’ve been through a lot and they look quite peaceful. So I let the tears fall. This month has been hard for me both personally and at a macro level. The intricate jagged edges of life clash with the overarching darkness that subjugation, hate and greed perpetuate and so I weep at the state of the world, at my little-big stresses, at the people I and we have lost, at how much we have been robbed, because it’s quite natural for things to fall and gravity exists for a reason. I mean, a reason related to physics (that I do not know because this apple fell far from her Science Teacher Mother tree) but also falling helps us center ourselves, help us gather and hone the strength to pick ourselves up and revel at the times when we are reaching for the sun, almost touching it and flexing in its rays.

Yesterday, I crawled under my desk and cried a bit. Like a physical whisper, a constructed falling, I needed soft, I needed quiet. I don’t know why I did it, maybe I’m just dramatic, (I am, actually,) but it felt right, and I needed to do it so I could feel anew what it is like to stretch up and out and look out for hope and know strength and be myself out loud. That feeling is itself necessary, to know that you can, to know that you must.

Updates:

• I deactivated my Twitter for a bit. More on that later. I admit it is bad timing because I realised that the Selling Sunset reunion was out after I did this.

• Prince William being named sexiest bald man of 2023, is Big Monarchy striking yet again. First colonialism, now this. I don’t expect them to choose a man of colour, because let’s just accept racism as the default on mainstream cultural matters, but in the context of white men, it is clear that Stanley Tucci, my pocket-sized ItalianX king, has been done dirty, yet again.

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