Voice Note #29 - This Feeling
It's yours forever
A year and a half ago, I wrote a poem called “These Days”.
I wrote an essay to go with it too, and talked about pearls and luster and watching life go by from behind a screen. My life looked very different then. (Or perhaps I should say that my life looks very different now).
A year and a half later, I have a new poem for you. This poem is called “This Feeling”.
THIS FEELING
(a year later)
A sharp swerve down the runway, and then you were off. You look into the mirror. You walk out the door. Everywhere is burning. You are drinking in the time, finding magic in the ashes. (You brought it here yourself. It weighed nearly nothing). You are falling in love, over and over, with everything you have. Each day a new pain, a new delight. In the days no one came to save you, you blinked awake every morning and wore your body. You got up and walked in it. Sometimes you even danced. The quotidian detritus that makes up a life. In this way you saved yourself. Remember that room? Where you died, then were born. Here you are blooming into a new shape. Your pearls have dulled, but you keep them to remember. You don’t need them anymore. In those days you told yourself you had to make it through to the end. Aren’t you glad you stuck around to see what happened next. These days the sunlight shines through the cracks. These days there’s so much of it, enough to fill every chamber of your battered, fractured heart. All its contents spilling onto the floor. This wound still fresh. This cut still bleeding. Remember what you promised — no anger, no regrets. In a storm you grew a garden. This feeling you hold, it’s yours forever. You carry it with you wherever you go.
A year and a half ago (the time I wrote the first poem, just a few short months before moving here), I had found myself in the aftermath of a big decision gone wrong, and it felt like missing a step down a flight of stairs in the dark.
I have a hard time reading that essay, the one I wrote with the poem. But I’m proud of it, and of who I was when I wrote it. I was stuck in the middle of a pandemic, in a country and living situation where safety restrictions were still firmly in place. I didn’t feel fulfilled with where I was going in life and wanted freedom to explore options I couldn’t see for myself, where I was. I was fighting so hard to live, to get out into the world again. I had left my job for a move to another country that didn’t pan out because my visa didn’t go through. It left me feeling disheartened.
On the bright side, I had a lot of time to write — and if I had a thread to run with, I held on tight and ran with it. It was very lonely. But I wrote a lot, and sang a lot, and I felt like an artist again for the first time in a while. I had so much hope still, in the midst of it all, and I suppose that’s where the poem came from. My life felt like it was on pause. I wanted so badly to fast forward to the good part. It all feels so far behind me now.
A year and a half later, and I’m in a library in London writing to you. I’m at the cusp of a new beginning I would have never arrived at if the previous major decision had never gone wrong. If things had gone according to plan, I don’t know if I’d be as happy as I am now. My dad and I talk about that a lot. A couple of months ago I started seeing a trend of posts on Instagram that read, in varying fonts and against varying backdrops, “Sometimes you don’t get what you want because you deserve better,” and it’s cheesy but it hit me right in my sentimental little heart. I’ve been thinking about how insanely lucky I am to be where I am, how it’s so much better than anything I had originally imagined for myself. I live in London now. I did a masters that I finished in December and I got my visa to stay in January. I’ve been spending the time since figuring out what happens next. I’m in the middle of a crisis, but I’ve come to realize that I’m always in the middle of a crisis. I hate being in this liminal state (I’ve never been good at life without structure) but it’s a crisis, I’m realizing, that I’m lucky to have. I’m building a life for myself here. For a long time I dreamed about Somewhere Else and I got there. I didn’t think any of this would work out at all, and it has.
Every year, on the eve of my birthday, I write something for myself. It’s a tradition I’ve had since I was a teenager: curl up in a corner with my journal and write. Mostly reflections on the year that’s passed, and dreams for the year to come.
I spent the last day of my twenty-seventh year wandering. I had an errand, got a coffee, walked all the way to Fitzrovia to buy a guitar tuner because I’ve been itching to sing again. From a place deep in my chest, I need to make music (I’ve been writing new songs!). I went to yoga. I wandered to the Barbican library for a secret scavenger hunt and rummaged for a book of poetry in the library called Strange Meetings. I couldn’t find it but I met a girl who was looking for the same book and made a new friend instead. And then I walked to the 180 Strand library Reference Point, where I tried to write this, but I struggled to get anything down. The previous night I had gone to bed late. I had just pulled a ten-hour shift on my first day at a part-time job, and then went straight home to finally finish a job application I’d been working on for weeks. A lot of active reaching towards new beginnings!! By the time I closed my laptop and turned off the lights, my mind was racing, adrenaline pumping through my exhausted body. So I gave myself the next day off.
In one of her newsletters, Lorde refers to a tweet from Durga Chew Bose and riffs on how elegance is arriving somewhere without a commute story in the same way elegance is starting a newsletter with anything but an apology for its lateness. She says, in an email written two months after the last, “things just kept happening and the list of things to tell you about kept getting longer until it was overwhelming, and so it goes.” I mean, what else can I say. When I started Voice Notes, I was used to writing in isolation. Creativity was something that broke the stagnancy. And then everything changed so fast. I didn’t know how to write about my new life, and I didn’t have the time to figure it out. But I missed writing, and I missed this newsletter, and I missed making things, so I’m trying to figure out what that looks like for me now.
When I wrote These Days, I wondered what the good part would look like — if it would ever come, where I would land, how it might change me. If I would still remain hopeful, if the earnestness I was always so ashamed of would corrode. With hope comes a sense of vulnerability, and I felt so soft in the sincerity of that feeling. It was embarrassing, but at times I felt a sense of tenderness over it. The poem rattled around in my head a lot over this past year. Tender, open. No bitterness, just grace. It rang like an echo. While moving to my new flat, while rushing to a class, while walking home from yoga. While wandering down the wrong aisles at Sainsbury’s. While running for the tube, while getting my heart broken over a text at King’s Cross. While having a picnic by the canal with new friends. While jumping up and down with my friend Alex outside the post office, singing I’m a resident! I’m a resident! after picking up my residence card. My life changed, and I stretched around it, often faster than I could keep up. In this new city, where I arrived barely knowing anyone. My heart still felt the same. Tender, open.
There’s still so much I want to tell you. But there will be other times to tell these other stories, and until then — it’s half past midnight and I’m twenty-eight (!)
And what a year it’s been.
Voice note for you:
Today’s voice note comes in the form of a new favorite song. The theme song of my life lately has been Smoke by Caroline Polachek, which is very end credits track of an imaginary coming-of-age film. (A the trailer song for the year ahead?? Could be both! All! I dare you to play it as you walk down the street and fight the urge to dance as you head towards wherever you’re going.)
(Also, the entire album is incredible and came out on Valentine’s Day, when I went to see her live with my friend Emma at the Eventim Apollo in Hammersmith. It was exquisite. But a story for another time.)
Thank you for reading this rambling journal entry of a post. Until the next xx
Niki
I love this!! 28 is going to be your year, I can feel it 💖
happy birthday, dear niki! what a beautiful welcome to 28 <3