Almost exactly four years ago, in early January 2020, I sat down in a cafe in central London and wrote the first words of my third novel, Cursed Bread. A year later, almost to the day, I finished it. The timelines feel compressed, implausible. Now somehow it is four years since that morning in the cafe, with the sky blue and freezing and spare, and the world about to change.
A few days before as 2019 slipped into 2020, I had found myself on a sofa at my best friends’ house, talking to a then-stranger about their then-boyfriend, who I didn’t know would one day become my boyfriend. When I got together with my boyfriend, years after that conversation on the sofa, I wanted to remember every word of it – what clues could be revealed, what vital information been confessed to me by this person who is now my friend, who once loved the same person I now love. Because I did not know my boyfriend then, except vaguely, back then I was interested in the way I am interested in any love story told to me at three in the morning – hungry for melodrama, compelled by proximity to a feeling. It seems so strange that I could have listened impartially, knowing what I now know. Revisiting my memory of the conversation isn’t the same; I can no longer always distinguish between my grievances and adorations and the ones that belonged to his ex-girlfriend, a muddled intimacy.
The year in which I wrote Cursed Bread felt like longer than a year, because of the strangeness of the pandemic and lockdown. I didn’t think of my now-boyfriend at all. He was a character in a conversation that belonged to another world, and I loved someone else. There was only the greenhouse heat of the spare room where I set up a trestle table and wrote feverishly all day long alongside an abandoned mattress, boxes, a torn-out space in the wall where a boiler had been. There were long walks where I left the house at five, five thirty, in the morning. Writing was the only thing that kept me vaguely sane, and still it felt like I would never finish Cursed Bread, until suddenly it was finished, and I realised it was January again.
Years have spun rapidly since then. Recently I have found myself unable to stop checking the photos on my phone from the same day but years ago, for reasons that veer between nostalgia, reassurance, disbelief. I feel far away from some versions, pitying of some, and envious of others. Today, January 4th, I visit myself on this day one year ago, having my photo taken in a black dress in my kitchen, grey winter’s light (envy). I visit myself on this day two years ago, discovering an earring I thought I had lost in a hotel room (envy), sleeping on an inflatable mattress in the spare room of the house where I am now, about to move to another house (inconclusive). I visit myself three years ago, standing on a beach and looking out to a forbidding sea (pity). Myself also three years ago, receiving a photo of two clear plastic boxes of baby clothes that were being saved for me, but which were never needed (pity). Four years ago, at a restaurant, a birthday party (envy). Five years ago, about to talk on the radio, and then a photo a few hours later of the number of my order on a McDonald’s receipt (inconclusive; probably envy).
Compulsively checking the photo memories feels like sifting through evidence, piecing things together in order to create a coherent narrative of the last years. I worry that in this checking I am growing too reliant on visual cues, too timid to trust in my own versions of events, and for example I can’t remember what I was going to talk about on the radio, but at least I remember that at the birthday party a year afterwards there was a kind of delicious fried lobster, and I remember how despairing I felt on that beach another year afterwards, dark cloud, the pebbles underfoot.
In The Glass Essay by Anne Carson she writes:
Perhaps the hardest thing about losing a lover is
to watch the year repeat its days.
It is as if I could dip my hand down
into time and scoop up
blue and green lozenges of April heat
a year ago in another country.
I can feel that other day running underneath this one
like an old videotape—here we go fast around the last corner
up the hill to his house, shadows
of limes and roses blowing in the car window
and music spraying from the radio and him
singing and touching my left hand to his lips.
Losing a lover or not, the year repeats its days. And I can feel them, like in the poem, these videotapes under the videotapes. I can feel the track of a life that was mine, is mine, that has looped around another year, in the process losing some ground, gaining some. Will there be a year where the groove worn by this looping will feel inconsequential? How will I remember today? I woke up early next to a person who I knew only as the subject of a conversation four years ago. We went to an exercise class (very January) and then stopped to drink a coffee and talk about how our muscles hurt on the way home. We arrived back, he cooked us an omelette, and I sat down and wrote this. Outside it’s quiet. The lights of the Christmas tree are still on. One day it might seem incomprehensibly strange and perfect to have a morning like this, a January day like this. I was very impatient four years ago, as if I would miss something. I was impatient a year ago, and excited too. I don’t know what I feel now; I am slower to name a state of mind, to decide on one thing or the other. I am not unhappy. The year is beginning.
What wonderful recollection and reflections. I think Cursed Bread is my favourite of your books. Can’t wait to see what you write next.
May you always be not unhappy.