Airlock

Pedalling my way out of Anhedonia City

1

I make it out to Berlin somehow, though I can barely leave the house in the days before. The sequence of tasks is comforting: pack bag, get coach, buy tiny shampoos, drink one coffee, board, immediately eat lentilsuppe, pickles and bread with my friends when I arrive. Each completed task makes me feel better, and when I step off the plane I take a deep breath, I touch a version of myself without grief, or the grief is different. I let myself into the flat that I consider my home away from home, sit outside at a table and watch everyone passing. Later, walking down Hermannstrasse in clear evening light, I feel psychedelic with gratitude. Over the next days I do a beautiful event, I meet my German publisher, I buy a soft yellow raincoat, I send a draft of a novel to my agent. I eat falafel and cheeseboards and drink Suze tonics. You can run away from your problems, it turns out, or you mostly can. You can step back into a timeline where they never existed, where everything was deliciously formless and theoretical. There’s such relief on being on holiday from your life. I still find myself compulsively talking about when I was pregnant in the queue for the club toilets, but my friends are kind about it, though the next day I’m ashamed. There’s a clear dawn when we emerge.

2

A friend, D, comes to London; I’ve met him only once when our travels aligned, four years ago. Yet we’ve continued to talk often, despite living in other countries. For that one night we knew each other intimately. The first and only night, spinning around a new city together. But now we’re just penpals. We greet each other and somehow talk for nine hours straight. We want to see how far we can get along the river. We keep our eyes out for otters but find a drowned dog instead, distressingly. The sky is so blue. We stop for a drink. You haven’t changed, which makes me think maybe it’s possible I haven’t changed either? Which is comforting, he says. He says he still finds me effervescent, which I think I was once but am not now, have not been for years. Again, it’s nice to touch a previous version of myself, to remember what I was like. When I met him I was having the best summer of my life. Of course I was effervescent! I would give a lot to return to that summer: three weeks alone in Croatia, that delicious possibility-rich future again, slipping my easy body in and out of water. It really felt back then that anything could happen. Will you have kids? / I was pregnant recently, actually / There are just still lots of things I want to do first. We gesture with our hands on the wooden table of another pub to demonstrate how it might feel that the possibilities of our lives are narrowing, but it only takes one explosion to open up the funnel, and then the pipeline opens up even more than before. This is what his friend who is getting a divorce says, he explains. Evening slips on, it grows dark. I’m exactly one week older than him. You say we’re medium young, but soon we’ll be just medium, he says, shortly before we hug goodbye. Yes, I say. I know.

3

I love my bike, my silly peachy-pink bike, the bike which Luke said would change my life and, irritatingly, he was right. Sometimes I cycle 20-30 km in a day just getting around. I can go anywhere, I take the long routes, scenic and shaded. With each week that passes I feel my lungs and legs getting stronger, I can go faster, I use the higher gears. I wear sundresses with cycling shorts and tie the skirts up around my waist, then let them down – jaunty transformation! Shortly after I have my miscarriage we argue about nothing and then afterwards pedal bleakly together up the river the opposite direction to the way I’ll walk with D, because it felt like a thing you might do on a hot Saturday even if you’re angry with each other, to take a pleasure ride up past Tottenham and Edmonton, cool breeze on glaring water. Wild roses overrunning the hedgerows, sparking Luke’s hayfever as we stop off for a bacon sandwich and a coffee. It is so objectively pleasant, but I feel nothing. I have spent a lot of time lately googling nothing feels good and what’s the point in anything and no motivation, landing me always on the doorstop of anhedonia, the inability to feel pleasure, which apparently might be normal and might pass. Weeks later I cycle back from an event, and the sunset is this beautiful shell-like peach-pink, and I feel a glimmer of something and think I am experiencing joy, and I go home and announce I think I experienced some joy just now! And Luke is thrilled for me.

4

In our house we have assigned our spare room as the airlock, the windows and doors closed and the bedding washed repeatedly and an air purifier running. A pollen-free zone, a sacred zone. Solving this task is satisfying. I don’t sleep in the airlock. I sleep instead carelessly and alone in the master bedroom with the windows open through the first heatwave, an industrial fan blowing pollen all over me, but it does nothing to me except maybe make my eyes a little sore. Nothing can touch me. With my eye mask on I can sleep and sleep and sleep for hours, through half the day, all the hours of sleep I missed in the weeks before.

5

I’m in Whitstable cooking breakfast for ten people at a hen do, my best friend Ed at my side, taking charge. We make halloumi, mushrooms, three bags of frozen hash browns, spinach, avocado, beans, so many different pots simmering, pour mimosas and juice. I am happy to be feeding everyone in this cavernous kitchen, unfamiliar happiness. Sometimes I’m forgetting what’s happened. I don’t wake up with sadness leading, with emptiness being the first thing on my mind. And all we have to do today is eat this brunch and then lie on the beach in the first tendrils of the heatwave. There is running into the sea. Fish and chips on the horizon. There is a day that feels like it will never end. Purity of purpose, purity of pleasure. It’s so simple. I’m on holiday from my life again. I come back with a bag rattling with oyster shells.

6

In less than a month I’ll be in Paris. In two months I’ll be in Switzerland, and the summer will be over. Everything is taking me away. My body is a strange place that isn’t behaving, a body acting up in ways that are unfamiliar to me, this body which has generally run like a clock until now, that has forgiven much. Though maybe it has not forgiven anything. There is a comforting simplicity in the times where I break down, I don’t know if I have ever cried so uncomplicatedly. I had something and then it was taken away; I had something and I lost it due to no fault of my own.

But still there are those shell-pink evenings. Cold water on a hot day. I can’t predict the future, but I resume the ability to finish reading a book. I even feel like writing, sometimes. I carry my friends’ six month year old baby around in my kitchen on my hip; she nestles her face into my shoulder. Her brother is three and draws bright scribbles on my patio in chalk. The swallows curl and shriek above.