Taking Stock

I grew up in a pub opposite an old cinema with a letter board. A Waitrose was built on the land where the rest of the cinema used to be. I only learned this recently when I googled how old the cinema I’d known all my life was. The original art deco cinema had opened in 1938, before either of my parents were born – before internet. Now only screens 5-7 remain, but the cinema’s still there. That view from my window of the Waitrose and the edge of the cinema, beyond my Jemima Puddleduck curtains, was one of the few memories I have of the chapter in which my parents were together, and the first view I remember having.

In the pub I would sneak downstairs behind the bar and scoop up the bottle caps discarded in their black plastic trays, Bacardi Breezer caps mostly. (I didn’t know this then). It was the 90s and the bottles were lined up like rainbows behind the glass. I clawed them into my dad’s upturned Mallorca t-shirt like a kangaroo pouch and trundled up the stairs. I sprawled them all across my bedroom carpet into matching groups, sorted by colour. The red ones were always my favourite. I was a collector before I knew anything could become lost.

Then one day you live at 195-197, 5-7, a symmetry in numbers. You have an office job, on a floor in the same building as the Bacardi headquarters. You see that logo again, the black bat, those bookmarks you forgot you remembered, and you want to step in and claim what is yours

Do you remember your first Christmas? The year dad put talcum powder on the soles of his shoes.

It’s just chance, not a sign of anything in particular. Nowadays the only way you see all your family, or any group of people you love, is when good things or bad things happen. Weddings and funerals, they come in succession. I keep the orders of service just to remind myself it was real, that we were once here at the same time. I keep football programmes to remind myself who I was (with). I keep whatever I can find of people, I scramble for them as I do with pennies when you’re four pence short at a corner shop. The sudden panic that you don’t have what you need. I am so afraid to leave anyone behind, they keep falling away but each bottle cap I assigned to someone even then without knowing.  

This is you, and you, and you, and you are safe with me

Don’t worry, you are all on stars now, I couldn’t bare losing you again

I often imagine who will be with me on the other side of the moon. Is it this one next to me or will she change currents when the tide pulls out again? We are my favourite when we are silent, lightly touching. Silence between two in cinema seats, watching life play out. The thread that connects us in a room or in between crowds. A cord that’s threatened to be cut with an incision or snagged with too much distance.

We hear the sirens above the city on Telegraph Hill where the sun slips away and the red lights begin to dance like memories of old friends. When I narrow my eyes they blur into a flash of red, a forcefield over the city. One day the sirens are for us. Purgatory is for the living between joy and loss. We are dots who suffer and soar between each other in concrete labyrinths punctuated with the glow of traffic lights and operating hours. A car that does not move creates a room in which love is born and dies. We hold pain with joy and float in the space between the waiting of each like tiny things of glass in Galileo’s thermometer. We creep into each other and build homes made of sand, their longevity determined by kindness of the weather and the softness to bend.

I look beyond the window I live through now. A lamppost covered in flowers for the stabbing of a teenage boy. I see ex-lovers and friends passing through crowds of people about their day unbeknownst to my idle watching. The homeless people sing and dance and stumble about in the street asking for money and speaking to no one in particular.

At night I see myself, a person looking back up at me on her way to the pool club that since closed in lockdown, her hair shinier and eyes brighter than mine now, glinting beneath a street light, an open smile up at me, blissfully ignorant to the years that separate us, cast in red and green hues from the flickering neon sign of the corner shop over the street. The realisation of youth slipping away only makes us realise how thick our skin has become.

I spend my days walking or running up and down different hills to chase sunrises and sunsets and escape the memory that I am stuck with myself for the rest of my life. Every now and then I google new jobs, new adventures, new questions. Who said the phrase, if you love something, let it go? Did you know there was a second line to that phrase? But no one can guarantee anything anymore.  

I’ve done two breakups in this room. The first one was rebuilding. The second one was accepting. I built my room back together, from flat pack furniture into things that hold me and the things I think belong to me, while I play the same record on repeat and drink little green bottles of French lager.

I am alone in Skehans pub finishing an article and I see a painting I like and I take a photo of it to try to see it better and figure out what it is, and zoom in on the name of the artist. Someone approaches me and I tense up. ‘There is one piece in here that costs more than you would believe, because it’s the only genuine one. If you ever find out which one it is, I’ll give you…. My blessing. I don’t work here. Where are you from?’ he asked pensively.

‘Bristol.’

‘I once lost a girlfriend at Bristol Temple Meads station. We got on different platforms and I never saw her again. This was before the days of phones, and we never crossed paths again. I thought I would marry her. Then just like that, she was gone. Maybe it was never meant to be, maybe we will meet again one day, but that was 55 years ago.’

‘How did you cope with that?’

‘You just keep going. A dear friend of mine once said to me when I was having a hard time in life, I said, no one would know if I died tomorrow. He said, look at this penny, if you drop it into a lake, it creates circles on the surface of the water, much greater than the penny itself. You have impact. That saved my life, and that’s why I’m here talking to you now. I’m sorry to approach you, I often get confused whether people want to be spoken to or not. I don’t want to bother anyone.’

I imagined the shape of what that loss felt like. How he has carried it with him for 55 years. How in his mind she wouldn’t have aged a day beyond his memory of her. Was she was still here? When I left the pub I glanced up at the sky as the moon followed me home and I put the two of these lovers up there too.

It all unravels before me like a piece of string. No promises and everything borrowed, my heart is like glue. I vibrate in my own joy, charged by those who love me and the way I love what I can touch. I reach into you and feel that divine energy runs through our veins, a Catherine wheel is laced beneath my ribs, this body that holds me tight when I can’t crack to cry and loose when I can let go. You have one too, that’s the beauty of it. I’m the happiest and saddest person I know, but everyone feels that way at 2am. Create summer in the cold and exist there always, your own guard even to those who are pure intentioned. Preserve this thing you have.

All these things, pennies, bottle caps, people. I want to turn to the sky and scream this is my lot, don’t you dare come for them. No more hurt, no more loss, no more accidents, no more sickness. I wish I could squeeze my fists and envelop a forcefield around everything and everyone I love.

But remember this, your lot in life built you. Let people believe what they think they’ve found on the surface. Just imagine what happens when they find you in there. The joy of people, of connection, of laughing until it hurts when you feel you have lost so much. You are never quite finished. Hold each other, take it all and look inside, then build it back for each other in something firmer than concrete. Believe in what you’ve built. You were always this good.

l.v.h

Cat Power - Lived In Bars https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVGgGW1ZalY