Music nerd that I am, I’ve been collating a list of every song I listen to for about 13 years now. A song can store a myriad of data – it can zap you back to a moment, or a feeling – so this isn’t just a catalogue of songs per se, it’s a storehouse. I decided to compile a Spotify playlist of every single song I have ‘loved’ on Last.FM.
I don’t know what to say anymore.
Okay, I knew what to say about ten minutes ago, when I was pegging damp clothing on the line at four in the afternoon. I carry no false illusion of any of it drying before tomorrow and yet that’s all I can think about now, rather than the flashes of insight, the debonaire prose that now eludes me. It’s almost cruel. Like a dream dematerialising as you awake.
I want to say that I was wrong about you.
I want to say a lot of things. Right now I would settle for saying anything. But to settle implies that you are happy with purgatory. The sameness. And I am not. Who chooses purgatory? Purgatory is a churning in your chest that is never resolved. Purgatory is a door that never opens, a hallway that never goes anywhere, a fog that never lifts.
The world is everything at once.
– Bhanu Kapil, The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers
My words haven’t been flowing like I’d like them to. Deadlines will do that. When you’re writing to a brief, to a deadline, you can run the risk of completely bypassing the creative which is so paramount to the process, but it’s usurped by this…urgency.
She pushes a box set into my hands. She is insistent. I came for photos, for my family history, I protest. For shreds of my childhood. I don’t own a DVD player. But I take it and place it in a box along with the rest of the scotch you’ll never drink. I don’t know why it’s on my desk. Scotland is too big right now. It looms large somewhere on a horizon I can’t bring myself to look at.