gaps in the story
There are three drafts unseen to in the eponymous section of this website, stretching back to March. They touch upon spring blossoms, the patterns of feeding geese on riverbanks and stargazing in a French swimming pool, among other things. I don’t know if I’ll ever finish them. Blog posts should really be finished in a short time, whilst the neurones fire. I write down a title that amuses me and an opening paragraph and then I get distracted and then that’s all that’s left. A sentence fragment that seemed clever to me at the time and maybe, if I’ve been productive, a hundred or so words that segue into nothing. Like a house converted to flats that still has one of those staircases that lead only to cream-painted plasterboard.
I know what they were going to be, vaguely what observations they hoped to make. The spring blossom one aspired to turn a brief sojourn to Cornwall into an Odyssey, likely to be littered with comments about hedgerow and the hope that spring brings and the joy of the wilds. There would have been a melancholy to it though, as it was my first trip to Cornwall since July 2018, and that trip, as joyful as it was, was joyful in the face of a grief and sadness I cannot shake, nor do I want to. I’m sure I would’ve made it work somehow. Blossoms and grief. The end of winter. The mirror glass of tidal water at the ebb, crusted hulls of abandoned boats askew in the spreading mud reflecting some fucking thing. If I’d written it I’m sure some links would come. I would’ve hammered it out.
Sat in the pub with a pint by the pier I watched the geese creep up to the river grass with caution, as though there may be a fox hidden below the tide line, small enough to hide amongst the reeds that stood only a foot tall. Each step they took they took as though there were boobie traps everywhere. They were the water fowl Indiana Joneses of the Thames that day. It piqued my interest, in part because I was trying to write a lot of other shit at the time. I watched them dart their heads into the foliage, quick, eating whatever it was that lurked in that grass that looked edible. Every couple of jabs their heads would pop up like meerkats to see if there were anything coming to eat them. Then they’d go back to eating. I’ve no idea what the point of the post was going to be, or if there was one other than the joy at observing a hitherto new (to me, at least) behaviour in the invasive, annoying and usually uninteresting behaviour of our loathsome invasive goose species.
As for the stars and the pool and France, that all feels like stolen time now. The title I came up with for the draft is “lying in the dark to stare at the light” and I’m quite happy with that as a title because that’s what we did. I think I managed a sentence or two and deleted them and rewrote them about four or five times before retreating from the post. I can make all sorts of excuses about why I didn’t push on with that but it’s because I’m selfish and I didn’t want to give it away. Sometimes writing is a release and I didn’t want to release that for fear that it wouldn’t be held quite as close to my heart afterwards. We saw shooting stars and satellites and aeroplanes and at least two nights were dark enough to make out the pale cataract-ic band of the Milky Way. Sometimes you write so as not to forget, but sometimes you don’t write because you’re not quite ready to let go yet. And writing can be letting go.
Letting go. I didn’t start a draft about this past harvest. I never got that far. It rattled in my head quite a bit. There were several storylines and a surfeit of metaphors to abuse but instead I just made wine and drank beer and ate wild boar and anchovies with my pals. I wish I had. I wish I wrote more while I was there instead of thinking about writing more. I didn’t because it was my fifteenth harvest and sometimes when you’ve done things for fifteen years in a row you pick up your pen with a little less urgency to scribble every detail down. If you’re not careful though, they can all blend into one. The fruit was good but there wasn’t enough of it. That could be 7 or 8 of the last fifteen years. But this year was different. I just didn’t know it at the time. I’ll have to stumble over my notes and photos and see if I can put it all together.
Now it’s autumn. And I look over the heat and tumult of the summer and spring and it doesn’t all quite fit. A didn’t go to b then c. I remember pretty much everything but nothing has followed seamlessly as cause and effect would have us expect. I lament the lack of writing but don’t know where I would’ve fit it in. Yet that might be why it doesn’t fit. Because I wasn’t writing it down. Perhaps those are the empty spaces, the bits where I didn’t take the time to write it down and make sense of it while it was happening. Not that it made sense at the time.