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[nakedknitting]

“If you’re raised with an angry man in your house, there will always be an angry man in your house”

the idea that I could never escape the tension of my childhood home was one that haunted me. i vowed never to have a home that fostered teetering around someone’s quick temper, a house that didn’t have angry quips seeping out of the walls, but this idea that I could never escape it lived rent free in my mind.

until you.

until frustration was never explosive and always quickly followed by reaching out to one another in the form of apologies. until storming out became taking a shower to wash it away. until those showers alone heard the bathroom door open and warm hands wrap around your shoulders.

until two children of angry houses vowed to create a home

[nakedknitting]

‘I didn’t fall in love with you’

There are two duvets on the bed, one yours and one mine, and we are wrapped in both together. You tell me that you did not fall for me. ‘No,’ you say ‘it was like sinking into a warm bath after being out in the stinging cold. It was warm and it was relaxing. I did not fall.’

It’s a funny thing for you to come out with, but I realise in the moment that you are right. I did not fall in love with you. It was never a falling sensation, I never hit the ground.

‘Falling’ in love with you felt like when you’ve just had a shower, and your bedsheets are clean and still warm from the dryer. Your body is sweet smelling from lotion, and your hair is soft and clean. It felt like slipping into that bed, gentle and inviting, wrapping me up in a warm hug. ‘Falling’ in love felt like climbing into the bed with you, hands and arms reaching out to pull together, legs intertwining and feet brushing off each other. It was the feeling of tucking into your chest, and fitting perfectly, limbs exactly where they ought to be and heartbeats parallel. There was no falling. It was a late night bubble bath with white wine and buttered toast. It was fresh warm sheets and inviting arms. It was a herbal tea in a warm mug held in two hands. The feeling when the Christmas tree lights finally get turned on, when the sun hits your face in spring time and winter was finally worth suffering through. It was warm and gentle and kind and loving. He was right. There was no falling, and so there was no way we would hit the ground. You cannot hit the ground when you slip into love, gently and with intention.

[nakedknitting]

I dreamt about you last night. It’s a new kind of dream. Fitting for a new kind of person. A mundane dream. The act of finding your luggage after a long flight and catching a train, soft kisses pressed between scrambles for a suitcase off the conveyor belt. Funny how the dream mimicked real life. How each morning felt like Sunday morning. Slow and sweet, even though I was always aware of the bus that was ten, then five minutes away. A scattering of kisses across the nape of my neck and up my face. Different from before. More playful, more full of fun intention to engage and pull me in. More kisses than I have had before maybe. More pressed kisses, some that deepen, some that don’t. Goodbye kisses and hugs saying hello. Warm arms in a bed slightly too small for two of us. Different, but in a good way.

[nakedknitting]

Tower hill is flocked with tourists. They admire the bridge and the buildings and they buy mugs and keychains in the gift shop. They think little about the people who walked through the towers. But as a women, it consumes my thoughts. I think of the girls who lost their lives in their at the hands of a man filled with fantasies of his power. The girls who were convinced by a man that he loved them. A love that was ultimately their undoing. I think of this girl, fifteen or sixteen, and I think of how naive I was at sixteen. How intoxicating love felt then, how blinding to common sense it was to be noticed and adored. She was no more than twenty one when she died. No more than seventeen when she married him. Her naivety a powerful weapon used against her. Barely lived and now sentenced to death by the instructions of a man. Marked as unclean, promiscuous, sullied. Marked these things as a child. A child. One died a child and one died leaving behind a child. I cannot imagine how it felt to sit and wait for the words that would mark the walk to your death.

I cannot imagine it.

To die at the hands of the same man who spoke sonnets to seduce you.

[nakedknitting]

june brought hot and humid summer nights like no other I had experienced. sticky and sweet and filled with ice cream and pizza. in the middle of the month, I lay in your bed, skin sticking to each other but between the two of us we had accepted this sticky fate. your face so close to mine that gravity could pull us together at any second. your fingers tracing soft nothings on my forearms up my shoulders and down the creases of my back. if you could do any activity tomorrow, what would you do, i ask. i like to listen to your voice. that’s a tough question, you say. while you figure out an answer, i think of the hike from yesterday and the people paragliding through a crystal clear blue sky and think that i would like to do this. your answer breaks my memory. i think i’d like to try paragliding, you say. i look up in shock. i recount the thoughts and we laugh over our similarities. you are a stranger. i know you only a few weeks, but you fit into me like a puzzle piece i did not know was missing. you laugh and pull me closer to you to the point where gravity does win. its sticky and hot and you kiss my temples and my nose with a tenderness that a stranger shouldn’t have for another stranger. you touch me with tenderness that nobody has before, and you smile at me with thoughts that i cannot access. june brought hot and humid summer nights. summer nights filled with you.

[nakedknitting]

Homesickness

Homesickness for me has always come in a few different forms. The worst kind being the homesickness for a person. Your body remembers the feeling of them and reminds you in bouts of painful memory. The feeling of their hand curling into yours. Their voice soft in the early hours of the morning. Their lips gentle on your nose, your temple, your collarbone. Your body is homesick for them.

Closely following is the homesickness for a place that you know you cannot return to for far too long. For the place that made you after other places broke you. For the life that you could create and foster and build to be however you liked. For a life that you have lived and lost.

Homesickness has a funny way of being present physically in your body. In your lungs and your stomach, down to your toes and up to where your neck meets your hairline. You feel is physically, homesickness.

[nakedknitting]

Specific parts of female friendship that I will always love

- professing to your friends how beautiful you think they are at 2am in the morning on a night out, not because it’s 2am but because they are glowing with the happiness of good music and strong wine spritzers

- taking every chance possible to remind your friends how wonderful they are and how they shouldn’t settle for anything less than gold

- laughing at 6am in McDonalds because you haven’t been asleep for 24 hours and this Big Mac is the first substantial, non-snack thing you’ve eaten since lunch 16 hours ago because you’ve been having too much fun

- kissing friends on the forehead when they’re drunk and happy and when no worries can touch you in the moment

- complimenting each other. at every chance. at every opportunity

- photographs. photographs of each other, of your drinks, of your food. photographs of your favourite outfit. just, photographs.

- the videos you send pre-date with an outfit check to the group chat, because their opinions matter more than any boy, and they know which clothes in your wardrobe are best suited for a first date

- realising one day that all along, it was them that was missing from your life. realising that it is these girls who fulfill your life and make you happy. realising you wouldn’t trade anything in the world for them

[nakedknitting]

Things living in Europe for a semester of university taught me

I am worthy of being someone’s friend. I am a good friend, even though I don’t think so sometimes. I am worthy of unconditional, soft and gentle love. Quiet loving your friends is more satisfying than shouting it to the world. How to be alone. That being alone isn’t synonymous with being lonely. That having lunch on my own is actually a very nice experience. Nobody else cares as much about what you do as you do. You should laugh hard at least 2 times a week. It’s good for your soul. That a sunny day and some ice cream can solve nearly all of your problems, at least for 30 minutes. Defending your friends and your beliefs is always worth the uncomfortable moments. Buy comfortable shoes. Buy shoes that you like, in colours you love. Be yourself, it’s is the best version of you. Leaving it too long without swimming in the sea or a lake can become suffocating if you’ve lived near the water for so long. Nobody is worth sacrificing your peace. Not ever. Don’t condemn yourself for living. Eat cake for breakfast. Eat broccoli for dessert. Fuck it. Travel if you can. Even if it means taking a train 2 hours away and finding a field to have a picnic in. When you find people who love you and who you love, love them confidently and wholeheartedly. The world will reward you for it.

[nakedknitting]

“You are a quotation mark. The most important stuff is inside you”

from the poem he wrote me

[nakedknitting]

On pain

Numerous people have had their chance to hurt me in the past. They’ve left little marks in my chest and gut that bleed when I feel the familiarity of hurt. Some have done more damage than others. Some have hurt me a sharp hurt which stung for months but slowly faded to nothing, healing eventually. Some hurt more, the damage done slowly over time. Those scratches are etched into my heart now, leaving a dull constant ache in my heart and a horrid nausea in my gut. A feeling that I became very acquainted with when I was twenty and twenty one. A by-product of wanting someone specific to love me and accept me and feeling torn and diminished when my efforts to gain this failed. Words promised me they loved me, but were accompanied by actions and comments which felt like small pellet guns hitting me. Enough to do a bit of damage but not enough to entirely kill me. A slow death, which I knew would never really come. Pellets can be removed and patched up in the end. The sting in my nose that always meant tears hit regardless of location. Sidewalks, college lectures, the safety of my room. Nowhere was particularly safe from it, from their words. All the while, the speaker never notices. Doesn’t notice the bubble wrap slowly protecting me, but stopping me from getting any closer at the same time. I wish I could tell you everything that I would say. I wish you would listen. You wouldn’t. You never really do.

[nakedknitting]

On jam tarts

Leftover pastry crust is always made into jam tarts. Usually strawberry, but sometimes my mother had made blackberry jam with the fruit from the blackberry bushes in the front garden. The tartness of the blackberries balanced with just the right amount of sugar. The tarts were sticky, and I was always too impatient to wait for the jam to cool down before trying to eat one. I would burn my tongue with the first bite and the strange feeling that comes with a burnt tongue would linger for a day or two. Even at twenty, my dad leaves the ends of whatever pastry he has to the side and gives it to me. Rolling it out to just thin and thick enough and taking way too long decorating the tops provokes recollections that are buried deep enough to just be a feeling in my chest and the memory of burnt tongues.

[nakedknitting]

On the children in my life

I miss the children that came into my life and then grew out of it. I watched them grow and thrive and move on and when I see them in a Facebook post it provokes a feeling of both pride and sadness in my chest. I will never forget the children who taught me how to love so deeply. I won’t ever forget the children who showed me what it felt like to laugh so hard you cried, or the children who were so deeply affectionate with me they made me surge with love. Watching them grow up and grow into themselves is the most bittersweet feeling. As they grew, they grew away from the small hands in my belt loops, to then the children who come to me for homework help, and then they grew to be not really children anymore who wave excitedly when they see me pass.

[nakedknitting]

When I was 16 I believed in the concept of three loves. A first love which was naive and innocent, a second which was hurtful and taught you all the lessons and a third one which was the love that you would love forever. The third was supposed to be your great love. I believed in this until I was 20 years old, when I met you. And you showed me that love can be naive and innocent, painful and great all in one. The fights over stupid things were counteracted by the 2am giggles where you whispered to me that you loved me. The nights that I felt like the world was coming down on me were followed by a tentative call at midnight where you told me that you would love me even when we were angry. None of it mattered when I saw you at work and your smile gave me butterflies in my tummy. And it was you who made me realise that there is not three ‘types’ of love, but simply that there are simply different ways of love and different people who live in different ways. And you were the person who loved me. You were and are my person.

[nakedknitting]

We went to Tesco today, in the evening. I drove. I had a list of groceries. We have a habit of creating dates out of mundane activities. Our first date we went to IKEA. Today, we went to Tesco. As you walked to the entrance, you were a little ahead of me and you reached out behind you for my hand and in the moment my heart fluttered. I quickened my steps to catch up with you, to fit my hand in yours in the way that only we have, with my pinky finger tucked in between your middle and your pointer finger because my hand is too small to interlock our fingers completely. In Tesco, I moved a pot of pesto back further on the shelf so I could ask you to come and reach up to get it for me. I won’t tell you I did that. I just wanted you near me. You pass it to me and slip you hand back into mine and gently pull me towards the sweet aisle. I think I could do this forever. I say nothing.

[nakedknitting]

And the worst part of it all, is that I would love you, and I would love you so so much, but I can’t because I made the bed and now I must lay in it. And I hate it. I want to build a new bed, invite you into it and burn the old one. But you’re clinging to the old bed frame and no convincing or coercing will tempt you away because you fear the new bed will bring the same hurt. And I’m doing my best to try and smother the nasty monster lurking in the corner of the room who whispers that I don’t really want you or that you’re not the one. The monster whispers that I just want the security, that I want the safety of a guaranteed best friend. The voice in my heart says it’s wrong, that you like him, you want him, you enjoy him. The real question is- is the whisper of the monster louder than the words of my heart.

- an excerpt from the book I have written in the notes of my phone

[nakedknitting]

Happiness Will Come To You.