Every album by The National

Can you think of a lonelier place than closing the bathroom door on Christmas day? There is something in the light of the bathroom too, hospital yellow that shows your face off like that in the mirror. And the haze around the edges from drinking in the daytime. And your head, my head in my hands now and my eyes closed and my mouth open for the seconds I get to stay behind the heavy door of the bathroom on Christmas day.

I think about being inside bars now and the freedom in the seconds of closing the cubicle door. In hearing someone's footsteps and fragments of conversation by the sinks and then a closed door between this and everything else. I always like to pull faces, I like to stretch my mouth apart and make lips like a fish gulping water, flare my nostrils, put my fist in my mouth. Just let me stay for the next few seconds here. Is it lonely or is it solitude. Is it something like intimacy with self?

Anyway lonely is inherently sad and solitude is an existence. It’s a completely different thing and I feel silly for bringing them so close together. But sometimes it’s hard to decipher the edges of one and the beginning of the next. I have had Maggie Nelson’s voice in my head all day, all week actually. Just the time loop; you’ve punctured my solitude. My solitude can cover my edges and wrap around my house and follow me up and down the footpath and onto the branch of the broken tree I am lying on now. It is feet on the ground isn’t it? It is an existence and it is a place full of grass shoots. And I’ve got this image now which could even be imagined from photographs of the mountain sides in Ireland that are close to the sea. It is the hardship just before spring breaks. I’ve never before today heard someone so articulate and so acquainted with the sadness before spring. The impossible hope, the edge of the cliff, the dance of now and not yet. Is it that?

Solitude is the necessary. But the Christmas day part, that isn’t that at all. We are lonely there aren’t we. Because we are lonely when we are pretending. But sometimes we have to pretend because everyone else in the room needs us to pretend. And it isn’t even a lie, it’s just leaving something out. Ok ok, I can play this game and I can feel that this is the most delicious food I have ever tasted, but 85% of me is living somewhere else and sometimes I have to go into the cupboard to be with her.

But how miraculous. And how lonely. It’s the capacity. It’s the capacity to have such a dry mouth from a lack of sleep because I was awake in the darkest hours of the night. In bed but not sleeping. And on top of that the day old excess alcohol rages at the pigment of my skin so you can see behind my eyes isn’t quite all the way here. So there is all that. And there are these hands that can do seven things at once to make a meal that frankly is another level of delicious. And hands can wash everything up and make drinks before they’ve finished their last ones. And then somewhere from beyond you are choosing music to keep the room colourful and you are squeezing their shoulders and meeting their eyes and taking in everything that they say. You are joining in and playing the games and sulking in the right moments, laughing too. You have put out another spread of food when it’s dark and found ice for their next drinks. What a miraculous capacity to hold the dark cupboard back for a day whilst the world fills up the living room.

But I don’t want to let my skin turn grey and have those conversations today. Today I want to go where a wild meadow is still blooming even under the circumstances.

Anyway I decided today to listen to all of the albums The National have ever made and I decided that I will say shorter sentences and ignore everything that isn’t urgent and I will operate like this and go to the fertile space or the dust. Because in it’s barren state is everything. I walked and looked into the eyes of anyone who would look back properly just to see what’s there. Let’s not open our mouths today because we have no good conversation left and we don’t need to recycle the verses given to us. What if we just look instead and you tell me in your eyes what is true and I live to see another day.

That sounds dramatic and I don’t mean it like that, I just mean to say, I’d rather just have nothing except a kernel of what is real. Than everything of nothing at all. You see?

I just don’t want to reduce any of it anymore. I don’t want to keep thinking I have figured it out. I don’t want to keep reducing what you do to what everyone else does. I don’t want to reduce what you say to someone else’s reaction. I don’t want to miss all of the threads of the tapestry that make it this real. And I get so dangerously close to doing that all the time when I am slamming doors and pushing for an answer that no one could be expected to find until they find them. So why am I always peering into your well and asking to hear the final sentence. Why am I looking for it to be written when it just is?

There are two things I wrote down from my book today. 1) Love the questions like locked rooms. WHAT. To be patient with all the unanswered questions in our hearts. To be patient. To be patient, the foreign land of patience. My most foreign land. What, I don’t have to detonate this with another letter I wrote in the heat of my moment? What? I could hold it close to me instead. What if that’s where the answers were anywhere. And 2) Everything must be carried to term before it is born. It’s the same thing. It’s just a different casing. We don’t fucking know yet. So what if I just get down onto the ground and pick up dead leaves when I feel to pick up dead leaves and stamp my feet because the ground can take it and find somewhere inside me that yesterday I didn’t know existed. But today feels like lying on the broken tree and looking up at all the way the bare winter branches cross and overlap above me.