when everything is yellow

I can’t taste the cinnamon bun, and I can’t even feel the connection between my tongue and my finger when I try to suck the icing off. Because I said, yes please, ice it, and she said it’s Monday, why not. And I didn’t need her to approve of my decision, but now my hands hurt in the way that makes my eyes water and I can’t even really chew because I don’t have much saliva right now, so I actually wish I didn’t have icing to complicate it. It’s been 25 minutes since I got out of the water that burnt my skin and 15 minutes since my teeth stopped chattering and 10 minutes since I cried a bit. The sugar does something as pieces get sucked off my fingers and then I give up and put it in my bag so I can focus on walking with my hands in my pockets again and I wonder a bit why I do it to myself. Why the coldest Monday of forever feels like the time to get into a reservoir. Why it was worth it to leave my bike locked up until I can muster to collect it because I actually can’t get back on it now.

Last year maybe around exactly now I did it to myself and then cycled across the city for my next class and there was sleet the whole way from Hampstead to Embankment and then at the reception my lip wobbled enough for the man I speak to once a week when I come in to ask if I need a hug. And I really did. And so we did. And today I want to say nothing at all and be hugged for more than 17 minutes. Mainly it’s because of the pain in my hands that makes me so feeble I can’t see straight. Still, I slide off the side of the jetty again and again and gasp and feel everything and nothing at all for a while. Issy said to me I’m going to stop doing things people tell me not to do and then ask them to help me deal with it. And I thought ok honey, good for you, but you’ll be the first one who ever managed to do that.

I started swimming in the cold at exactly the point in my life when I didn’t realise at the time, but was in fact at the beginning of needing to be brave and braver and braver for much longer than I’d have coped with knowing at the top of the slide. The day I moved out of my flat because we’d broken up - so it wasn’t really the vibe to live there anymore - I walked an hour to the ponds and it had been snowing. In the water there were sheets of ice around a small area that you could swim through. Not too close though, they warned, because someone had cut themself against the ice. So I swam to the very edge and heard ice up close. Ice up close creaks and whispers, and you hear to respect what she is and be quiet with your strokes. I heard. My strokes. I got the bus home and did everything I could do to avoid leaving until it was time to call an Uber and lock my door for the last time. Watch the countdown on the Uber app, the countdown of the last minutes living there until you don’t anymore and it’s time to give a key back.

So sometimes now I know more and more that I will be ok when it hurts again to love and I feel more and more that it doesn’t ever hurt less the next time. Not really. You just know you will probably survive because you once got in water that was full of ice in just a red swimming costume that I know flatters the shape of my body. And there I didn’t sink. One of my most memorable moments of Sex and the City is the start of season six, when Carrie bumps into Aiden on the street and he has a baby now. And she walks away and does the brave thing of calling Jack Berger, because she just saw with her own eyes, if me and Aiden can survive a crash that big! There’s nothing I can’t! And it couldn't be more that feeling. I didn’t die and it was such a death, so why not fucking go back into the merry go round. Why stop now?

I would love to whisper gently to myself the day of the Uber, maybe to the moment in time when I cycled around East London to find fish and chips listening to Bruce Springsteen, that a day will come, sometime in the future, about two years after locking the door for the last time, when he’d send me a weighted blanket in the post even though I hadn’t mentioned my sleep had been so bad. It was just a gift for someone he loved still, just differently now.

You know when people tell you that you can’t be friends? But you try anyway? And really fuck it up because you can’t be friends? Not yet anyway. But that is the thing that everyone’s wise advice hasn’t taken into account. You just have to feel it all yourself. And even after an absolute car crash, it might remain true later still, that you were right, underneath all of the terribly awkward messy ways we were human, there are still the two souls back there who only loved.

When I couldn’t get to sleep last night I thought about how I washed my hair the morning after my abortion. And I put on a dress. And probably I was walking carefully, but I walked down the road with sunglasses and clean hair and sat in the park with my sister and drank a weak coffee because suddenly I wasn’t pregnant anymore and suddenly coffee tasted fine again. I wanted to go to her and walk down the road holding her hand to remind her that she wasn’t doing it by herself because she had me. I thought of the weekend after when I went home and walked in a shadow of black and wondered if I’d ever not be dark again. I want to go to her when she couldn’t look Beth in the eye before dinner because she was about to sob and say, it’s ok, if you ask her, Beth would actually hold your head in her hands.

There is something the most sad when you remember yourself walking the perimeter of the playground alone because you don’t know what to say. And there is something even more sad when you remember your sister’s first day of school and she couldn’t stop crying and Mrs Mole had to carry her away from mum. And then there is when the boy who got you pregnant carelessly says something about his pregnant friend a week later and you can’t help but lose it, because why didn’t I, why didn’t I, let myself imagine I could have the baby. There is your Dad at boarding school in a concrete room set on fire by boys who made it to be politicians later and he is small and he is scared in the middle. There it is all at once. And there you are ok now.

There is something about collecting all your dark pieces and seeing more of everyone else's, there is something that makes the light so much brighter. There is something of the dawn when you least expect it.

In therapy I have started talking to my inner child and I have started to be kind to all the way she enrages me when I watch - and then make us turn off - home videos. Because I just can’t bear to see the way she tries to get attention. Because it is so deeply me that it is unbearable. And then for once Jeri said, what if you look at her with compassion instead? What if you look at all the creative fantasies she’s building to be noticed and what if you speak to her now. Yeah so I make felt robins and I spend hours trying to make a yule log and then I tell everyone what I’ve done. And christ I couldn’t be more obvious. All the ways I act out, all of the ways we can see through me, all of the flaws that cover my Instagram feed, all of the brilliance, all that is real and then deeper still there is something else. Someone who whispers to herself before she goes to sleep and whose heart skips a beat when she sees, when I see another magpie. And isn’t that for a rich time here?