I am

I write these words all the time. They help me see what's true.

New Year’s Day

I am… sitting up in bed, my knees drawn up under the duvet, my journal balanced on top. I can hear the soft sounds of Darth, my cat, washing himself; the dry rasp of his tongue.

I delayed picking up my journal and writing this and so I missed the chance to narrate him watching the magpies on the neighbour’s roof through the window, his yellow eyes wide, his sleek body perfectly still. I missed, too, the chance to capture the slam of the back door as my son came in from the rain. He has been sitting out in it, sitting on the ground on a folded blanket, a dry circle protected by his umbrella, watching the way the water collects on the gravel and on the leaves of the winter weeds. It is one of his favourite things to do. It helps him when he’s anxious.

The cat’s yellow eyes. The slam of the door. These things exist still as echoes and thoughts and these words on my page, but they are not HERE, now, and if I keep focusing on what happened I will miss what is happening, and so I go back to the magic words I use to work out what’s really true... I am… I am…

I am… sitting up in bed, yes. Tucked up next to me, my partner, F, pages through the black and white spreads of old comics on his iPad. A helmeted villain grins leerily up from the page, and as I write those words, planning more, F stops abruptly, putting down the iPad with a snap, shuffling himself down to lie flat and pull the duvet up to his face, his eyes closing. At the same time, Darth slides off the bed with a thunk. The dehumidifier down the hall purrs, reminding me that wet washing is sitting, chilling and forgotten, in the washing machine, in the shed. The central heating makes its strange tinkling sounds. F is already breathing slow and deep.

The small house around us is spotless — not a thing out of place — but then I haven’t done any work for two weeks now. These details are important. The house that is a little too clean. The fact that I’m wearing extra socks over my tights; that the toes beneath them are red and swollen. My cross stitch project sits on the duvet at my feet, ready for me to pick it up again. That’s what I was doing before I started writing this. It shows a neat, tight square of green and brown stitches that will slowly morph into a vast stitched picture, one day, months from now, but it doesn’t show that yet.

What words does this image conjure? Control, perhaps. Avoidance. Companionship. Worry. Patience. I don’t know — you get to choose the words.

Outside the window, it is grey. It’s turning dark — too dark to sew. The only light is lamp-lit, golden. The pen is making deep shadows on my page and I can feel the dry skin on my hands. I have been washing them too often again.

We came to bed in the middle of the day for warmth, and because there’s nowhere else to sit, really. The tiny box living room has a two seater sofa but squashing all of us in there usually leaves at least one of us unhappy and, and so…

No.

I am… I am thinking again. I am not here. There is a restlessness in my stomach (I haven’t done any work in two weeks, my brain chimes in). I am watching my beloved sleep and feeling a gnawing burn to take care of him, and the boy downstairs; all of us. On the laptop, on the floor beside me, there is a timetable and a plan, all set to begin on Monday fresh. When I write the magic words in this journal next week… I am… I am… what will they find me doing? Will they find me doing something I want to do, satisfied? Or will they find me doing something else, frowning, folding myself up in the warm duvet of my resistance?

I read a lot of New Year’s posts, as the year turned. This time of year, everyone shares what they’re going to do, or not going to do, or what other people should do, or shouldn’t. I find it very boring.

Yes, yes, I want to say, but what are you actually doing? Right now? No one seems to write about that.

Tell me: if I was to draw a window in the air and peer through it to your life, what would I find? What would you be doing? What things would be around you? Would you be there, aware of it all, or would you be in your head, somewhere else?

I don’t want to do it to judge — how should I know what’s best for you — but I do want to see. It’s that I long for. To see what’s real, under all the smoke and mirrors, the online personas, masks, performance, conviction, righteousness. Behind all that. In this moment, and this one.

What do people actually do? What do I actually do? It is these two questions that keep me writing and that keep me wanting to write. They nag at me. These days I care far less about what people say. People say stuff all the time. I say stuff all the time. It means nothing.

What I mean to say is that we make these pictures with our bodies, with our environments and the things we do in them, in every moment of every day, and I want to see those pictures and learn what they mean. Do we like the pictures we make? Do they make us smile? Do they feel like us, or do we carry inside us an unlived longing, dying to make new pictures of its own?

That’s why I write the words I am in my journal and follow their thread so often. Not to chastise myself, but to look at myself, cleanly, like I’m holding up the picture. What am I choosing to do in this moment? What I am turning towards and what am I turning away from? I assess the picture like a writer would. What does this picture tell me about this person? Is it who they want to be?

Yes, I’m moving into the new year with a plan, as naive and as hopeful as anyone, but the plan isn’t important or interesting, really. What matters more is the grand experiment a new year offers, to keep sitting and writing the words I am… I am… and following them with a true answer. I am… this. And this is good, often, often, often. Thank you world, thank you me who chose this today.

Sometimes I do frown. There. There in that gap I feel as I sit and watch my life. There, perhaps, I can make a change.

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