Bonfire Night, 2024
Lately, I have been very busy. It’s not great for me physically. It’s almost as if, in summoning the energy to do all the things that must be done, the fun as well as the obligations, I have no off-switch; I must have the energy coursing through me at all times, even at night. However, today is a gentle day and I managed a decent seven hours of sleep so I have some mental space, and physically I am relaxed, the jitters have stopped. What I realise is that in the busy, anxious, over-excited state I am very hard and sinewy, stopping for no man. Once I quieten and become more meditative, I can allow myself to soften. This is how I prefer to feel, I think.
It is November. I hardly remember the woman from January who was so frightened, who flinched constantly when her soul was stinging, who was overwhelmed and fragile and could not see a future, in any form, where she didn’t feel that desolate. Where I am now, it is hard to say what I feel because compared with that time, I feel so little. Of course, I was never going to feel in such high intensity forever. I say, ‘of course.’ I say ‘of course’ from this comfortable, end of year vantage point. I say ‘of course’ as if January-Kate were only an apparition of naiveté. November-Kate, with all her sophistication, her self-knowledge, her intrepid journeying into independence, has almost lost sight of January-Kate. Do we always look forward? I am where I was going and it feels like the right sort of place. I’ve arrived at myself. I’ve made the house cosy and not too shabby. I’ve asked for very little help. I’ve painted and fixed and come alive in seeing the transformation to home. I no longer need to be elsewhere. And I suppose the thing to do when you arrive after a long journey is to enjoy, luxuriate even, in the halcyon days of homecoming. Perhaps I am doing this. I am having fun after all. The kind of fun I am having is still novel, inaccessible as it has been to me. The fun you all had in your twenties. But still, I ask myself, what next? What next?
Does there need to be a ‘what next’? Perhaps I just carry on. What I can’t understand is how lonely I was in the last five years of my marriage. I left because I thought I would die of loneliness. Truly, I didn’t think I could stay alive but now here I am, November-Kate and I am not lonely. And yet, I am alone, on my own. I am single. I have cultivated deeper friendships than I had before, certainly. And I have cultivated them with more authenticity because I am a pared down version of myself, with fewer places to hide. My children tolerate me with palpable affection, my lovers are attentive but today I have wondered, could I not have had these connections from a different home? I am the same but different, as if I find myself thinking, after all, it was so easy. Of course, it wasn’t easy, it was traumatic and disorientating but now I am here, so much myself, I am almost deflated, as if to realise that all I ever needed was to find myself and listen very carefully, then let go and plunge forward with the current. How strange to have been so scared.
