PS

Sorry for disappearing and thank you (if you did) for missing me. I have been stressed and busy and doing fun things too... AND my mother has been here.
All too much.
Hopefully back now.

The things that are joyful, no matter what

Today, walking down the steps on the way to my office, I looked up at the nest underneath the upward flight on my right. Three tiny, perfectly-formed, almost-grown swallows looked right back at me.

I cannot imagine a more wonderful start to the morning.

Here they are this afternoon, when I lurked about taking pictures of them – but not for long, because it seems to make the parents reluctant to return to the nest.

Atlas

In my house I have a very large atlas. It is too large to be really like an ordinary book; it feels like something a little different, with a different and particular sort of purpose, to contain the world. It is old without being quite venerable, an old National Geographical atlas with tough board covers, faded and fraying with use.

It isn't mine, though it makes me think I would like to own a big old atlas, with pages lying unevenly, protruding past the cover, corners softening. I borrowed it from the library for reasons I will hopefully find some time to write about, which isn't strictly allowed but the librarian is a friend of mine. So I hugged it close and carried it home.

It isn't like most atlases I know, in that the detailed maps are not physical-style maps, all green and brown with the place names hard to see. They are political maps. The seas are blue and the countries are great expanses of white, with the mountains shaded in in delicate brown, and different colours around the edges to denote borders. Which all leaves plenty of space for names - countries and states and counties and regions, islands and rivers, mountains and lakes, and most of all cities and towns, thousands upon thousands of them. The world seems quite a different sort of place drawn this way - less a real place made of rock and water and forests and so on, and more a place created in the drawing and the naming of it, a place made of paper, an unreal place. I like these blanker maps; they seem to offer possibilities.

So I have been poring over maps, and thinking about the nature of atlases.

I have been running my fingers over the map of home, and feeling very far away. It is such a familiar shape, but not really familiar - I couldn't really even draw the outline, or place many places at all. I do it now, with my fingers.

Looking at the map of Mexico, it is such a familiar outline now too, but where I am within it surprises me. I don't really feel like I am here, in this map, at all.

I have been looking at exotic places I want to go one day... except that they don't seem exotic, just inscrutable shapes on a page.

The place that seems really fascinating, full of mystery, compelling me back to it, is home. My life will almost certainly unroll on these islands. Not the trips or the holidays, but the gritty stuff: the jobs, the houses, the love and loss, the ordinary and extraordinary days. I look at all the places and wonder what's going to happen to me, what I'll do, where I'll end up. I imagine the possibilities.

Atlases contain the future: all the places where all the things that are going to happen to us are going to happen.

An atlas like this holds the past, it guards a world lost to decades of ruthless time: the towns that are now great cities, the empty spaces where towns will grow, the colonial names that sound now stranger than the syllables that have replaced them.

The shapes stay constant but the writing is rewritten.

And, there is a future that the atlas does not see. As the seas rise, the atlas will stay constant to the world it remembers for us. And it cannot imagine the slow self-consumption of the earth: how the old continents will be drawn under and melted away, and new continents will grow, and everything will be forgotten - never mind Shakespeare, even the shape of the world will be otherwise entirely.

I think it is a relief to me that the Atlas remembers the world; that it stays true. It lifts the burden of memory, of keeping the world in mind to be sure that it is, and was. I do not know, or remember, but the Atlas does.

Perfidy

Three of the past four days we've lost power for big chunks of time. We had an email about this today, explaining that one of those occasions was because we got directly struck by lightning (!) and that they are working on how to minimise the disruption in the future.

Now part of me was thinking, Oh, but candles are fun. And their light is alive. And it is good to feel the storm and be part of the world, not just to carry on business as usual. Just like grown-ups! - like when it snows and all the grown-ups are complaining about the roads, and not being filled with wonder by it all and wanting to make snowmen and have snowball fights and gaze at trees with every tiny branch delicately iced.

And the other part of me was being a perfidious grown-up, and thinking it would be good for the things in my freezer compartment not to keep melting, and never not to have the internet and lights just like that.

I have a feeling that the grown-ups are slowly winning.

Down with grown-ups!

The world is suddenly full of swallows

Now, of course, there seem to be swallows everywhere. I just have to step outside to see them, tracing rapid arcs in the blue sky and between the trees, looping around me a few inches above the grass as I walk across the football field.

I hope that they've just arrived; I don't like to think that I've just failed to notice them. The thought has just occurred to me that they might be mid-migration, on their way to somewhere else. I hope not, but even if they are, even if they've all gone tomorrow, it seems like a miracle to me to have seen the world so suddenly full of swallows.

They are amazing. Their blue is deep and brilliant, but somehow gone before your eyes can catch it, the evasive blue of reflective trickery rather than pigment. Their bellies are the colour of sunset. They move so fast that I can't work out whether their throats are a brighter red or not, though I keep convincing myself one way or the other.

Our kingdom is speed,
we make the earth to run
and the sky to spin,
gracefully.
Never shall we be caught
even in your eyes.

True hope is swift, and flies with swallow's wings

A few days ago I was standing like a moon-struck sheep, gazing up at the graceful, darting little birds around the front of the main building, wondering if they were swallows, or martins, or swifts. I can never quite believe that anything is really a swallow, because they always turn out not to have been.

Today the sky was as blue as if it couldn't imagine being anything else, and the campus was very quiet, because today was a holiday (I am saving up my days off for when people visit, hence was working). And when I came out of the entrance door, there was a swallow, sitting on a wall. I didn't think swallows did anything as mundance as sitting on walls. But there it was, and as I walked it flew away in front of me, glossy blue, the flash of a paler belly and a bright red throat, streamlined and forked-tailed.

It was perfect, swallows are perfect, and I have seen one.

And for balance, I have also seen another cockroach in my kitchen. Bah.

But the cockroaches of this world do not dim the swallows. Not today, anyway.

Another thing about storms…

is that unexpected thunder really scares the shit out of me. Not the rumbley kind, but the kind that flashes and cracks and explodes right over your house like it’s under attack. For a fraction of a second there is nothing but terror, not even the beating of my heart.

It’s the same with fireworks. Mexicans love fireworks, especially on high days and holidays but pretty much any day will do. Which should make me awful happy, because I LOVE watching fireworks, except that here the oooh-aaah-prettyness seems to be secondary to the fuck-what-was-that-noise-iness. Which means random explosions are a possibility at any time, day or night (and usually just one or two – not a whole display you can settle into watching, oh no, just a couple of almighty bangs). Which I am mostly used to, and no longer wonder if someone is being shot up in the hills, but they’re still unpleasantly startling close by.

I am getting worse at coping with unexpected loud noises as I get older. Especially when I am alone and in a certain intense, fragile kind of mood. I hate shouting, the sudden yells and shouted greetings and catcalls of the city. I especially hate shouting, in fact, because there is part of me that is instantly terrified, instantly assumes that it is me who is being shouted at, that I’ve done something wrong, and my mother is screaming at me all over again because I have or haven’t done something, tidied my room probably, and it’s going to be horrible. Quite apart from living in an foreign land, where I don’t understand what is being shouted and my skin and hair and foreignness and assumed and actual relative wealth puts me always in a little more than normal danger. Quite apart from it being a bloody loud noise. Also car horns, and the whistles of traffic cops, and all the rest of the traffic’s roar. Barking dogs. Aeroplanes. A brat with an incredibly loud football rattle.

Not crying babies though. They almost never do here, and it is beautiful.

And nevertheless I love the bustle of the city. I love the glimpse of fireworks flowering over faraway houses. And I love the storm.

What I was going to say, before I got distracted by noises, was, tonight there is more darkness and candlelight, thunder and lightning, rain and rain and rain. I have my candle, and matches, and the delicious little stink of matches when you light them, I have gas to cook with, I have laptop battery (for now), and I have a spurious blanket, which makes me happy because of its stripes, and which is wrapped around me because that seems the sort of thing to do when sheltering from the storm in cosy candlelight. I have everything but the internet. Which I miss MUCH more than electric light. But I suppose I can do without even that for the perfect silence in between the thunder and between the ticks of the clock.

*

Next day:
I am in my office now, where there is internet.
Last night, when my laptop battery ran out and the power stayed out, I stopped.
I stopped worrying about all the unwritten emails (dozens), all the unwritten blog posts (dozens), and all the undiarised days. I stopped worrying about the things I have to send to the insurance people. I stopped worrying about things I need to read on the internet. I just stopped.
I read for a little while by candlelight, and it was very very quiet. Then I blew out the candle and it was very very dark, because the bloody streetlampthing outside my window was out too. And I didn’t have to get up for at least eight blissful hours, and I went to sleep.
And I woke up for no good reason in the early morning and went back to sleep again until after I meant to wake up. But nonetheless today I am merely tired, rather than tired-to-the-point-of-death.
I think this no-internet-no-power business might just save me from myself.