Thread by @porridgebrain

Hello! #AStillLifeWeekend starts here. The wonderful @BloomsburyBooks published A STILL LIFE back in Feb. My memoir tells two stories: "a slow life and a slow year, entwined." It walks you through my days and my heart gently, intimately, often in surprising and moving ways.

As I wrote, I took photos. This weekend, I'll be sharing a behind-the-scenes look at some of the images that accompanied moments from the book. So many of you have been such generous, devoted readers and I thought you'd enjoy this different view of the story. Thank you 💙

"I write this from my bed in an old terraced house that’s seen out a hundred and fifty slow laps of the sun. I’ve spent the last fifteen of them here. Same old walls, same old view."

"I share the house with my nine-year-old son and no one else. Our days follow a repetitive, quiet rhythm."

"The first thing you’ll want to know, I expect, is what’s wrong with me. That’s always the first thing people ask, their eyes sliding to my legs, my slump, and so I will say now that I don’t know. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I’ve spent my whole life wondering too."

"'Is it broken?’ says a man, nodding to my mobility scooter while keeping cold hands in his pockets. He has a face like a scrubbed potato, his cheeks purple. The rest of him is all shoulders and shadow. ‘Oh, no, thank you! I had just stopped to take photos of the puddles,’ I say"

"Much of the nature writing I read talks of connecting to yourself and to the land by walking, exploring, by rediscovering wildness. But what if you can’t walk and can’t leave, what then? What if your wildness is dead roses and walled yards, mossy rooftops and cold neighbours?"

"The way he talks to our cat when he thinks no one is listening would tell you everything you need to know about how much heart runs through him"

"At any time of count, at least three people will be asleep... This place is the best and brightest, safest place I know. Places like this are rare and precious. They split that narrow end of the wedge wide open. Places like this let all of us breathe."

"I have a habit of leaving flowers in vases long past their best, until they are puckered and wrinkled, losing their petals and manners. This habit’s not from idleness or fatigue though, this is more a kind of lived intention: I don’t give up on things any more."

"There. A flash of orange and a singular bend of white that can only mean one thing in all the world and all of time. A swan above and a swan below, I think, as I turn and drive back home. I smile, renewed. I don’t need much, that’s the thing."

"... the way to beat shame and the fear of rejection it hides is to make it all visible, to shake it all out somewhere spacious. Screw fear to hell. Pay attention, be brave, see the truth, write it down. That will always be enough."

"And wouldn’t there be good company in that? In me entertaining the whole of existence come to visit? Maybe if I sit still long enough, I can be an axis around which every wonder spins. Try thinking these thoughts and still feeling small and alone and isolated, I dare you."

"The snow persists and makes a canvas of everything and I sit and watch it. As more of the land is buried, the opposite seems to happen to people. Everyone seems to melt back to something habitual, everyone becoming a caricature of themselves."

"It makes me look at ugly things again, at the rich compost of last year’s brown leaf mulch in the gutters and the slumped mess of snow’s weight on the verges. I smile with a secret knowing. There is power in decay and I claim it."

"I am not the weather... and so I can let pain move through me and out of me... it is simply the wind of a dark day that I can lean into until it passes. ‘Pain, you can’t hurt me,’ I whisper as Jonas dashes off, and I laugh because the words are absurd and because they’re true."

"I don’t think madness would feel this quiet. I don’t think mysticism would feel this ordinary. I have learnt to slip between the two, unnoticed and undemanding."

"Today is the day I hear it. It takes me and carries me and, for a moment, I know bliss. The unexpected, sudden sunshine of the day must have filled his small, dark body up to the beak until he couldn’t help but pour it out of him."

"I can almost feel its gentle eagerness. How much is wrapped up in each bud. How tight and full it must feel, and I think: I know that feeling. At least now I can say that I’ve been so quiet, I’ve heard a daffodil undress."

"Lichen covers everything. It makes necklaces of powdered bone and teeth on the headstones... like a forest, like coral, like plague, like pus-covered skin, like chalk on a paving stone drawn by a child’s hand. There is so much delight and horror everywhere, all at once..."

"There is a rising in me. My hands and my lips have become hungry buds and I want to press them against whatever’s warm and giving. I feel it: that sap pulse, an awakening of green somewhere hidden and parched. It is like nothing else."

"I’ve got a thing about overhead wires. I can see some from every window in my house. I like the spaces between them, like someone’s cut up the sky and pieced it back. I like the way they stretch from house to house, the fact that we’re all joined up like that: threaded together"

"One rabbit stops to wash itself, paws pulled rhythmically over nose and head. I am tempted to copy, to pull at my ears until they stretch, to crouch till I shrink, and finally, in the form I belong in, to burrow into the dark home of the bank..."

"We’re taught that only romance can give us the love stories we crave. I say, come sit with me at my best friend’s table one teatime... all of us laughing loud enough to make the sugar shake, and tell me you still believe that."

"I am watching the sun move around the garden. In early May, it claims its territory like a new lover. Here, it asks? And here? The light is soft, slow, perfect."

"I sit again on the dirty floor, abandon gloves and trowels, and push into the sticky compost like a midwife. I tip seeds, sleeping, into my cupped palm and paw through them, selecting life, selecting futures, and the seeds do nothing but wait and trust."

"Grief makes me feel more connected to other people than almost anything else. There is no single emotion we get to claim as solely our own, but I think grief may be the most shared, the most universal... As I grow, I can recognise its shape more and more in the people I meet."

"How funny that drinking tea is the one act of hope that endures... Hold a cup and I am back together, joined by cups of tea past. What a relief to be whole. No wonder I make so many."

"I reach out to the wolf. It is all snap and bite in this bed, but I know that is because it is afraid. I don’t want it to be afraid. I place shaking fingers against the skin of my own arm. I stroke, soft, soft. Shh. Be still. It’s OK. It’s OK. I cry. Of course I do."

"Suddenly, there is a ‘next’. Suddenly, there are plans, dreams... I am full of fire under this clear sky and a man I wonder if I could spend the second half of my life with shyly talks of all the things he wants to show me, to share with me."

(F took this one)

"It is love’s job to say, firmly: you can. You do. You are. You must try.... 'One more time, from the beginning,’ the piano teacher says. We get nowhere alone. I think that’s what I’m realising from this wonderful, terrifying place. We get nowhere alone."

"In his words, his gestures, his gentle, pleading eyes, I watch him hand all his power to me... Slowly we realise that neither of us is disappointed."

"The new damselfly hangs hidden on the back of the balcony chair, emerald, glistening. Next to it, an inch away, I can see the stiff, deformed monstrosity of the nymph form it has crawled from... something of each is in the other: an echo, a memory."

"It feels vital now to have the right gaze on you, to help you remember who you are. Suddenly I doubt my self-sufficiency. Perhaps that is why the garden collapsed? I spent months whispering to it, telling it of its beauty, its power, its worth, and then I stopped and went away."

"The idea of all these women feeds me. Each holds an aspect of myself I have struggled to find acceptance of or a place for. Each of their energies combine in me and I resolve to try and make something good with it. I feel like the uncertain, desperate grandchild of all of them."

"As I’ve grown and learnt, I have pulled some walls down. Others I’ve needed help with, needed love. Other still won’t budge and stay beyond my power. In amongst them all, despite them all, I am learning how to be free, and how to create freedom for others."

"I can’t lift my legs, my arms, my hands. To make them move I must haul them, like wrecks through heavy water... My breaths come ragged, torn... When I move, I hear hollow moans from faraway and know they come from me."

"We roll onto our backs and watch the clouds, impossibly white today against the blue, and he tells me in a long stream of confidence what he sees – a dragon, a plane, a fish – my eyes still closing and opening like the butterfly’s wings."

"The skies are so big here, my eyes can’t hold them. I must turn my head as I sit in the car to catch it all, as we drive over the vast bridges that join the land together."

"It is a perfect moment. Brief and absolute in its contentment... I do not grieve what isn’t. I do not try to leap from it hungrily into elsewhere or try to hold it fearfully still. All simply is. What a rare thing that is. Horrifyingly so."

"I can smell the apples that surround me. One more hits the floor with a thump every few minutes like a slow, irregular heartbeat."

"Change change change in everything, and I feel like I’m spinning; poised on a tipping point, breath held, arms open, heart ready. There is an itch to pull something out of this feeling... I cast on a shawl in soft, grey Danish wool, watching the stitches march along my needles."

"Besides, how cleverly love spreads. Even at my most broken now, I watch how the basic, most focused moments make my son grow, and how they make Fraser unfurl too. I see what happens afterwards: they go out and touch the world and other people in ways beyond me."

"I close my eyes and say a prayer to no one, in thanks, in hope. I put my hand to my heart and feel the hard flutter there, like I’ve swallowed the bird from the air, and I know I will never, ever be undone, not entirely."

"You can dream your way through ideas, through pain, I have learned. You don’t have to control it all: if there is no control left, it’s OK. Your mind will make great leaps, jumping gaps between things to find out what’s on the other side."

"He has stuffed the footwell with cushions again and drives me around the world. I lie back, my legs supported, my twice-socked heels making little hollows in my soft car bed, and I watch, watch it all."

"There is a difference between being stuck and being rooted, and my roots stretch down down deep."

And that's a wrap on #AStillLifeWeekend! Thank you for following along. I hope it's helped to show a new side to the story as we lived it. I appreciate you all so so much. 🧡