“The cities kill the stars”. A friend told me that one night. I had crept out of my warm bed, to speak to him, when he was slightly drunk and smoking something good. He was talking about how, on the moors, where there are no street lamps, or buildings, or signs of human life, the stars are mesmerising.
“When you were small, back in the day” he continued “and you painted the page dark blue and flicked white paint all over it, that’s the closest I can get to describing what it’s really like. Except it’s better and it’s more”
I could see it in my mind’s eye; just him and a couple of friends in that vast, unending place with the shadowed lands around him, and the sky outdoing itself above. If you look up at it, you will find it is as deep as time itself.
I wonder how it is that when you look into the night, for long enough, you can feel history and tomorrow moving through you.
“If you needed more light” he added “you’d set fire to a branch from a gorse bush. It burns fast and bright and strangely pretty. You should go. You should find the nearest moors to you, or at least somewhere away from everyone so you can see”
Of course I should go, but I shouldn’t go alone.
Even if they are empty of people, he says, there are ponies who can’t decide whether to bite you or love you, and wild sheep. These count as monsters to the unwary. The sheep like to surround you and they have horns. Possibly even menaces. I heard his smile as he kept talking
“I think” he said as though he was serious “a man can, more or less, take on one sheep but a whole circle of them is impossible. An unreasonable amount of my life seems to have been spent surrounded by animals who want to fight me”
After I put the phone down, I remembered the first time we had ever spoken. Or, really spoken, at least. The pseudo-first was when I had called his place of work, anonymously, to ask for magic beans. He sold plants, back then, and didn’t know my voice. He thought I was merely an odd customer, and spoke to me as though my request was perfectly rational. Even when I got to talking of needing a beanstalk tall enough to reach the flat above me, so I could steal their golden harp.
I didn’t quite know how to stop committing to the prank, and so I didn’t.
But the first time we really spoke, I had just walked from my house to stand one road away.
It was like I had gone to the moon. My friends celebrated for me, as though I had. They sent me ovations of love, in a flurry of messages.
Distance is entirely relative. It is only the word for time as it gathers between places and people, and as it pools in the spaces between the blinking beacons of our lives. What is insurmountable now might be a blink of nothingness tomorrow.
It must be just two hundred steps between this road, and that one, but I had not made it there for years. I had forgotten the view. The sunset softened majesty of the Downs. The wealth of trees garlanding them. The treasure of the grasses in their subtly different greens. I can see them from my house, too, of course, but here was a whole new part of them. I stood in the middle of the road and smiled. Breathed deeply like an explorer conquering a mountain. This is the start of freedom. This is how life shifts from one chapter to the next. You only notice the pages have been turning when you choose to look back.
He called me, for the first time, when he heard of my achievement and he told me about snow. Real, and falling, snow. About a time when he had seen it while he was riding on the zephyr of a good hallucinogen. This must have been near Christmas. The snow, he said, was full of rainbows and enchantment. It’s prisms dancing as he walked. A stranger, seeing just how high he was, had tried to sell it to him.
He declared he wouldn’t have minded buying it, “it was quite some snow after all”.
I still have not been to the moors but I have met the moon in my garden, and told her everything.
And, every year, when the summer is in swansong, the stars begin to fall. These are the Perseids.
They fall in cascades and glimmers, over and over, racing straight towards you. Or else they streak across the sky, of a sudden, and with such speed that standing in the dark you must wait for your eyes to adjust and even then, you might miss them. You watch for them, head tilted back to look at the open space above you. You are small, like people always say we are in the face of the universe, yet your heart can expand in moments like this to hold everything.
Anyone who tells you magic isn’t real has never seen them.
I just keep thinking of distance. The distance to those falling stars. The distance carried in the air that separates us. All the steps between where I am and where I’m going. About how nowhere could be further away than where I was.
Everywhere around here there are snickets; winding, hidden pathways that stand as shortcuts between the roads. One is so long that it takes you through a wood, and the path itself is overgrown with brambles. It is better than finding out that the back of the wardrobe leads to Narnia, when you come across these unexpected pathways and find yourself slipping in and out of nature.
I spent a whole summer walking them, alone. Letting them take me to the old Grammar School where the classrooms stood empty. High on the roof were the great, copper cowls my great-grandfather had put there and which the air has since turned that peculiar copper green. Verdigris. Or I’d let the snickets lead me to streets whose names I’ve half forgotten, where I exchanged smiles with strangers and looked for anything beautiful and unexpected. Any flower, any curiosity in people’s front gardens. Any secret.
Another snicket leads to a hill that tests your legs and seems to take you vertical but it is worth it, because it’s lined with rioting blossoms. A vital revolution, in white and palest pink.
Everything around here is so green, in contrast to the peerless blue of the sky, and it breaks you open, and blooms into you, until you are nothing except life.
I even found my way back to the pitch I used to play sports on, as a young girl. Through a gap, near someone’s garden and, suddenly, I was there in that little field where I had hit rounders and discovered an unexpectedly competitive vigour with a lacrosse stick.
Later that same summer I fell in love with a graveyard. You can reach that by snicket, as well.
I fell in love with how the grass grew long, and forgotten, because no one cut it. The birds had meetings on the tombstones and my presence startled them back into flight. They fled to the nearest branches to assume the pretence that they were not sentient, and plotting. The church bells chimed the hour and trees stood tall, like sentinels, and guarded both the living and the dead.
I walked the little paths, alone, reading names, writing stories in my head about the people they had belonged to, imagining a ghostly choir singing in the church at night. Feeling safe in that place that used to frighten me so much that, as a child, I turned my face away from any cemetery we happened to be passing in the car.
On one of these days of walking amongst the stones, it rained. The heavens opened like a prayer book, and the raindrops fell down on me like words. I was soaked. My clothes clinging to my skin, my hair stuck to my neck, my shoes squelching. Too wet to care about finding shelter. So, I kept walking around the little paths instead. I saw the rain racing down a stone angel and, for a moment, it made it look like she was weeping. This is how a miracle is vouched for.
That must have been the day I ran for the first time in almost twenty years. I crossed a road too slowly and I ran. Just for a moment, just for a few heartbeats, but I ran. I regretted it afterwards, but I ran. That was a miracle beyond the sight of any statue shedding tears.
Often, when I returned from my walks a neighbour would be outside, opposite, and pacing the kerb while he smoked. He had long hair and he would say good morning, or good afternoon. He would ask how I was. He turned out to be a poet. His agoraphobia meant he couldn’t go further from his home than that set part of the street.
Distance is always relative.
He was trying to get one step further every few months. A heroism greater than vanquishing armies.
The first time I was able to go to the voting station, to vote, I wore a suffragette sash and a suffragette rosette. It felt like an occasion I should mark properly. He saw me and left his place on the kerb to come and shake me by the hand, out of respect for what the sash had stood for. Then he went back to his safer path. An intrepid adventurer who had, in that moment, made it further than a man without fear could ever walk.
If you really look at life, it is filled with beautiful things. If you live a life that is also filled with terrible things, or painful things, the beauty is much harder won but, perhaps, therefore, it is even greater.
When I was frail, and barely able to stand, a small thrush once flew in through my open window. She stood, triumphant, on the clean washing and sang full throated in the silence of my room. My mother started to panic about what to do so I went and picked that little bird up. I carried this small creature with its own whole life, to safety, with my cupped hands. She was soft, and warm, and as I carried her she kept singing. I took her to my window and let her go. I watched her arc over onto next door’s roof and settle there; Still singing.
I thought about that bird much more than I think about the hundreds of birds I see now, and I’ve remembered her far longer. The hundreds aren’t less beautiful but I am so used to them that I think of them as ordinary. There is so much beauty everywhere, we have almost become immune to it. This is the distance between reality and perception.
In the past, people used to be deluded into believing they were made of glass. I have become fascinated by the oddity of this. Particularly the woman who believed she had swallowed an entire glass piano.
Yesterday, though, I lay on my sofa full of such a vast amount of love that I felt as though I was clear as a bell. My feelings were singing through me. Pure as the light that spilled through the window and which seemed like it might pour into me. I was transparent in my peacefulness and full of something bright that shone like alchemy.
For a moment, I almost believed I could be a living glass who glinted in the sun.
The distances between us, in even our strangest imaginings, are smaller than we know.
Love itself, I think, is the opposite of distance. It is a closeness that has no regard for death, or loss, or for where you are in geographical relation to another person. There is no geography or time to it, at all, because love is immediate. The people who are important enough become part of you. No matter the kind of love. The friend and the lover are equally as near. They are each a spark in your own neurons and they are in the measure of your own heartbeat. They make you feel, and your ability to feel such profound and tender emotion is the way in which you are most alive.
In this way, they live in you. If your love is returned, you are kept alive in them.
So, I can’t stop thinking about distances. Most of all, about how much peace we might have if only we could understand them.
Great piece
Marvelous, friend. Simply marvelous. <3