News from Spring

Let the months teach you

I discovered some blight underneath the new growth of the goji berry tree as I was cutting it back away from the nearby bushes of currant. This wouldn’t normally be an issue if it wasn’t so early in the season and if I had not been neck-deep in the bush pruning for the last 40 minutes— I live with other plants and was thinking about them the entire time. The borage is almost done and still humming with bees drinking its sweet nectar. I sometimes think about the random pieces of research that go viral once in a while that say Researchers Discover that the Smell of Soil Trigger Neuropathways That are Responsible for Happiness and then I get really worked up because no shit anybody could have told you that. It’s so disconcerting to read research from people who never find themselves in a squat just looking around. Science is so stupid. Happiness science is even worse. Here is some news from spring:

• I started writing something about being adjacently gender queer stemming from not being able to relate— not even for a second ever— to the desire to be small or thin or quiet or less full than I am after reading Lorde’s interview with Martine but then quickly realized that no one could relate to that so I will not be publishing those thoughts. Okay maybe just a snippet:

Whenever I ask myself how Julie has raised me to be so clueless the answer is immediately revealed to me: she is this clueless. [redacted] I wouldn’t know where to start. Daughters of [redacted] do not know of such restraints/ I don’t know if that’s true. I was somehow made safe to eat as much and of everything since birth and no amount of [redacted] can undo that now. My sense of self in this particular area has been reliably solid for a very very long time. It is perhaps one of my most self-assured qualities which gender can’t shake if anything it shakes gender.

• It’s May and the second floor of the school is incredibly warm and littered with glue sticks, chairs untucked, leaking pens and bits of chewed up (?) paper. The view outside my classroom is so picturesque it’s hard to believe it isn’t a gen AI image prompted: wild horses, lush rolling green hills, sunny, blue sky, and perfect cumulus clouds.

• Marina and I are “chard synced” which is the best kind of synced after being fully compatible on Co-Star. Both of our chard is germianting at the same time despite being 7,620.244 kilometers and 3 lines of latitude apart. The chard in the garden is bolting already thanks to London being 27 degrees many days in a row—a record high by the way; the news won’t stop coming— a reality that demands both direct action (at worse) and radical re-imagining of community and relationship (at best).

• Anqa and I finally got engaged after 4 years of dating. When I was 18 I got the letter V tattooed on my wrist and what I didn’t know then was that it actually stood for A, my future fiancé. Moving through the world as an engaged person is both delightful and normal.

• I drank a rose bush from start to finish.

• Lilac season came and went and I barely got enough sniffs. On the walk from the station to work, there is a lilac tree around the corner from the playground where the kids play basketball in the sunshine. The one time I stopped for a substantial amount of time, my body basically all the way inside the bush, a car pulls up behind me and shouts "HEY WHAT’RE YOU DOING?” I don’t hear them at first being so deep in the bush but then a second, third time “HEY WHO ARE YOU?” I realize the people whose front garden I’m tresspassing is asking for me. I emerge with an actual twig in my hair caught redhanded and tell them truthfully that I am admiring their lilac tree. They seemed genuinely surprised like no one had done this before, and proceed to offer me cuttings to take home. They beg me to take as much as I wanted. The branches still sit in a pretty green marbled glass vase next to the wooden bowl where I keep my ceramic asparagus and keys even though they never made it from the train journey in the first place. That was the most memorable lilac experience from this year.

• Read a nice poem but sadly cannot find the author:

To Speak is To Lie

I would like to improve the world

With words Can you see me

Dissolving in the attempt?

But there is no solution

Nostalgia gets in the way

And meanness, too, deflects me

With its dumb stare

From a face resembling my own

But it’s yours, reader

• No water or food has entered the Gaza strip for over 2 months and 1 million children are facing the most severe level of starvation. There are no coherent thoughts on this at the time of writing, only staring at you or blinking tears.

• Everyone I know agrees that the time is going down like what was that

• The day I bought Zara pistashio ice cream, she also bought me pistashio ice cream and it is moments like that that makes me believe in the magic that connects us with one another. Of course, the moral of the story is that at the very moment you remember that there exists a zero waste shop in your neighbourhood you should drop everything you’re doing and walk to it. Whatever calls to you in there will probabbly be calling her in some mysterious way that eventually results in you falling asleep three times watching You’ve Got Mail.

• My printer is broken and I unabashedly asked a man to help me fix it.

• The walking onions in the garden is flowering little white petals that sing to me in what only can be described as schizophrenically. The flowering season isn’t going to last long and so for 2 weeks in a row I sat down on the woodchip path next to the little patch of them listening for walking wisdom. I am always looking for tips on how to walk. They told me that walking is 1) not about going anywhere, 2) most fruitful when approached as an experiment and 3) not dissimilar to dreaming.

My plans for the rest of Spring is mdma in the back garden, step out into the street alone in the sea, kiss for hours straight, letting what has to pass through me pass through, and missing you (on top of the usual being vigilant with the bathwater).