Awakening
There is something new about me
You can follow me on Instagram here, and you can contact me at robinccraig@gmail.com. I’m currently open for commissions. If you’d like to buy me a coffee on Ko-Fi, you can do so here.
There was a period of my life where I went to yoga classes to feel a sense of calm. These days, I prefer to carry my calmness with me alongside my keys and phone. But I do have a balcony, where I go to separate myself from the world and observe.
The balcony can be accessed in two ways: from my living room, shared with my housemate, or directly from my bedroom via a French door. It’s large - larger than some bedrooms I’ve had - with a wooden floor that grows mossy in winter. You could sleep out there, if you wanted to, and wake to the sound of London’s parakeets flocking in the dawn air. As it stands, I go out on clear days to look at the people.
When I stand at the edge and peer over the railing, I can see all the way down several streets at once. I know most of the workers by sight, even if they don’t know me. There is the barbershop with the old Jamaican men who sit outside on hot summer evenings, taking plastic chairs from indoors and moving them onto the street to talk and listen to music. There are the Greeks who run the garage and seem to work seven days a week, rolling up the sleeves of their stained overalls and having barbecues in the forecourt on Sundays. There is the coffee shop that employs young actors and musicians trying to find their way in the city, sticking posters for their next show in the windows and smiling with tired eyes when you ask them how they are.
I watch their lives play out from the balcony until I get too tired, or it rains, and then I sit down under the covering. The walls of the balcony are made of opaque sheets of glass for privacy and when you sit on one of the wooden chairs, all you can see is the sky. The people and their lives disappear and you are left entirely alone. In winter, I can watch the rains move in great columns from west to east, covering the city like cloaks. In summer, I am met with the sky as a flat blue expanse.
Now, it’s early spring, and I sit and look out at the first blue sky in weeks, waiting. Clouds are running across the horizon, curling and stretching their way along as though rushed. Often, they are altostratus clouds - streaks of white that are whipped into the upper atmosphere by high winds. I’ll know summer has arrived when they’re replaced by their cousins, cumulus clouds: small tufts of white sitting low in the atmosphere, made by warm air being pushed upwards.
When I watch the clouds, I think of Luke Howard, who lived borough in the early nineteenth century. A meteorologist, he was one of the first to give the clouds these names. Now the clouds go on without him, and without knowing that they have been named.
After some time passes, I begin to tidy up my potted plants: my skinny blackberry bush, my English ivy, and my nasturtiums. My father taught me that you can eat the peppery nasturtium leaves, so I grow them to remember him, but I’ve been neglecting them all winter. Last year, they bloomed beautifully in the early autumn, with red and yellow flowers that bobbed in the wind. Now they wilt dramatically in their pot and their yellowing stems threaten to die altogether.
I use kitchen scissors to cut back the leaves and pluck off the dead flowers methodically, rubbing them together in my hands before putting them to the side. They feel like rubber, and if I smell my hands, I can catch a faint whiff of their scent. The more I prune and pluck, the less sure I am that there is any living nasturtium plant left. Their soil is sodden after months of rain and my hands are becoming covered in mud. It looks like they’ve drowned.
I keep pulling up stems, but the more I pull up, the more they tangle together into clumps, cloying and jostling together as though afraid. When I look at them, they make me think of lovers intertwined with one another, laid together in bed so close that they have forgotten which limb belongs to who. The stems seem to lock into one another and, try as I might, I cannot seem to get rid of them all.
Lately, when I look in my mirror, I see someone who I believe is worthy of love. This is perhaps the first time in my life that I have felt, deeply and plainly, that love is something I deserve by virtue of being a person and being alive. It does not need to be earned. With this, I am figuring out a new relationship with myself and my body, and with it a different kind of sexuality: one that is soft and slow and new.
The nasturtium stems come up, and I put them to the side with the rest. I keep pulling up the leaves and flowers until my hands are covered with muddy soil. The pile of dead stems is growing bigger, piling high on the table and occasionally toppling over in the wind, then scattering across the floor. I put them back together on the table.
Eventually, when I have put all the dead leaves and stems and flowers aside, I find, underneath everything, a single stem that is green and vibrant. The nasturtium is still somehow living, its roots clinging onto the soil despite it all. It’s come through the wet winter into spring, not knowing that it was meant to die.
I recently wrote about losing my father and a favourite pub for The Guardian. I have some more pieces upcoming with The Guardian and others that I’ll share via my Instagram when published. If you’d like to buy me a coffee on Ko-Fi, you can do so here, and you can email me at robinccraig@gmail.com
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