This Could Be Anywhere in the World

Originally posted October 18th 2023

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I grind up mustard seeds in a mortar and pestle I got downstairs at the 99c store. There’s a shop down the road that sells weed that has a sign that makes it look like a children’s party supply. The only grocery shop I’ve gone to by myself is downstairs too, but the fresh produce isle isn’t great, so every week my sister and I go to one near the station that has a better selection. I haven’t gone on my own yet. I’m still re-calibrating.

The weather has gotten colder and I find myself every morning throwing on my green jumper. Been watching a lot more movies and drinking a lot of black tea. Every summer I look at my tea drawer and feel guilty that I’ve gone off it, forgetting the moment the weather changes I’ll get back to it. I’ve read hardly anything this month, a few pages of a random book here and there. 10 pages of Y/N by Esther Yi, 30 pages of Strangers I Know, a couple of Moby Dick. Looking at my bookshelf wondering how to get myself to focus. My focus is searching for something else.

I’ve been priming a canvas for several days. Sand, layer, wait til tomorrow. The stretcher bars are too thick for the stretchers themselves, the ends poking up. I feel like a bad artist. I don’t even varnish. Copying drawings from a book of Pennsylvanian folk art, just to get my wrist moving. My joints hurt more often these days and I worry what that means. My hand is already shaky, I don’t need more pain in the mix when it comes to making art. Wear compression gloves and hope for the best.

Online, it’s comforting to see other artists talk about “the chair”. The chair, where we spend most of our time, sat staring at our work from a distance, watching it as if we’re wildlife photographers. Perfectly still, waiting for the right moment, as though it were a living thing. We observe its movements and changes, how it reacts. Every painter I know spends more time staring than painting. Creating is a lot of doing nothing.

I’m not going to talk about home. I think I’ve talked it to death. I don’t have anything to say that hasn’t previously been said (despite my love of repeating myself). My sister and I played cards outside the laundromat last week and I saw the men playing dominoes and wondered how long had they been meeting like this. There were boys filming a music video outside the cornershop and the lighting guy was doing a bad job. There was a dead cat on the side of the road that disappeared an hour later. White coat, looked as if it were sleeping. My cat is currently asleep on my lap, he’s been trying to hangout on the kitchen table since the move. A development I do not care for. Since it’s gotten colder he’s become very cuddly and I don’t mind because he’s like a living hot water bottle. He likes to watch “TV” (when we open the window and he perches on the sill). He likes to watch actual TV too. He shapeshifts from being an old man, frail and thin, to a chubby kitten, fluffy cheeks and round. It depends on what he wants. Food mainly but sometimes affection. He takes up the bottom of my bed when he’s not asleep on the suitcases underneath it. If you take too long to give him dinner he will paw at your leg. He knows how to sit when asked, like a dog. We were told he’s 8 and we go between thinking they lied and he’s much older or they were wrong and he’s much younger.

My new room has no windows. Despite the apartment being advertised as a two-bed, it’s clearly a single. My room is the sitting room. I forgot how scared of the dark I am and it’s pitch black at night. I also hate sleeping with the door open but that’s the only way to get any natural light in the morning. I’ve been adjusting. Kind of. I haven’t been sleeping well at all these last couple weeks besides the last two nights. Finally getting used to how dark it gets. I woke up at 5:30am this morning, considered letting it be the start of my day before passing out. The cat then woke me around 7am to let him out, fell back asleep until 10 which is unusual for me to sleep so late. I feel the last two nights I’ve been catching up. My eyes hurt, there’s a ever looming headache that does not go away with painkillers. Maybe I’m sick. I don’t know. Do I even get out enough to get sick? Since moving back to America I have struggled to sleep through the night, woken by jolts of anxiety. Staring at the ceiling until my heart rate goes down and I can relax enough to close my eyes. It’s a pain. I’ve never struggled to sleep before, I even took pride in that fact. It makes me wonder what I must be dreaming about to cause such a reaction? Maybe I should visit a hypnotist, get into my subconscious and sort it out. Or maybe just drink some sleepy time tea.

I nearly started crying last weekend while trying to visit a bookshop near my flat. I felt the anxiety sink in my stomach as we started to leave, knowing what was coming. It was an old habit, trying to brute force it. We turned a corner and I started to shake my hands, a pulse of energy, fear, a need to run home. I knew what was happening, that it was “just anxiety” but it didn’t matter. I was so scared, my anxiety has run out of threats and is now just fear. We chose to turn around after me asking pathetically “can we turn back?” as if I was a child and not someone pushing 30. It felt humiliating and hopeless. It feels like I have no control over my life, that I am determined to sabotage myself, that my body is an enemy. On those kinds of days I believe nothing will ever change, I start to panic about the future, about plans I’ve made, wondering if this it as good as it gets.

I don’t know how to make that final push through. There are so many things. I feel overwhelmed by what I want and should do. Over the weekend there were events I wanted to go to but I would have to go alone so I stayed home and tried not to think about it. I have always felt that life has been passing me by, that I’m not doing what I’m meant to. It feels as though there’s something I missed early on and it knocked me off course. I’ve always considered life to be a dark comedy, but I’m failing to find the joke right now.

I’m tired today and sick of writing about myself.

Thank you for reading,

Enya xx