Tomoé Hill
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IF THIS FEELS like a flood that flows from my fingertips, it is: I have gone for so long without this kind of communication—I am thirsty, I am hungry, I am ravenous in mind and body. I wonder if there is anyone who feels the same.
*
I am leaving my period of hibernation. Or is it stagnation? It has felt the same, at times. I must re-enter the world, alone, and I am frightened. Looking at rental properties online bewilders me—brand new riverfront towers, chrome and glass boxes—then I spot a place hidden away. When I go to see it—a tiny annexe of an oast house—it is set on wooded land, a small bright stream running through it, something out of a fairy tale. It is late January, and a light dusting of snow drapes the dark green moss-covered shelter to park the car, the lighter green of the grass. It silvers the white snowdrops that cover the grounds like a carpet. Driving there, the lanes are narrow and the car brushes against tangled holly, waxen green and needle-edged. You would have your own section of garden, says the landlord. Apple and pear trees. I touch one of the trunks: cold, gnarled and waiting again for its branches to explode with leaves and fruit, and suddenly remember how Demeter rendered the earth barren in the months Persephone was bound to the underworld.
He tells me a charming anecdote about the property: that if the owner cuts off the supply of water from the stream to the nearby castle, he can still be beheaded. The peculiar charm of a violent past gives these places their character. There is a high, weather stained brick wall that hides me away, an old wooden gate with a metal latch that needs kicking open when it rains and causes it to swell. A large old-fashioned bell with a small strap is mounted on the white painted brick of the entry alcove. Will anyone ever ring it? I think to myself. The inside of the annexe is smaller than I thought, but then, it will be just myself and all of my books, and that is enough. Part of me, I think, needs to be tightly enclosed for some time to come—coccooned. With a shaking voice I place a deposit on the phone that afternoon and start packing in the evening. I am haphazard about everything but books and perfume; these are packed carefully, lovingly—swathed in bubble wrap and cotton wool. Words and scents, the only precious things these past long years, the ones that still made me feel alive.
A drop of Le Labo Benjoin 19 spills on my fingers as I pack: it smells of warm animal fur—memories of a tiny black and grey kitten that liked to sleep inside in the bed when it was cold—fall, winter and smoldering wood. It scents my dreams, where sex still permeates everything, even though I turn in my bed and there is no other, even though my body generates the heat of passion in the depths of sleep.
Myth is steeped in sex: how it transforms us, in both wonder and fear. We pursue and are pursued. How would a lover now come to me? Not in a shower of gold or the guise of a swan, but in those languorous hours where my mind, restless in a sleeping body, imagines the softness of sheets as skin, my heat creating the ghost of past lovers, future ones next to me.
I awake: secretly wet and aching, not just muscles, but also flesh—with longing, with loneliness. My hair brushes my back and feels like a lover’s fingertips in the morning; that slow arousal that makes the eyes flicker open and the mouth form words of almost inaudible want. I smell animal heat and embers: it hangs in the room, the heavy draperies of lust.
*
One bitterly cold evening I move out, leave my old life. I am paralysed by fear as I stand outside my new threshold. The movers are still at the annexe, so I bring in the remaining boxes from the car and move about the kitchen mechanically, cleaning and pretending that everything will be alright, that I have made the right decision. Once they have gone, I set to work: I pour a large glass of whisky, light candles, set about moving bookcases and methodically filling them. I open box after heavy white box and gently take each one out, remembering how they were ordered on the shelves before. Anatomy, art, philosophy, Roman and Greek history, classical novels, modern ones. Ballard and Bradbury, Davis and Joyce, Benjamin and Barthes. I murmur titles under my breath like some healing mantra. I don’t really believe in much of anything, but books are at the top of the small list of what I do.
I work steadily, late into the night, stopping briefly to eat, unable to taste anything but the whisky that I refill my glass with. When the most important things are finished—the bookcases and the bed—I sink exhausted into a hot bath and stare at the ceiling. I need to be surrounded in scent right now, more than any other time, and so the water is perfumed with Ormonde Jayne’s Ta’if: rich red roses, dates, and orange blossom. Of course it is frowned upon now to consider such imagery, but I cannot help but think of Ingres: The Turkish Bath, pale peach and pink-tinted flesh, curved bodies resting against one another—when time is nothing but pleasure or the anticipation of it. On top of the bookcase in a corner of the small bedroom is a tray filled with my perfumes. The bedside table is stacked with a few of my comfort books: Ulysses, Metamorphoses, The Arcades Project, and something by P.G. Wodehouse. Perhaps that seems odd, the last choice, but I need to remember to laugh now. Nevertheless, I fall asleep that night listening to the owl in the trees outside, tears staining fresh linen.
*
I am a solitary person by nature, but this new silence is hard to get used to. I fill it with Mozart and Puccini’s operas and read voraciously to make up for lost time. The person I left felt ignored when I read too much—as he was not a reader himself—and so my compromise for years was to watch television while thinking of the things I wanted to read, visualising turning the pages. I would end up devouring books when he wasn’t around, one perpetually in my hand as I went about the house doing chores. But as any reader knows, half the pleasure of reading is talking about it with a like-minded person. I knew no like-minded people. I knew people who read grocery-store bestsellers: sports and celebrity biographies, the latest popular trilogy turned movie, but no one who delved below the surface into the wild literary deep, the tangles of words and thoughts that capture and drag you back down into the depths, barely letting you breathe. In the month before I moved out, when things were in the last throes of finality and it didn’t matter what I did, I stayed up late into the night, reading Ancient Medicine, Lucretius’ The Nature of Things or Foucault’s History of Sexuality.
I no longer draw my bedroom curtains at night. I like that there are no eyes to watch me like there would be in the city, save the ones of the nocturnal animals and birds—and what do they care about me? I am the stranger here. When the night is stripped of its sodium lights, its intrusive concrete structures, when all that is left is trees and undergrowth, stars and the noises of the ones to whom the earth belongs, I feel accepted. I turn off my light and stand by the open window—it is always open, even on the coldest nights, because when I shiver, it reminds me that I am still alive, that something can touch me. I breathe in the scent of the water from the nearby stream. Fresh-running water has a metallic scent, ozonic. It speaks to you of purity and the places that are still relatively untouched by our interference. The water that flows down the mountains in the Alpes-Maritimes region of France is like this: it may be sultry and hot in the cities by the sea, but drive a half-hour or so upwards along the windy rocky road, and the air becomes crisp and icy. I was amused the first time I was in England and saw a Pimm’s, full of herbs and fruit and vegetables: the air in the mountains is a version of that. The icy breeze carries with it the scents of hyssop, rosemary, lavender and thyme; dried grasses and overripe fruits that fall in the shade by the roadsides, figs, mainly. Beautiful purple-black figs that split almost when you touch them—the most sensual of fruits. White milky sap that oozes out, inviting you to dig your fingers in and tear it apart: reddish-pink seeded flesh that you can do nothing else with but sink your mouth onto and devour, juices dripping from your lips and chin. At the small cafés that are in every village in the mountains, I was always intrigued by the tall, ice-filled glasses of green effervescent liquid that everyone sipped under striped umbrellas. I asked in my halting French for one, and when the cool liquid ran down my throat, I understood: it was mint sirop with sparkling water, the romanticised taste of the icy liquid that poured forth from the mountains.
But the animals: there are many foxes here. They seem unafraid of people, because here we leave them alone. Coming home in the still winter evenings, they walk close enough by to unnerve me, although they have always seemed indifferent to my presence. But their noise first startled me as I lay in bed: it sounded like a child screaming, a high pitched broken wail, over and over. They are either fighting or fucking, I think. Does it matter which? Both bring a certain degree of agony to the noises that emanate from the body, whether woman or animal. Now I listen to them and it is a kind of lullaby: a violent, lonely one that matches how I feel. Some nights, when the landlord is away and I am at my lowest point, I lean out of the window and wail with them. It does not make me feel better, but for that night, less alone.
*
I can’t get used to my new home. Logically, then, it is not a home. It is a house—but not even a house, an annex. Somewhere I come after a day of arguing to wander about, restless, up and down the small flight of stairs; staring at the bookcases; taking long eucalyptus or rose-scented baths in order to let the water take away some of the invisible weight. I decide I will plant flowers. Walking the outdoor rows and through the greenhouses at the garden centre, I choose rosemary and hellebore, two of each and wait in the open doorway looking at the idyllic Kent countryside as they are potted. Rosemary will flank my door, hellebore will sit in the wooden alcoves. In the mornings and evenings I take to rubbing sprigs of the herb as I leave and come back. Never having been one for ritual, I find my actions both strange and comforting. Rosemary has a clearing, energising scent: a combination of mint, pine and camphor. Its oil is strong—so much so that only lightly running a fingertip across it leaves you scented for hours. I like to be marked in that way, because it reminds me of my skin being anointed by a lover’s fluids. Rosemary… remembrance, as Shakespeare’s line goes. Memory is sometimes punishment. Plants have taken the place of flesh now.
*
I finally tell my mother that I have left: something I could not bring myself to do until now. As much as the silence has screamed, I did not want, did not know how to tell anyone what had happened. All I told her in the end was brief: I’ve left. I don’t really want to talk about it. I’ll be fine. I was lying, of course. I don’t think there was much truth in those words at all, bar the part about having left, and that too was a sort of lie: You see, we had divorced years ago. We just stayed together. Why? That is a rope so long, that even holding it for all these years, I am not quite sure where its beginning is. I never told her we divorced. Why? That, at least, I can answer simply. It happened around the time my father got ill and then later died. I didn’t want to burden her. My sister had her own marriage problems at the same time, which everyone knew about. My instinct has always been to withdraw at bad times where hers is to amplify. But to pile one child’s troubles onto another seemed unforgivable to me.
Physically, my mother is slight—a child’s body: only 4’9”, the weight of a sparrow. And yet, like most mothers, she has shouldered mountains without complaint. But I knew that I would have been the proverbial straw, and would have died rather than uttered a word. There never seemed a good time to tell her, later on. After my father’s death, I was trying to make sure, as best I could across an ocean, that she was functioning as well as she could, grieving, but not too much: I didn’t want her to sink into a death-reverie that some fall into, the reverie that swallows lives whole. Those are sinkholes that dot the road of our family; we see them miles off yet some of us have been hypnotically drawn by them: choosing to stare into that small abyss, then jump in without a backwards glance.
*
Lily of the valley grows creamy white, en masse along the shadows of the moss-patched brick wall, and the roses are blooming early: there is a tangle of them outside the downstairs windows. Mixed pale pink and yellow, I can reach out and draw them to me. I tweet pictures of the grounds and the flowers. I get the impression people think I live an idyllic sort of lifestyle, although I quickly dispel notions that I somehow own this property. Sometimes I am too poetic with the accompanying things I write with photos. They come out of me in melancholy but I think they are read as romantic—something like pastoral isolation. Other people’s perspectives are such a curious thing.
I hate the word reclaim. I am supposed to reclaim my life, my power as if it were a suitcase waiting at an airline’s lost items office, or a piece of dusty furniture in the attic that just needs a clean and some new paint. An action is sometimes just as hollow as words can be empty. There is an elusive something beyond the writing and the doing that restores us to something more or less whole in the world.
I receive an email for an acceptance, a short memory piece about how I used to walk the London streets at night. This was in my university days, when I couldn’t sleep, from too much reading. There is a fine line between recalling memory and creating false ones when you spend a lot of time trawling through the archives of your mind. It is how people go mad, I imagine—slip from one to another. When the mind and body are under stress, attack from that rush of adrenaline, some people strangely grow tired and need to sleep—hide in the safety of the unconscious, like losing yourself in the rows of a vast library.
I am finding that I lose myself like this while I am awake.
The same place previously accepted a fiction piece of mine that had the same dreamlike feel. There was a line about muscle memory: how when you have not had physical—sexual—contact for a long time, your body expresses its frustration by acting out pleasurable motions. Sometimes I find my legs in the act of wrapping as if they were reaching to pull a lover close, a hand in mid-air caressing. Often now, I am awakened by my body betraying me in the ultimate way: dripping with sweat, in the midst of full orgasm, back arching away from the mattress. I don’t remember what I was dreaming of.
More than the geographical isolation, more than not knowing anyone, this is the thing that makes me feel like some sort of ghost among the living. I remember sex vividly, I think of it—want it constantly, and yet it feels like a country I visited a very long time ago, one that I don’t know if I will ever return to. My body knows, and fights—fights the idea that one day I could forget completely. I am touched by its determination.
Over the Easter weekend I order two large turquoise ceramic planters, to be filled with as much lavender as they can hold. I have envisioned where they will sit in the alcove, fragrant on the breeze and bringing bees. When I go to pick them up, I realise I have been a bit too romantic: they are easily over 30 kilos each, filled. I can’t manoeuvre them myself. One of the men that works at the garden centre lifts them into my car, managing to scratch the side of it in the process, to which I stay silent, more concerned about the folly of my purchase. One goes in the boot, the other is lifted into the back seat. When I arrive home, it takes me about twenty minutes just to partially lever out the one in the boot. I have parked next to the gate, but it is still a struggle—admittedly a comic one to look at—to get it to the alcove without dropping it and shattering all the bones in my feet. I swear at the bees that have already arrived in greeting, then go back to the car, where I spend the next hour crying and cursing and spilling soil everywhere. The landlord is gone, and I refuse to call my ex-husband to come and help me. I think wildly for a moment that I will dig the soil out, handful by handful into another container so that I can move it. I end up leaving it there the entire long weekend, and whenever I leave the house to go to the shops or exercise, I am hit with a dizzying and humiliating wave of fragrant incapability.
*
I have been asked out on a date. This takes me by surprise. I have been speaking to someone online, a friend of another online acquaintance. He offers to come down from where he lives if I would honour him with a date. I agree, and we meet at the National Gallery. I am wearing a black Helmut Lang dress, wide-brimmed grosgrain-trimmed olive-green hat, high leopard-print suede Saint Laurent heels—relics from a past life. My wardrobe is a reliquary, and occasionally I open the doors and silently contemplate the stack of expensive shoes, row of fitted dresses, silk shirts, brocade pencil skirts and pile of cashmere jumpers piled in a wicker basket. Am I praying? No, but I am wishing for something—maybe that is the same. “They’re just so beautiful” Daisy sobs into Gatsby’s colourful stacks of thick silk and flannel shirts in The Great Gatsby. A similar type of worship, perhaps. Worshipping a person she knows but doesn’t, in the way I recognise myself, yet at the same time do not. I ask the cabbie who drops me off to wish me luck. Good luck, love, he says heartily. When I arrive at our meeting place and touch his shoulder lightly in greeting, he shakes. The shaking extends to his voice, which quivers very audibly, and I don’t know if he is just terribly nervous, or if I am somehow displeasing. I can dress and apply my makeup, but I have no idea what looks back at me in the mirror. In my head it is still the shape of the woman who could not get off the sofa a year and a half ago, held down by a body slipping out of normal function in the extreme; preventing any form of living, such as it was.
He has brought me a gift: a bag full of Anne Carson books. Most have inscriptions to me on the first page, a very hopeful and premature wish for coupled longevity. We walk around the museum, I holding onto his arm lightly, which I think he likes, although part of the reason for this is because my heels are damnably painful since I am not used to walking in them anymore. I try to make him comfortable, but he trembles throughout. He says that he was that nervous all the way down on the train. I am nervous, but I don’t think it has ever manifested itself quite so visibly, drastically. He is intelligent and charming, but seems afraid of things. He doesn’t seem to like London at all, the people, the heat of the day—which isn’t even that hot. Afterwards, we walk to a nearby expensive hotel and have a champagne afternoon tea. Or rather, I do, because he doesn’t eat those sorts of things. At least he drinks. We sip our champagne and have a rather technical conversation about sex, which reminds me of The Bell Jar, where Esther has a long, serious talk about sex with a young man from another college, after which he deliberates and then announces he would like to have sex with her, because she would be the right kind of girl. It all felt mechanical and cold. I kiss him goodbye as a test. I want to know if I feel anything, if my body registers something my brain doesn’t. His lips are soft but I feel nothing. As I sit on the train home, I feel relieved, frustrated and also guilty.
We have a few conversations on the phone. They are long, but again, feel mechanical to me. Sex is discussed at more length. He admits he is squeamish. He doesn’t know if he can give me what I want, but he says he would like to try. The problem is, I want everything. I don’t want someone who is afraid or timid. I don’t want to have to teach anyone. The person who touches me next needs to grasp me in a way that shows they understand. Within the boundaries we create for ourselves, we need to roam free. I have never understood why this is so difficult for some people.
Sometimes you get an innate sense of a person—nothing they say specifically, but a reading between the lines. You feel that they feel about these things the way you do. Something about sex exudes from their pores, and you want to get under the skin and explore. Maybe your body just smells pheromones. We like to think it is a more cerebral connection. But even through a screen, although of course you can’t smell, you can still sense. Something animal still translates, distantly.
*
I have been invited to my first literary event. I am unsure why, maybe it is because I talk about and post pictures of my books all the time. But I accept, and then spend terrible amounts of time wondering who might be there, if they will think I am a fraud or interloper because I have not written a novel and I work in a completely different area. I envision worldly authors discussing literature I haven’t read and discussing people I don’t know. When the day comes, I take the train, a growing knot in my stomach. Since I am early, I find a bar and proceed to drink Manhattans and worry further, nervously folding and unfolding the corner of the page of a book I have brought, Silvina Ocampo’s Thus Were Their Faces. I listen to the chatter that combines into one indistinguishable voice, thinking how some people take these conversations for granted, how others talk because they can’t bear silence in their heads or around them—how it is a kind of death to be alone with only their thoughts. I come close to turning around and going back to the annex, to the lavender and rosemary, to the foxes. But as I sit there, chatting to people online, someone says they understand, they probably wouldn’t have the nerve to go, either, easier to stay home. For some reason that makes me determined to see it through. I pay, leave and turn up late—walking into the room, one foot forced in front of the other. Faced by the prospect of having to introduce myself to this crowd of strangers, I feel my lips go numb. One of the hosts says hello and introduces themselves, I stammer a pleasantry back. Then someone else recognises me from online, someone I talk to a bit more on and off. I say hello, admit to being petrified, and find myself mumbling I can’t do this and walking swiftly out. I’ve already made it around the corner and down the street when he catches up to me. Hey. Hey! You walk really fast. Where are you going? I slump against the wall of a building. I don’t belong there, I explain. I don’t know anyone either, he says. A lot of us don’t, except from online. You’re the same as us. The same as us, I think. Come on, he says. X is there. You know, who writes _______. You’d like him. I’ll introduce you. I find myself surprisingly drained, but willing. I let him humorously march me back in, and end up spending the couple hours left talking, much more easily than I would have thought possible. It feels like coming back to a language you haven’t spoken in a long time.
*
It is my birthday. I stay at home, because I can’t face the idea of going to work and having my ex-husband wish me a happy birthday. Happy what, exactly? I wake up and spend a lot of the day on the sofa reading in silence, the windows open wide throughout the annex to let in the warm breeze. The landlord is on the grounds tending to a great bonfire—the smoke, scent of flames, smouldering wood and ashes drift in and cover everything, including my skin. I have a fanciful idea that this is somehow a kind of purification, a burning of the past—but not quite rising up from the clichéd ashes. I think the embers will continue to burn for some time. On television people who have terrible lonely birthdays always seem to open a bottle of champagne and toast themselves ironically—this seems to me an awful waste. I drink whisky instead and think about how it burns going down my throat, the taste of smoke and peat and salt air. It reminds me of walking along cliff edges in Skye—how isolated it felt, and wondering if it settled in the blood and bones of people who lived here. Perhaps it lies dormant, waiting for a person, a place to trigger it back to melancholy life. Or does it grow on you like moss, covering you until you become indistinguishable from your landscape?
*
In Sex and Terror, Pascal Quignard says, “What the world is: the traces the wave leaves when the sea slowly withdraws.” He was, appropriately enough, speaking of sexual melancholia. This is what I continue to feel. In my last experience, to put it brutally and bluntly, I was fucked enough to feel guilty, but not enough to come. I can’t give any eloquence to the moment our bodies broke free, animal scent heavy in the room, all-too-human emotions leaving us wild-eyed.
*
There is a book by the name of Pond, where at one point the protagonist—also isolated, although less so than I am—speaks at length of her discontinued cooker, almost at the end of its life as she cannot source a required control knob. It is a faithful appliance, one that has helped sustain her, and so it takes on an almost mythic quality. When I moved in, and even now, the one thing I hated about the annexe was the cooker: no strange, far-off brand, but a standard old white Belling. Old, because as pleasant as my landlord is, he does not wish to or cannot afford to have new appliances put in. These things were really of the least importance in my mind (it was also after I moved in that I discovered there were no kitchen drawers), but in the life I had come from there was a kitchen I was especially proud of: ash countertops stained to look like oak (we were told oak itself was not practical), pale grey-green rustic wooden cabinets with dark silvered handles, even cabinet doors that hid the washing machine and refrigerator/freezer fronts. A large, pristine white double farmhouse sink, although I only ever seemed to use one side—the kitten we had liked to occupy the other, watching contentedly as I washed vegetables. A microwave built into an alcove. A large oak table and matching wine cubby. A set-apart shelf above the sink that held tins of expensive exotic teas: Mariage Frères Earl Grey French Blue and Sultane, Fortnum & Mason Russian Caravan and Irish Breakfast, Kusmi Samovar and Thé Vert à la Menthe Nanah. While all this seems posh and aloof, it was not without humour. There were glass chopping boards scattered on the countertops, a matching green to the cabinets. They had botanical prints of fruit and herbs with their Latin names below, which I glimpsed in a shop and had to have immediately. It was only as I was washing one months later that I realised the small scripts in full were Biblical references: where in the Bible the fig appeared, etc. We were not religious, and then it dawned on me why visitors—close acquaintances—who happened to glance at them gave us strange looks, but never said anything than oh… nice. I just thought they didn’t like botanical prints. After that, whenever we used them, we said we were chopping for Jesus.
The cooker is the one thing that best symbolises the chasm between my old life and new. I use it very little as a result: I find it depressing the way it produces memories—not because I miss that life, but only because they persist—alongside the foil-wrapped salmon for one or the roasted vegetables I made way too many of once, automatically calculating for two. I can afford to buy something new, but the thought of the hassle of having to disconnect and move it when I eventually leave (will I eventually leave? This seems wildly optimistic) makes me tired. And I wonder how often I would use it anyway, if it would just be a superficial thing to try and make me feel better, that in the end, wouldn’t.
*
I had braced myself for that period of a week and a half when the office was closed for the holidays. Said that I would stay in and read, write. It is true that I had enough to occupy me in daylight hours, but once the sun set too early, I would find myself staring out of the window into the dark, seeing nothing but my own reflection from the candlelight behind me. I could have flown back home, true, but I couldn’t bear to face the rest of my family outside of my mother. You see, it would have been the first time I had gone home since I left—it would have felt like failure, not homecoming. I am sure most of my relatives would have been outwardly kind, but I would know that inside their heads, unasked questions would be buzzing like angry wasps.
I had one relation in particular: an aunt who gave me conflicting advice over the years—I must be better and more clever than the men. I must be independent. But at the same time, the first questions regarding a boyfriend would be: How much does he earn? What does he do? What kind of gifts does he buy you? Even when I was younger, I tolerated it with a laugh, although secretly I was appalled. When I became engaged, I grudgingly told her what she wanted to hear. She happened to be in London on 9/11. My then-fiance was in America, trying to get a flight out. He ended up on one of the first commercial flights they allowed, and he recalled how thick and heavy the silence was the whole eleven or so hours. This relation phoned to arrange a visit whilst I was watching coverage on television, my neighbours vague and not terribly interested in what was happening—it wasn’t here, after all, it was there. Sometimes there is the same thing as not existing at all. Get your ass to London, she said laughingly down the line. Fuck you, don’t ever speak to me again, I said, slamming down the receiver. The famous family temper rearing its head (You’re descended from Samurai and Vikings, my father said mildly, after one of my youthful outbursts. You shouldn’t be surprised by this). Now, I wonder how much of my decision to marry him was a knee-jerk reaction based on her. Rebelling against her approval of him by convincing myself I was more in love than I really was. I was relieved when he came back safely, but not as much as I should have been.
*
Christmas Eve/Christmas Day: in those early hours that straddle both, I am in bed, books scattered on the duvet. I can’t stop crying, but I don’t know why. I am frustrated and perplexed at my inability to stop. The person I wish would send a few words by email or message is silent, busy doing what people do at this time of year. But very kindly two people who know my situation—at least part of it—send me emails. I am grateful for the acknowledgement, and that they don’t do that thing some do of trying too hard to make a person feel better. The few words are more than enough.
*
This is not therapy, nor is it cathartic. It exorcises nothing. I have always found it curious that people consider writing about experiences—mainly terrible—as such. In my mind I always pictured it, perhaps cruelly, like those travelling spiritual healers who claim to be able to cast out sin or sickness. Get thee out, Satan. A white tent with other people’s memories sitting on benches crying Hallelujah. What is this, then? I am not entirely sure. What it feels like is a bottle of champagne (how strange to think of it in terms of such a celebratory drink) that has been shaken: you understand the pressure building inside, and although the glass can withstand it, to remove the cork and let the agitated contents flood out is preferable to letting it settle and not know if you will be met with an explosion or lifeless liquid later on.
— Tomoé Hill
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Tomoé Hill was born in Wisconsin and after escaping to London, now lives and writes in the South of England. Her pieces have been in The Stockholm Review of Literature, minor literature[s], Open Pen, and LossLit. She is deputy and reviews editor at minor literature[s]. @CuriosoTheGreat.
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