A lamp on the window

I have been sitting in bed, struggling to write, moving between words and unpicking my sentences, wondering what the point of these writings are, and looking out at the lamp’s reflection upon the window. A yellow firefly pressed against twilight blue, framed by piles of books and moon frosted leaves. The reflection is a cutting from one space transposed and absorbed into another. It is an image thinned and watered down, a translucent trace blotted into existence.

The lamp creates the warm glow of a softened boundary, forming a point at which meanings and memories become both diluted and enlivened, and where my imagination can gently stretch out to the rhythm of the slow setting sun.

Against the darkened sky, a cut-out in the landscape emerges, a cascade of light where my stories turn into arched branches and my words melt into the sweetened hum of birds. A horizon of checkered sheets and ginger tea, brushed with the mildew of abstracted childhood memories.

This is a house of reflections, layered between glass doors and window panes. Where the speckled traces of overnight stays, a fear of the dark and tip toeing quietly down the corridors make prints upon bronzed lamps and antique mirrors. It is a home of strawberries and cream sprinkled with sugar. A lost time of boiled green vegetables, after school tv and dancing bare foot on hard stone floors, in which recollections were creased and folded throughout the furniture. This is a place pierced through by an era of impressions, a hazy chrysalis that existed before certain rhythms and identities began to solidify, when life remained a faint line in soft pencil.

Now the house is also a holder of new histories, of red candles, coloured glass and my mum singing to our dog in the kitchen. A place of re-ordering and rearranging our family dynamic through bowls of soup and cups of tea. It is where we sit amongst reflections and look towards our past as we stitch and unpick our choices, pulling between the tightening clutches of our different life stages.

I have a habit of undoing myself, of stripping myself down and loosening my narratives. Forgetting my habits and well learned phrases, moving between disciplines and, as direction fades, I become porous to the world and I know at this stage that I’m getting lost.

I guess I see the lamp as a symbol of this undoing. It is a refuting of bounded-ness, fracturing my histories out towards space. But it is also a kind of boundary in itself, the internal made external for me to look onto and shelter in a sense of consistency. Not a stasis that prevents growth but a net that catches what I might scatter.

I am familiar with this form of layering up, of working inwards outwards into space in the hope of continuity. A way of my being that has been made apparent and solidified through years of constant packing and unpacking. Now unpacking my possessions into this temporary room, I have become aware of it again, as I fill drawers with clothes and lay out books.

I was intending to write stories about these objects, but for now have decided against it, believing that to wrap them up too heavily in language would feel like a kind of severing. An externalisation that would remove the possibility of returning inwards, of bringing myself back together. Instead I have followed the lamp, focusing on the speculative possibility of chance encounters, of leaning on what is yet to be gripped by closeness and writing what might be nearer to truth than sentimentally. From this distance, I have walked through my mind’s darkened passages, watching as I try to colour my life with a sense of consistency, a certainty in the steps ahead.