A couple of days ago Don Quixote and I were curled upon the sofa in my living room. I had reached page four hundred and thirty-one but still had five hundred odd pages remaining. The story was getting tedious and I was looking for a distraction. Don Quixote is a great companion on a Sunday afternoon, but the room was warm, the sofa comfy and my eyes were getting tired. A nap didn’t sound like such a bad idea. A nap seemed a very good distraction. As if my mother had read my mind I heard a scream from downstairs: “SARAH!”
Oh God, I thought, she’s hurt herself. I threw Don Quixote to the floor and ran to the stairs. As I hurtled myself down she yelled again, this time I detected a tone. She’s not injured, she’s angry. I stop. Is it too late to creep back to my book? I never meant to throw you away, Don. Please, won’t you take me back?
It’s too late; she’s already heard me jump the flight of stairs. My mind flashes to the image of my bedroom; the clothes in piles, books on the floor, the unmade bed, and the paper scattered everywhere. Oh God, she’s gonna hurt me. I creep round to my bedroom and standing amongst the rubble is my mother accompanied by her expression of disgust. She handed me an ultimatum: “If this isn’t spotless by tomorrow, I’m throwing everything in the rubbish!”
“But Mum, I have to read Don Quixote for school. I’ve got so much homework.”
“I don’t care, I’m sick of this mess. Don Quixote can wait.”
She leaves me standing there, lost and overwhelmed. “It’s just going to get dirty again,” is all I can muster for one last attempt at getting out of it, but she’s gone and all I can hear is “PATRICK!” and then his frantic footsteps down the stairs. “Sucker,” is the first thing that comes to mind, there’s no saving you now. I closed my door and took a look around my room. I had been avoiding it for far too long. There were things in there I didn’t want to face that I figured would dissolve into the carpet after sidestepping them for a couple of years.
I started with the easy stuff. I tackled the bed first. I pulled the covers to the top and collected the pillows from various corners of my room and assembled them in a somewhat presentable fashion. I took a look at the finished product. Not as impressive as I had hoped; there appeared to be random bumps under the covers. I stripped the covers away from the bed and to my surprise found a pair of shoes, a pair of scissors, a fork, a dictionary, and a couple of markers. There were reasonable explanations for how each of these items had collected in my bed but I shivered at the thought of the possible accidents that could’ve occurred in my sleep. Thank god I only sleep on the right hand side of my bed; the left side could have been fatal. I had had a really late night a week back and at four a.m. taking my shoes or clothes off seemed unnecessary. I had passed out and must have kicked my shoes off later in the night. The scissors and markers had been from craft day I had had with myself whilst I was sick in bed. They weren’t safety scissors. The dictionary was what I kept at my bedside for when I needed to define something from a book I was reading. I had been reading a book for class one night, Labyrinths, by Jorge Luis Borges and had been stumped on more than one occasion. There was one word I could remember and it was crepuscular and it meant pertaining to twilight. The fork and how it got there was a mystery to me. I couldn’t recall eating food in bed, let alone food that required a fork. I wondered how long it had been there. I decided not to think about it.
The bed had taken longer than expected and after another two hours I had picked up my clothes, the books were in the bookcase, my CD’s were in their cases and the papers were somewhat organized on my desk. There was one thing left, and I had left it until last. The folder. It was what I had been dreading the most and I was tempted to just throw it and all its contents into the bin. I sat there in the middle of the floor just starring at it for a while. For something so small it was pretty scary. For something I had created, I was petrified. It just sat there waiting for me to open it up. This orange folder, bursting at the seams with pieces of paper, just calling out to me. It was a folder of memories that I had collected; a record of three months of my life. “Stupid Sarah, why would you keep all these things? This is just gonna kick you in the ass.”
Opening the folder was the best thing I could’ve done. I poured the contents all over my floor and I let it swallow me up. It was mine and no one else could touch it. It was nothing to be afraid of, more of something to look forward to, something to give me hope. I picked each slip of paper up and let it remind me of the days that had passed. There was the set list that had been taped to the floor at Chris Walla’s feet for Death Cab for Cutie’s show. It was one of the best shows I had ever been to and I had gone alone. Music had never entered me that way before, perhaps because it was just me and the music. I remembered how they closed with Transatlanticism, the blue light over the piano and me yelling “I need you so much closer…” It was all there in the paper I was holding.
I picked up the menu for the Dog and Duck; I had stolen it on my last day of working there. I looked over the choice of sausages that were served from noon onwards. I had not tasted them all, I wish I had. We never got Lamb & Mint or the Scottish Venison and I normally settled with the Lincolnshire. I only ever ordered it on breaks because the mashed potatoes and gravy were divine.
I found my tickets for Fleet Foxes, Tegan and Sara, the Lovebox Music Festival. Band of Horses was somewhere in there too. I found the tube map and I placed it at my feet. I sat there and followed my regular lines with my finger remembering how it felt when the wind caught my hair as the trains left the platforms. I used to love getting up in the morning and rushing with the crowds to my train. I remembered the elevator I got stuck in at Earl’s Court with five other strangers and how the technician forced the doors open. I took the stairs from that day on. I thought about Rohan and how he would ride the tube with me from Leister Square after an evening shift and we would have a question of the night. “What is love? What is love without lust? Can love conquer distance?” He would ask me a new question about love each night and I would give him a headphone and match a song to his question. Wilco – Radio Cure. “Distance has no way of making love.” I didn’t pretend like I knew the answers, I just gave him my thoughts, he was happy with that.
I found the map for Tate Britain that Noah and I had used to navigate around the gallery and the pamphlet on Psycho Buildings, one of the coolest collections I had ever seen. I thought about how I loved Noah’s presence against the London backdrop. It scared me to be alone in such a big place. He brought some of my old home to my new home. I took him to my place; he said it was a shit hole. It was a shit hole. We went to Brick Lane and he took me for curry, then to Portobello Road and I bought scarves and a basket of strawberries. I remembered saying goodbye to him near The Photographer’s Gallery on Great Newport Street. I ran to work only to run right back when I realized he had stuff to give me out of his backpack. I looked for his face or just the colour of his red t-shirt in the crowds but had no luck. I felt so small. I ran back to the pub and got changed for five hours of work. When I walked downstairs Natalie said my friend was waiting for me. “My Friend.” Someone of mine that was right there, and he had found my pub and was standing in the doorway. “My Friend” in a sea of strangers. He made me nostalgic for New York and on my break I bought a huge can of rice pudding. When I got home that night I heated it up in the microwave (the power was actually on that evening) and ate it in bed. I wrote a letter to Cassandra.
It took me two hours to look at everything, feeling it in my grasp, knowing it with my eyes. I wanted it so bad but it was so far away. I got to the bottom of the pile and all that was left were two pressed flowers and a pink envelope. I opened the letter and thought back to the day I first opened it. It was one of my homesick days where I called my family from a red phone box and told them how lonely I was and how I missed them terribly. It was after an evening shift at the pub so it was late but I wanted to hear their voices so bad. Fifteen minutes and £10 of my phone card later I stepped out of the phone box still looking for something that resembled home. I pushed open my front door and would’ve continued through to my room but just this once I decided to check the letter pile that lay on the counter in the kitchen. There it was on the very top. I recognized the hand writing as if it were my own and I ran to the bedroom and jumped into bed, ripping it open. I sat there with the pillows propped up and she made me laugh and she made me cry. She told me everything I needed to hear and her timing was perfect as usual. Cassandra’s words were beautiful and I clung onto every word.”Please don’t doubt yourself, Sarah…you will know, eventually. Don’t even underestimate your presence; dear…you are seriously missed over here on this continent. Your soul is the kind that comforts. I miss you very much. Your calming disposition, most definitely.” She recommended that I listen to Aretha Franklin’s Soul ’69 album if I had the means. I didn’t back then but sitting there in my bedroom I had the means, so I listened to it and it was good. It still plays now on solitary afternoons.
The two pressed flowers were all that remained on my bedroom floor. I had forgotten about them until then, they were delicate and so was I. They didn’t throw me back into summer; they took me back years and years to my grandmother’s garden. I recalled picking the yellow and purple petunias from her flower pots and her letting me choose the two largest books in her house to press them between. They turned out really well and I have them framed in my bedroom. The two flowers in front of me made me think of my Nan and how little I see of her now. Once a year, if I’m lucky. I thought of two years back sitting on a stool in her kitchen and listening to Frank Sinatra as she made the dough for scones. She let me cut them into little circles and put them on the cooking tray. As they baked in the oven we went out and picked the ripe plums off the tree. For tea that night she gave me three scones, two plums and a cup of tea. I was content and thought of how much I missed this, doing the little things. She would make me hot chocolate every night before going to bed and I would sleep in the bunk beds, even though at eighteen I had outgrown them. When I was little she would tuck me in and say my prayers with me. The room would always be cold and I’d really have to snuggle the covers to keep warm. Nothing seemed to change over the years and I liked that. I just wished I could stop my toes from sticking out of the end of the bed. She’d wake me up each morning with a cup of tea and two biscuits. It was a polite cue to tell me I was lazy and it was time to get up. Rachel would come by early in the afternoon and we’d try desperately to make perfume from the flower petals and rain water in Nan’s garden. We’d always get frustrated after waiting twenty minutes for a scent so one of us, whoever was dared first, would run upstairs to Nan’s bedroom and grab the perfume bottles from her cabinet and pour the scent into the flower petal bowl. We wasted a lot of her perfume back in those days but she never mentioned it.
Those were my memories just from opening up a folder I had used to collect little bits of my life. From one Sunday afternoon of cleaning my room I lived three months over again. I’m sitting, starring at it now, and these memories have no home. The folder sits in my closet and I go to it whenever I need reminding, but I’m not even sure if it’s better to forget. All I’m sure of is that I need to go back. I want a place that isn’t a shit hole that I can decorate all on my own. I want to take my regular route to work and rush with the commuters to my train. I want to go to Sainsbury’s and buy cherry tomatoes to eat while walking through parks. I want it all back and I know one day I will. The trains when they leave the platforms, the umbrellas when it starts to pour, the newpaper print left on fingertips, the dull orange lamp posts. I’ll have you all back…soon.
