Harvest Moon + Lunar Eclipse = Songwriting

I woke up this morning from a dream crying, and had to catch my breath upon waking.

I have one or two of these a year. Usually they're anxiety dreams about not having spoken to my mum enough, and I dream something has happened to her, and it makes me pick up the phone immediately. to check on her. They're my brain's way of telling me that I've been too self-absorbed and that I need to connect with the people that matter most to me. Because my mum and I only have one another, I think this is mild only-child-of-a-single-parent woe. 

This dream was different. It was about my ex, and it told me very clearly that the door to our connection was closing, and that my mind and body are re-assessing his influence in my life. I've been inside that process for nearly a year and a half,  more "officially" for a year, but after seeing a photo I hadn't meant to see, making it very clear that he had moved on and is in another relationship,  my brain started doing calculations in the background about what that meant for me. Maybe this weekend's full moon just made sure I'd caught myself up.

The truth is that I've also moved on, and moved very far away from our life together. I've dated others this year, sure, but mostly I've been working on making personal choices I know my older self will look back on and be proud of, after a heartbreaking rupture last spring made me question so many of the choices I had made over the past six years.

Apparently we're all feeling the effects this weekend of a giant harvest moon timed, unusually, with a lunar eclipse.  Our watery bodies are supposedly affected by the push and pull of the moon and this is a time of re-setting the emotional dial.  Here's the forecast for all of us from foreverconscious.com

This Eclipse may stir up some painful moments or some fears, but know that this is all so you can grow and flourish in the direction that you need to.  

While this Eclipse is helping to release the truth, it may also release any angers or frustrations that have been simmering beneath the surface. Emotions will be very high around this Eclipse and it may be difficult to see clearly at first.  

Know that the best way to channel this energy is into something creative. Writing, art and music are all excellent ways to channel any anger, frustration or heightened emotions that appear. 

 So I wrote a song about it (It's pretty terrible, but it'll be good to sing, in a somewhat PJ Harvey sermonising-style). My co-band member even wrote music for it already. Here goes.

Harvest Moon

You got me looking like a fool

Harvest Moon

I wake crying salty tears

Big rushing tidal fears

All alone in a stolid room

Emotion pushing through the gloom

All out of sorts, in my bed

I can't seem to find my head

My soul as heavy as deadened lead

I miss all the things you never said

Oh, Harvest Moon, you got me looking like a fool

The Bad Poetry Club

For a moment,

when I thought I'd lost my bag in a London cafe,
I got that dropped-stomach feeling.

That familiar lurch,
which all of us know.
The panic.

Where did it go? It was just there.

It's the same feeling as when I saw you, in April,
and you told me -
I don't feel the same
I don't see the same future for us.

I've had that feeling many times before,
But never as much
as
that day
on a Barcelona beach in April.

Where did it go? It was just there.

Flutter (A Short Story, Not At All Autobiographical)

The days were long in June, and the evenings barely blushed and fluttered their eyelids, with a sunset of a little over two hours. He felt that day had lasted forever, as he waited for her to arrive. He idled. The long glass corridors made him uneasy: the ringing out of his heels on the polished wooden floors troubled him somehow, as if he were pacing a hospital corridor. Here he was, in the site chosen to mark the occasion of their long overdue meeting.  

The idea had come to her in a Williamsburg bookshop. She had picked up a series of travel essays about Iceland, and she’d fallen in love with the photos; her glacial eyes gleaming at finding such serene blues on the book jacket. They had picked the Harpa concert hall as their meeting point. “We can pick up our own symphony where we left off,” she had said.

Their lives had been abruptly separated when she had accepted a new job in a New York publishing house.  He had remained in London, unwilling to give up the work he loved as an editor, but also the townhouse, the dog, and his usual weekend stroll to collect the paper, followed with precise regularity by a flat white and some Ottolenghi sourdough toast. It wasn’t that he was stuck in his ways. Just comfortable. It had been four months since their last physical meeting, and an intercontinental ache had set in. He despised the digital. He couldn’t get used to their instant messaging – it just seemed so banal, the information they would exchange: the photos of their lunches, their desks, their walks to work. In the early days, he thought, they might have met at the museum of penises instead. They would have snickered in complicit unison, as they had on their first trip to Amsterdam. The sex museum had hardly been highbrow, but they had wandered about in a dazed glow, giggling as they took in exhibits of Monroe and Mata Hari. That first year had seemed like one long Sunday morning spent entangled in his high threadcount sheets. Now? They whatsapped their salads to one another.

He sighed, his heartbeat quickening. He missed her nape, her scent, her often-fuzzy legs. He fought his impending erection, scandalous in the airy confines of a concert hall with endless windows. He strode, then slowed, then sat, then stood and dialled. A robotic voice asked for his message, but he found he had none.The sun was dipping, lazily, like a cat stretching. There was no sign of her. He tried her phone again, fruitlessly. An icy thought gripped him: panic that her plane hadn’t arrived. As he arrived at the next possible conclusion, he felt nauseous. 

She hadn’t boarded in the first place. 

Light danced on the glass panels, honeycomb glittering in the soft evening sunshine. Final flurries of activity at the concert hall doors were taking place. Attendants collected wayward tickets, wives snapped their handbags shut and husbands downed the last of their drinks. He put his dinner jacket over his shoulder, and hurried down the glossy hallway, towards the briefest of dusks.

Alone in New York

Back in mid-October, I was sitting in a southeast Asian restaurant, eating tom yum soup, waiting for a callback from the super, as the recent cold spell had sent the new flat's heating into hissy, obnoxiously loud overdrive. I was missing E acutely. There were other couples everywhere, and those uncoupled ones were at the bar watching a noisy game of football - the NFL kind with helmets, that's the most detail I could absorb. Coldplay's Yellow was the jaundiced soundtrack. I was reading about love; the pure and unconditional love of a mother for her child aged six, and suddenly I felt older and emptier. My life felt so comparatively narcissistic. Suddenly I wanted to grasp a small hand, more than anything. It was all rather sad.

It was so often in those early days that I caught myself sitting alone, eating some kind of soup-based noodle dish or another, thinking of the people I loved that were far away from me. Often at that time of the day it was long after my mother's bedtime in London, and E's in Spain, and I hadn't had any internet installed in the apartment yet, and I got to thinking, "I ought to write things down more often". Only from this kind of no-man's land of semi- boredom does creativity come for me. It's a place where the Internet, and cats playing banjos, and halfhearted instagram-posting cannot place its cold dread hand on my shoulder. So I usually found myself outside of the apartment, trying to pass the evening amongst others, but not really with anyone. Just watching and listening, making mental notes and trying to stave off the certain loneliness that came from arriving home to nothing and to no-one. My flat was missing furniture, life. It was missing E.

It's getting dark at around 4.30 now, and light at 7, and it's much harder to wake up. The window in the tiny corridor that passes for a bedroom in my New York apartment faces a brick wall, and as I'm on the 4th floor of a 6th floor walk up building, the sun must be far overhead to begin to reach the crevice between window and wall. Waking up alone makes my movements mechanical, automated. There's something so forlorn about not being able to turn, reach out and touch the warm body next to you in the bed, and to re-enter consciousness next to another human doing the same thing.

And then before I know it, the day has whooshed past in a flurry of activity - of work - and it's become time for bed again, and I sort of guiltily enjoy the luxury of getting ready in my own time. I idle in the shower, using lavish products I've treated myself to. Then I feel deep woe, thinking about all the people I've seen sleeping rough; those haunted, lined faces that New Yorkers hurry past every day; those forgotten children who wake up every day cold and hungry, and lost. And I think: this city is making me selfish. And lonely. And there is the state of being in this Big Apple - it looks lustrous and inviting, but when you take a bite, it's occasionally floury and maggoted. 

So what's the remedy? Time with family and friends, when they visit, as mine did for Thanksgiving last month. Regular calls, texts, sending photos of things you know would tickle them. Planning ahead for the next break. Joining things. Trying to do good, spending my time unselfishly. Donating a coat, clothes, or money for hot meals, and signing up to volunteer. And realising that I have things to be thankful for, in that I'm holding the maggoty apple in the first place.