Self-inquiry

I followed the moon all the way here. On the drive I think about the internet and the scene I just left: my friend Sarah’s son reaching for her hands; her partner Adam lighting the gas hob, poised to make dinner. I turn left past the place that I know and glide through the slicked black roads that dip and wind, passing only one other vehicle as my own plays out some love song at a volume I can’t change. I arrive at the white thatched cottage with the red door and the string of festoon lights Lucy has left on for me to find my way. When I switch off the engine all I can hear is the sound of the creek, invisible to me until the morning. Life without trending audio.

I do what I alway do when I arrive: assess the kitchen. The closest store is 20 minutes away and I didn’t feel like stopping in, too eager to hear the crackle of the fire. The obvious choice is the one with the least ingredients. Midnight pasta: where garlic, chilli, anchovies and their oil become friendly, spitting fragrance out from the pan. I find pasta is best when there are limitations: an absence of ingredients or a lack of time. I eat on the low sofa, the fire flickering in front of me, my laptop open to an episode of some tv show about big families in northern California – still too dependent on external distractions to truly sit with myself. I fall asleep quickly, deeply, in sheets that slip like silk.

There is lore to this house: it’s been passed down through friends of friends over the years, a mysterious collision of kismet and coincidence. Tucked behind the other side of the Helford River, it lies right next to Gillan Creek; if you follow the muddy path behind the old pottery shed, you’ll find yourself at the top of a hill looking across to Falmouth and then St Mawes. Because of its lowness – sitting at the dip of a valley – it can sit in a layer of fog before the sun burns through. This was the case the morning after I arrived. Eagerly awaiting the sunshine – indicated to me through my often-visited weather app – I was reminded of patience. It’s nothing new to me: when I lived in the shed, it too lay at the bottom of the hill, and would similarly be drowning in mist before blue skies emerged. I was grateful for the delay.

It’s easy to idealise life here. Not just in this spot, but in this corner of the south west, where you feel both far but close in every sense. I sometimes wonder if I’m living in the nostalgia from a time before I really knew myself. Putting on rose-tinted glasses and seeing only the surface of velvety rivers and clear skies. I am hopelessly attracted to beauty and I send a voice note to a friend asking if that’s good or bad. I live in the heart of this binary, constantly assessing whether I am one or the other, often forgetting the nuance or that humans inherently exist in the grey.

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“Some friends call the house ‘the cottage of self-inquiry’, which strikes me as true,” Lucy tells me in a message. “It’s a grounding place but sometimes you feel a lot there, too.” I can attest to this. The following day I decided not to leave, allowing myself to really bed into the space. Overwhelmed with work, shaken up by misguided guilt of one thing or another, and properly alone for the first time in weeks, I began to cry in front of my laptop, murmuring ‘I can’t do it’ to myself or perhaps the universe. I took myself for a walk and left my phone at home, so all I had was the squelch of mud underfoot and the tyranny of my thoughts.

Later in the week, a friend and I discussed our different habits when we approach the downward spiral. She tells me she seeks the comfort of friends in safe spaces; I tell her I need to be totally alone. Neither are better or worse than one another, but I envy her ability to ask for help because I feel great shame or embarrassment or even humiliation if I do. She asks if she can serve me a spoonful of the pasta I’ve made and I say no, you go ahead and serve yourself, and I realise how much control I require over even the smallest acts.

I bite my tongue and don’t inquire about the him we both know. His name emerges in conversation, only lingered upon for a moment, but I stop myself from asking the questions usually circulating in my mind. Later that night I think about the lore of this thing; the myths I’ve created, the narratives I’ve spun, placing goodness and badness on one of us or the other. Sometimes I wonder if I’ve made it up in my head, the spark so faded over the years, the truth of it all so blurred, the conversations deleted then rehashed. Have I turned this into something it’s not? Because I’m not just attracted to beauty but the beauty of the unfulfilled; the romance of potential, even if it’s only been me pushing the boulder up the hill, no one there to watch it rise and fall.

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Last week I rewatched The Worst Person In The World. Before I’d seen it, a friend told me he thought I might resonate. I knew he meant the themes and that he didn’t know that phrase is something that rings in my mind most days. I find it hopeful – there’s that word again – because it reminds me that perfection is futile. That you have to make mistakes, that falling in love isn’t the final answer, and that finding peace in yourself often takes playing out the war within first.

Despite all of this self-inquiry – reaching into the depths of my habits and patterns that might not be all that healthy – I’m feeling hopeful. The prospect of a shift towards expansion, the appreciation of all the goodness in my life, the potential of desire and family and more wholeness.

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“I am thinking of beauty again, how some things are hunted because we have deemed them beautiful. If, relative to the history of our planet, an individual life is so short, a blink, as they say, then to be gorgeous, even from the day you're born to the day you die, is to be gorgeous only briefly.” – Ocean Vuong