In the summer of love, I will stop being prolific

"Love me too well, I'll retire early."

I made a note in my phone to write something like, “In the summer of love…” I didn’t though. It sat there for weeks as I stalled to find any evidence beyond that day in my garden.

All my work descends then. I start only writing one lines, lists of images from now but also from then, a converging lineage that becomes a language I can’t escape:

The hand in my hand, up in the air, ‘Sunshine Baby’. That finds its way in.

Two plastic chairs in two different gardens; the concrete one we met in, sinking into the wet grass, high and mute. For the way eyes look when they’re in love and intoxicated, somewhat scared and softer than ever thought possible. I will only ever tell it through that.

The birthday cake aisle in Sainsbury’s will be a cautionary tale forever.

This week I raced into the Rothko room, hands grabbing my wrist, my waist, laughs echoing and then instantly silencing. Different energies but both our own. The movability of something new. The ability to be everything in a 2-minute gap.

I think it’ll find its way in again and again so I’ll have to stay it straight right now. It was an honour to spin around in the gallery, embarrassing myself in a nice new dress, simply to give you the courage to act on the impulse you whispered in my ear. I have never felt like a cuter sacrificial lamb than then, a braver volunteer. Always so tender and usually the more timid, I worry I can’t challenge anyone and chew fearfully, insecurely, as the intoxication of someone else’s dare fades when I’ve ticked the box and the breathing has slowed to normal again. I have completed so many and then sat in the fading adrenaline, too shy again to craft one to throw back. Maybe that’s how I’ve got here. Always so tender, so timid, usually always smaller and quieter and doing as I’m told. Maybe I just couldn’t think of a dare, so stuck forever with the truth. But it was a joy to watch you watch me, to see the comforted confidence in your smile as you handed me my bag back, ready. I wanted to give you the privacy and now watch while you spun and spun like a kid again. But I was one too and you were so beautiful. It was an honour to do it for you. I’ll see it in the skirt of the dress every time. I’m sure the scene will find its way back and back and back, a metaphor for something. If I don’t say it once, I’ll fight it off forever.

I told you I’d been trying to not write about you. You told me to stop that. How’s this?

If I try to stop again, I’ll falter so I write fast. I think surely there must be something more. I tap my pen against the metal of the outdoor table trying to think of a bigger picture and only end up thinking about people I loved pausing to record voice memos of passing sounds. I’ve stood quietly as they did, watching with these wide eyes that I don’t know if they look any different but they feel it, foggy and shining and viscerally rose tinted, white but surely gone pink. I will be smooth and slick, all my thoughts but “wow” gone and then when I replay it over in privacy it’s always different - greener. They go home and I pull the image forward again and wonder if it’s awe or jealousy, is there even a difference? I tap my pen wanting something for me and find you. I want to write of the other day when I writhed on my bed and moaned, all bratty, that I wanted to be the inspired one, speaking of it like we must take turns but I know it doesn’t work like that. I’m just shy, that bit has gone quiet, another so loud.

If I try to fight it, to leave behind the hands and the songs and the way eyes looked and the sound of a howling cry at the top of the stairs and mum’s voice and Sophie’s train tickets for February 2023 and the flat on the corner and the trickiness of it in the snow, and the perfect phrasing of all the scenes I’ve seen as love or as loss, I’ll go quiet. Maybe there is natural quietness in this phase then. Hold the cards of everything that’s ever happened and put them down carefully in the right moment. I can’t spill the sights of the forever I’ve had so far and so I can’t write, or else they’ll know me too well. Or else it starts to sound like a scream and I have to be a gavel and then it’s there.

My silence is sponsored by the side profile in court when a judge talked about exactly this and I won. I can say what I want but the innocence of the excitement is tainted. He never found his way in anyways, I’d long since chalked that up to the love not being good enough before he went excavating, digging out stones, saying they were sharp, saying they were something. Every love I’ve ever had has begun with a speech about my greatness and then I go quiet and do the speeches long after they stop reading and then I blame it on that. They would care more if I wrote more. But when it’s passionate, I’m busy and when it’s settled I have nothing to say.

I’ve never really been good at writing from in it. The sickness of either side, the crush and the collapse, demands it so intensely and it sounds like a scream and then I remember the way I tapped my fingers silently on my leg in formal wear under the wood, the way my mouth tasted of whatever they put in rescue remedy, the melody of hold music, how much I contemplated my own words until I was ill.

Sickness on either side could say it all, or at least enough for now. Scared and feverish, scared and victorious. I said I’d get out of that and write about it, quickly and passionately and proudly. But I’d said nothing and now all my love poems seem bad. Is a diary ever art? Isn’t that what he called it? Non-fiction, real thoughts?

I fall asleep asking it when I give in, put the pen down and just watch movies instead.

Sometimes it’s spoken over in the voice of someone different. I once fancied a nature poet who told me I wrote too much about me. He cancelled plans to write about mud and studied hard to do so, reading Hughes and thinking about metaphors. He drove me to his house and peeled my clothes off under a Jean Cocteau poster and then drove me home that same night. I wanted to know what he’d be like in the morning. I wanted to write about that image, tracing the lines of those pen faces because he always had his eyes shut. I didn’t do either, didn’t let myself do the latter. I felt close to him for a while when I batted my hand away and felt the hit like it was his skin. I’ve resented him much longer. He’s in the language too, in the days where I forget his teaching and write like this; a weapon against it, never able to avoid a “me”, an “I”, or my favourite word, “you”. Had he liked me more, liked me longer, perhaps I would’ve quit. Head in the oven eventually but silent during the honeymoon.

I’d go back now and laugh at it. Tell him that I simply didn’t need to try, all of this falls out, here are five paragraphs on your bedroom wall. I hope you enjoy your Saturday inside. Let me know what Hughes would have you say about my collar bone, when you find the right way to hide my skin in something about bark.

I’d go back now and laugh at it but I can hear him now. A years stale comment from someone who’s surname I’ve lost to time, and I want to delete the document.

Maybe I should unpack it more. I could get my fingernails into socialisation and the lingering worry that somewhere in me I think this is all I’m for. I write of weeping over a lack of birthday cake, the argument I had just to be allowed to make him one that he didn’t want, or I think about the steak I bought against my decade long morals, and I wonder how much I should worry about how much i want to play the role and how easily I’d commit to it if i was allowed. Am I taught to quit when I’m shrouded in arms, now safe and seperate from the world and thus from the solo, inner, real self, the self of hobbies and talent and action for no one but me? I’m listening to a song ‘love me too well, I’ll retire early’ and there’s the conflict. The worry that I genuinely would and then the sweetness. Love me too well and I’ll put the pen down unless I can write straight out about that.

If I can just say what I’m trying to it’s this. I made a note to write “summer of love” because a man played guitar in my garden but I didn’t for weeks because I watched him more. Distracted by being funny in messages. Busy on weekends and maybe a night in the week too. I have never really journaled. I have cut out the time to do anymore. Two sentences and then two beers and a mess about. I turn him into time off and go on a sabbatical, call it a research trip but to say any of that, I will have to first say this and not be shy. I will have to first say this and let you read and think of a witty comeback. I will have to wonder why I feel like a bad writer when I feel most like a girl, confront the choir of men’s voices, remember I don’t really like books by boys anyway, remember everything is a love song, or I’ve always said so. Remember I have always wanted to be a writer, just like the one I am; frantic and a knot of emotional somethings, all thrown out, pretty, disgusting, bloody, and intoxicating. And so I must be intoxicated.

I will race to the Rothko room, run through the tube. I will go limp to life and let myself retire for months if I need to, if I’m busy eating 3 for £8 on the world’s longest afternoon. I’ll spend less money on pens, write a three line thing about a point of affection but then just hang out with it. My writing will descend to lists and sentences. Like five drafted haikus where I counted syllables out on my fingers in the sun, or “in the summer of love I will stop being prolific”. But I’m here aren’t I, writing. So I’ll edit. “In the summer of love, I will stop being prolific, unless I let myself write about you.”