fog / silence

I felt like an oozing gel

Last night, I walked home from the train station at midnight. The city was dark and quiet and covered in fog.

I love Edinburgh in the fog. I usually like to romanticise it and focus on the softened needles of pine trees. Or the way fog rises up from the ground, obscuring the yellows of gorse and daffodil.

But yesterday was all about the city. I took the remote Calton Road exit at Waverly and emerged onto the city streets almost like a secret. The buildings and lights took on an expressive haze, and the obscenely bright blues of St James Quarter looked iris blurred. A night bus rushed across the bridge above me, and red light entered the mix, diffusing streaks of light purple across the sky.

T and I were returning home after seeing Glen Hansard perform in Glasgow at The Pavilion. It was my first time there, and I was elbow-to-elbow in a seated theatre adorned with red velvet cushions. The crowd was much older than I am. In fact, Glen Hansard’s guitar was older than I am. I want to add something about whiteness here too, but I am exhausted by always adding something about whiteness here.

I felt out of place, but that feeling isn’t new. I feel uneasy when I articulate it because it seems, now, so utterly mundane. Not worth the breath.

*

Lately, I don’t know how to enjoy things. Or I am unable to enjoy things for long. Enjoyment and leisure make me feel guilty. I also know that I can’t really continue that way. Despair saps energy.

But still, I dress up for a date and my stomach drops. I walk into my favourite café on Leith Walk and shift uncomfortably. I laugh with a friend and inside something churns.

And art? My artmaking process reassembles itself around Gaza. I want to write but I can’t think about anything else.

*

The fog was reshaping the world. It made Elm Row look gentle as if I could press my hands into the hard buildings, sink right into stone. It blurred the faces of everyone exiting CC Blooms, stepping outside to smoke or cool off or grab a taxi.

It gave me an out too, a way to hide myself. I walked down the wet streets and let anonymity take hold.

Similarly, at the concert, I looked for ways to disguise myself. I smiled politely at the man standing in line next to me, aware that sometimes a smile can be an assertion, or at least a costume of familiarity. A mechanism of fitting in. I was also willing myself to sink into distraction, to enjoy this evening. And I was somewhat succeeding.

But then, around the third song, with possibly over a thousand people listening, Glen Hansard sung his changed lyrics to ‘Down on Our Knees.’ Gaza is burning, he screamed out, in his way. And then he specified Israeli bombs. There was no passivity.

After many poetry events and even book award evenings where silence reigned, I was surprised and moved. It felt genuinely powerful. But my body reacted strangely and reflexively. I grew tense. I felt my spine go so rigid. My skin prickled. I don’t know. Something else about whiteness could go here, I think. Something about being the only one in the room. Those indicative and tired (and true) expressions.

When the song ended, the audience, including me, was loud with applause. Someone yelled ‘Free Palestine,’ and more applause, more cheers. Glen Hansard raised his fist. There was no ambiguity.

The couple in front of me sat still. So, so still. It was the only song they didn’t react to. Two bodies refusing to move, statuesque, lest any stray movement suggest they agree with the sentiment.

Maybe I’m making that part up, reading too much into it. But the culture of silence is so strong that I’m probably not making that part up.

When my own body relaxed, I felt like an oozing gel. I realised then, how much tension I hold at all times. My body wound up, as if its tightness could translate to hardness. And hardness meant fewer things could hurt me. This gelatinous unfolding meant I cried through the next two songs. Tears collected in the mask I was wearing, disappearing beneath it as if they were never there.

That wasn’t the first time this happened recently. At a book event in December, in a room filled with mostly strangers, but also a few people I genuinely trust, someone said the word ceasefire on stage and I started weeping. It seems to be what happens when my body loosens, when it momentarily stops being on razor’s edge.

*

I live in a beautiful and safe place. I can spend midnight on the street with someone I love, thinking poetically about fog. I can look at the buildings and admire them, the way light halos around the lampposts out front. I don’t know how to enjoy these things anymore.

I am also amazed at how the silence is changing, incrementally, in various spaces I’m in. I don’t (and clearly my body doesn’t) discount how important that is.