Chapter 1 #4
this wasn’t suffering. This was abject pain, I could note, but a greater shock cushioned the blows, a new validity that was
coming to my senses, a new benchmark, a new degree of aliveness that I can only describe as being able to hear things I had
never heard before. Seagulls called from what felt like miles away. People swept, negotiated, hammered, dug, simply walked—whole
lives were happening outside my cell and their sounds were of such a pure, undiluted crackle.
What would have been (or would be?) my old flat was just down the road from here.
And if I closed my eyes and listened to the seagulls, it truly felt as though I could leave this cell, walk down the street, and be back at home with the same seagulls singing the same songs as if nothing had ever happened.
Maybe my ex would be back there too, complaining about something—the rubbish needing taken out, the weather, the birds.
A family of seagulls lived on our roof back then.
They had made nests on the roofs of the buildings in our development.
They would caw all day and my boyfriend hated the noise but I thought they were fun to watch, silly when their screams bubbled up any odd hour of the day, their little wars.
They were drawn to the “green” roofs on all the buildings in the development—a tax write-off that mostly grew pollen-rich weeds in spring, burnt and dead by summer, and it was that barren greenery that made an attractive nest for the birds.
They shit everywhere and swarmed the sky in the mornings.
Sometimes I’d hear the gentle swoop of one passing the window in the middle of the night.
Workmen would come out on the roofs and try their best to make a hostile environment for the birds. From our top-floor flat,
I’d watch them out on the lower buildings trying everything just shy of outright extermination. I’m sure the birds were a
pestilence to people of consequence tied up in property values, hygiene concerns, but not me, barely able to make my half
of the shared rent. The men erected tall poles onto which they fastened kitelike fake birds that fluttered dark and menacing
in the wind to scare them away. This caused a week or so of chaos and screeching, but it only took one calm summer day, when
the plastic crows hung flaccid and motionless, for the gulls to realize they were nothing to be afraid of. Other days the
wind would blow so strong that the decoys would get wrapped up in their own tethers, knotted and stuck to the poles, and the
gulls would cackle, victorious. Eventually the workmen stopped coming out to reset them.
I’d watch the seagulls from my balcony on days I wasn’t working (i.e.
, couldn’t find work, gave up on finding work, content to walk dogs forever) and smile at their tribal infighting, their comic dawdles, their fluffy new chicks flapping limber wings learning to fly.
I’d hold my breath if one of them came too close to the roof edge.
I applauded when I saw them soaring high above me one morning, little gray feet splayed out with joy, then gone only a few days later, flown away.
Our balcony developed a spider problem that summer. The seagulls would eat flies and other bugs, but when they were too busy
fighting the workmen and the plastic crows, the flies proliferated and attracted spiders who wove enormous webs all over our
balcony in order to catch them. My boyfriend refused to step outside, refused to open the windows despite the heat, would
scream with great charade when one of the spiders crept inside the flat. One day I killed them all, sprayed bug spray all
over the balcony, swept away their webs and mummified meals, totally ignorant to their purpose—and the next day we had a fly
problem. The day after that, I had a boyfriend problem. We had a blowout fight over cleaning and the recycling, over the spiders
and the flies, and everything became barbed in the way these things tend to, seagulls screaming all the while, refusing to
be our metaphor for domestic neglect and elemental incompatibility. When our breakup finally happened it happened immediately
and without fanfare. When I received a vague text from him the day after the night he had walked out and not come back, my
first thought was oh, this is going to be a thing, but it should have been oh, this was a thing and now it wasn’t because it was already over. He never came back. My boyfriend had also had a boyfriend problem,
and he had taken care of it.
It was very London how we broke apart via admin, like defaulting on a loan, deleting a spelling error, sweeping away a cobweb.
It didn’t feel real when I half read the long, wordy email from him—he had never sent me an email before, why start now?
He sounded so contrived and not himself that I googled the whole thing to see if he had used a foolproof breakup template or AI, but he hadn’t, he really was that wordy and contrived.
I tried replying with my own screed but only regurgitated the same shallow phrases, sounding like the back of a cereal box.
I deleted the draft. I deleted the email and blocked his.
A few months after that, I traveled through time. Now there were centuries (I assumed—I didn’t know what year it was) between
me and the breakup. Actually, technically the breakup hadn’t even happened yet. If someone were to ask me why I was feeling
gloom (aside from the imprisonment, the beating, the gruel) I wouldn’t be able to say “I’m getting over a breakup,” because
that wouldn’t be true. “I’m going to be getting over a breakup” would be more accurate and that sounded like nonsense, that sounded like nothing. “I’m going
to go through a breakup many years from now”—of course I would, that was no surprise. Everything broke eventually.
But the truth was I didn’t feel gloom at all now.
I could say these days imprisoned passed like nightmares, but like the nightmares of a newborn, who wakes each day with tremors and shrieks not from any logical pain or need, but from his body simply being just-born, unfolding like a leaf and trembling, knowing not which way to move.
I held spiders in my hands now. I watched them weave and sew all night in the corners of my cell, understanding the patterns of their days more than anything else in this world.
I wanted to know what their secret to the universe was, how they had managed, as a species, to stay the same for so long, content to weave the same patterns unchanged.
I whispered to them my fears and asked if they had ever met a time traveler before.
If they had, they certainly didn’t make it known, just as God had left my desperate prayers at the park unanswered.
I had slipped through time itself and not a peep.
But this was no longer loneliness, I realized.
This was no longer abandonment. The spiders carried on and so did I, and in the darkness, their leggy movements felt like instruction, the calls of gulls sounded like guides.