Desire (Part II)

On why it matters where you sleep

Blurred edges

Last month I wrote down some of my initial thoughts about desire. You can read them here because I’ve removed the paywall for a short time. I wrote about the space between wanting and getting, the wide blue space between solitude and desire that Rebecca Solnit describes.

I’m currently reading The Lonely City: Adventures In The Art Of Being Alone by Olivia Laing. She talks specifically about loneliness in a city, but I feel qualified to talk about the art of being alone anywhere, if alone means lost inside my own head while chaos is spinning around me, and if it means being alone but rarely on my own. Of course alone is not the same as lonely - does loneliness kick in when the alone-ness ceases to be a pleasing state? Is loneliness that tipping point when my own company is no longer enough? Or is loneliness an absence of something? Someone? Is loneliness just another word for desire?

“If loneliness is to be defined as a desire for intimacy, then included within that is the need to express oneself and to be heard, to share thoughts, experiences and feelings.” Olivia Laing

When I feel lonely, or what I perceive as loneliness, my chest is full of stones weighing me down, even though loneliness is commonly understood to be a lacking. Loneliness is both a void and something so dense it can crush me. Likewise, desire is at its most potent when it is unfulfilled. Once we are sated the desire ebbs away. For a while. I haven’t known sated for a long time.

Mother’s Day reading

This morning - Mother’s Day - I was not with my children. I lay in bed eating toast, drinking tea and reading Simple Passion by Annie Ernaux. I had woken up early, like I always seem to at the moment. My shutters leak light and turn my room grey. When I lift my hand it makes a silhouette against the window. Everything is hazy because I am not wearing my contact lenses and I like it that the edges are rough.

When I moved into this house six months ago I didn't know where everyone would sleep. There are five people in my family, and four bedrooms in this house. I wanted the room at the top of the house, the rickety loft conversion with a view of the sea. I wanted to be able to climb up the stairs far away from the world and sit at that window and write and dream. I wanted to turn it into a bohemian garret full of plants, with blankets sprawled over the bed and books stacked high in piles. I wanted to make a space that reminded me how to be a woman, not just a mother. So much wanting.

But the mother stepped forward and wagged her finger at me. Your youngest daughters need that room more than you, she scolded. It is the biggest room in the house and there are two of them, each with very different needs. She was right, that mother, and also I didn't really want to be at the top of the house while they all slept below me and anything could happen and I might not know. The mother always wins - reminds the woman to put her children first.

But the move did something to me. I know my mother role is huge, but I was tired of the real life metaphor I’d lived for years, the one where I slept in the smallest bedroom in the house, in a tiny double bed that was bent and buckled and scraped the walls. That little room served its purpose, it contained me when I felt small and broken and needed to hide. Frequently it was filled with all of my children as well, all five of us squeezed into that creaking bed as we tried to make sense of our new life.

My tiny bedroom with the broken bed

When we moved to this new house, I said to the children that I no longer wanted our lives to be defined by an absence, by someone who was no longer there, unreachable in so many ways. I didn’t say it to hurt them, I thought if I kept telling them that we are enough they might start to believe me. That strategy has varying degrees of success. I know I cannot always be enough.

On the day of the house move, with the children packed off elsewhere, my brother, who had come up the night before to help me, walked out of the old house with me and around the corner to the new one. I am anxious, I told him. I don’t know where everyone is going to sleep.

The previous night we had sat in my old kitchen surrounded by badly packed boxes, eating pizza. I had reached that stage of moving where I didn’t care where anything went, I just wanted it in a box or in the bin. My brother drank cider and I poured a half-hearted glass of wine that did nothing to calm my racing heart. He walked around to the new house with me that night too, because I didn't know where to put the piano or the big sofa. Funny how when you are dismantling your entire life, the things that don’t matter at all are the things that you think are the problem.

The next morning I can’t remember what the light was doing. It was early September and about 7am, so probably the night had been chased away by a late summer day. As it turns out, that day would be the hottest one we would have in Northumberland all year. I wore a vest top and piled my hair onto my head because my neck was sticky with sweat. All day long I wanted to be in the sea that lay in a strip of blue beyond the rooftops.

That early morning I walked into the new house with my brother and tried to make the strange emptiness feel like home. We walked up to the first floor then bent our heads to climb to the very top of the house. In an hour the carpet fitter would arrive and tell me that he’d been given the wrong materials and he didn’t know if he could finish the job. A few moments later the removal men would arrive and tell me how tired they were, how they were underpaid, and how they were doing me a big favour by lifting some extra boxes. My brother had to work hard to maintain any faith I had in men that day.

Despite having barely slept, the new day made it clear to me that the loft was certainly the best room for my little girls. My older daughters would take the back room and the single bedroom on the first floor, and I would take the double bedroom at the front of the house.

This new room was different to any room I’d ever slept in before. It had a very soft carpet and fancy looking shutters at the window. There was a TV on the wall and fitted wardrobes. I’ve never had fitted wardrobes and I like the feel of wooden floorboards underneath my feet. Four spotlights sat in circles in the ceiling and the walls were painted a neutral colour, something like taupe. I was used to a knackered light fitting and an IKEA shade, all the walls painted white. The black fireplace was the only thing that felt familiar, because it looked almost identical to the one I had bought with my ex-husband from a reclamation yard close to the Scottish border before things went wrong.

I didn't know who I would be in a bedroom like this. Too much space to claim just for me. A friend had told me to get over myself and order a king sized bed. She wanted me to be good to myself and fuck the expense. I didn't understand her motives at the time, but she was right, buying my big bed was a good decision. It has allowed me to contemplate desire in a way I never could in my old house.

I thought that once my ex-husband had moved out, and then when my divorce came through, that would be the end of that chapter of my life. I did a degree. I wrote a book. I was free. But something about physically removing myself from the place where my old life unravelled, even only a street away, has helped me to extricate myself further from who I was before.

So this bigger bedroom is where I lay this morning with Annie Ernaux and my tea and my toast. When I bought my new bed I also had to buy a new duvet. I love this duvet - I’m glad I also thought fuck the expense with that because it’s a delight. It has a plain white cotton cover and matching pillows and if I tidy my room, pick up clothes from the floor, remove hairbrushes and bobbles the kids have left by my mirror, I could be in a nice hotel.

Nothing could ever have happened in my old bedroom because it was a makeshift room defined by absence. It was all I could do to imagine. It’s easier in this new bedroom to hide the mother, and the wife has disappeared completely. There are no ghosts haunting the sheets. I can read books that fill my head with longing, listen to music that does the same, light candles and watch the flames flicker. Now I feel that it is possible for me to move beyond the held breath into the actual desire. Beyond the yearning.