Pastel Christmas

No sight of red and green in rainy Porvoo. Instead there were pastel blues and pinks. A spot of yellow. Cobbled streets that we imagine to be deadly when frozen over, but for now, almost safe even in heels. I found a wonderful mint green, embroidered morning jacket to go perfectly with the colour scheme of the city - will introduce you in due course. For now, I am content sitting on the sofa with a pile of chocolates and watching the lights on the Christmas tree. It might be what us Finns call a 'black Christmas' with no snow on the ground, but I am grateful for the mild temperatures this brings. I can enjoy a leisurely walk in the woods in my UK winter gear. The forest is so quiet after rain, mushy and wet, and you can hardly hear your own footsteps on the soggy moss - perfect for daydreaming and reflecting.

Christmas lights

I'm going home in two days. I've got absolutely no plans for Christmas but instead big, big plans for the year 2014.

It leaves me in the dark.

A stressful place where keys are returned, in a gesture much like receiving them: careless, yet heavy.

Where he says nothing but ‘thank you’ in a voice that is too soft after all the harshness that has passed between us, like it is going to be followed by a reconciliatory yet final 'goodbye'. Like he is relieved I have made it so easy for him. I don't stick around to hear it nor do I look at his face, which could reveal so many a thing. I am scared of things that are about to be said and witnessed.

Instead I duck out the door, muttering ‘I don’t know what to say’ in a breathless manner that suggests tears welling in the enclosed spaces of my eyes and as I stagger across the yard I hear the door lock. My breath, that I feel like I have been holding in all day, comes out in a billow of white matter and sounds like desperation. 

I do not know where this leaves us. Boundless, separate. Keyless. In the dark.

Stay golden

How do you know

You don't. 

A softness in her demeanour; lethargic, long muscles and buttery bones create an almost slothlike appearance. Edging along the sides of walls silently, observing everyone else in the room. Playing cards, chatting, drinking sherry from small crystal glasses that clink against their teeth.

She walks along, casually draping her gloved fingers against the wall, studying the patterns of the damp-ridden wallpaper. The shapes unite and break in intervals and she is mesmerised by them and the deep red arrangements that seem to hover in the air.

She looks at him, once, twice but never thrice. He only catches the back of her neck; unruly dark hair coiled up into soft curls, continuing all the way down and disappearing inside her dress. For a brief moment he imagines it released and wavy against the whiteness of a pillow on a bed, like a pool of blood. This makes him shiver in his chair, and he grasps his glass that bit harder and spills the sticky liquid onto his fingers, cursing. It seeps onto the cloth that covers the table and he thinks how it will leave an amber imprint there, forever marking the things he felt that night.

In your bed

In your bed I am filling the spaces between your covers

The bumps in your mattress and the gaps in the poor weave of your sheets

You don’t have to say it

It’s like pins and needles on the back of my neck

It’s like the sound of thunder without lightning

But without lightning there is no thunder

Your eyes are everywhere over me except my face, you cannot look me in the face when you’re not saying it

You don’t say it but my ears hear it and on this Monday I will change

I’ll twist myself around, so far that the image will break and you can follow the trail of shards

Still you don’t say it

And I give a voiceless promise that I will change

This Monday, Tuesday... Next week or next minute

The sky is a pinpricked sphere and I cannot make the difference between shooting stars and their reflections on the windows of buildings

I greet them all with a wish

You don’t say it

But I think I can hear the thunder

I'm up in the woods

Yesterday we walked in the woods and the smell of birch, the orange peeling bark of pines like strips of grease proof paper and dead grey trunks still erect, plunged into me and made me breathe in.

The moist, cold earth loose underneath our searching footfalls...
The compost of autumns past and forgotten, the tiny purplish blueberry shrubbery and the lichen and the golden sun on the tree tops...

A smell so sweet and fragrant I wish I could have bottled it.

In these parts the woods are still wild, even though there are well-trodden paths crisscrossing it made by animals and later followed by humans. There is not a sound in there, just our feet on the ground carefully avoiding the gnarly, bare roots springing up from the soil unanimously trying to trip us.

The parallel sun sifts through the leafy vegetation creating luminous mirages across the pathway. Finally we pass into the chilly shade of blue pines and feel alone like lost children.

Here is where you kiss me, with the stillness of the landscape in my ears and the shadows growing beyond my closed eyelids. I am imagining the trees looking over us, towering above our lilliputian heads, and there is a murmur rising from somewhere within.

Then we walk back, with our faces burning, tripping on all those roots now in our fervor as the murmur grows louder.

And when we finally reach the fringes of the forest, now freshly grown and green and light, never to return again, the sound lifts

And I knew you would never be mine.

Me and room service honey

I love my room.

I have loved you in three countries

On a single continent

For two years and eleven months

We have celebrated three of my birthdays and two of yours

I have spent the Christmas with your family

You have spend the summer with mine

I have taken you with me everywhere

Watched you naked, clothed, in your boxer shorts

Clean, unwashed, unshaven and shaved

I’ve been with you when you’ve cried, with your back toward me on the bed and your head against the pillow

And when you were in love with me you’d take off your glasses to kiss me because it was the only way to get close enough

I have taken you with me everywhere

And the smell of you which I am bound to forget

In a city full of artificial scents; shampoos, conditioners, deodorants, perfumes, detergents and powders, lotions and creams, you smelt to me like a human being

My thoughts are muddled with images of you

The milky fuzz of your lower lip

Imagining the sound of touching your face makes my skin ache

I have taken you with me everywhere

I've been hallucinating you

The light in the city at sundown is like a golden paper curtain coming down, falling upon the streets.

There have been two Paul's in my life today. 

Paul 1 was as tall as a mountain, a smooth-skinned creature with very few blemishes or pockmarks considering his respectable old age. He was surrounded by overgrown powdery roses, a tailless squirrel and a few awestruck tourists. 

The other Paul I came across, or rather didn't, was as cold at heart as the surface of the stone that Paul 1 was constructed from. Paul 2 had left behind discarded lovers on the sides of streets, in cramped alcoves carved into ancient rock. He'd branded their white skin with the letters of his name in black marker, pressed his lips against them only to depart a few minutes later. But there they would stand, upright and still bearing his name, waiting.

You're too old to be so shy

Yesterday I learned that dead wood bleeds. It is surprisingly thin in substance, much like human blood. And it looks like syrup, clear ochre in colour, with a smell reminiscent of the idea of forests. Because forests don't really smell anything like the insides of dead trees, or the birthplaces of their limbs to be more precise. Dead tree sweats too. But this I learned as a child, years ago. 

I have been discovering secret places of London. Like the St Dunstans in the East; a little oasis sprouting out from the ruins of a church. Eerie, beautiful. I also learned about the history of a site in Whitechapel I have been curious about for weeks now. Trinity Green, it turns out, was built as an almshouse by a particularly kind-hearted sea captain for fellow sailors in the 1600s. I find it hard to fathom how old things can be, it is mind boggling.

Maybe I'm too young to keep good love from going wrong

I love London on Sunday mornings. Places usually packed with women and men in sharp suits and sleek hair are deserted and peaceful and beautiful. I can smell the stone buildings' wet cold breath. From the window I observe the Gherkin daily, the ever-changing backdrop of clouds and watercolour sky. 

Reflections

Bank holiday weekend. Reading Lolita at Haggerston park. 

Life goes easy on me

Possibly the craziest most wonderful, baffling week I have had. So much stress and hard work and then 'poof!' here's the magic potion to solve all your troubles. I am in London. I have an internship and another one on the way. I am doing something cool every day. 

It was my 25th birthday when I got the call. All the more reason to buy the bottle of dark rum I had in my basket when they rang me. A busy, mindboggling weekend of being visited by an old, cherished friend, a birthday bash, packing, finishing dissertation and getting it printed and bound. First five days in my internship and now somehow it's Saturday and I am sitting here in this flat in East London.

Life is wonderful and scary and huge and easy and hard. I like to think good things happen to good people.

Goodbye Bournemouth.

copyright: Ndapewa Ann Pett

Mouthful of diamonds

This is the kind of stuff I like to wear when I'm not going anywhere special: just running some errands and picking up groceries. Comfort is my number one priority on days like these. Slouchy boyfriend jeans with a cotton knit, and bare feet! Not to worry, I will be wearing shoes when I leave the house. However, I would probably walk around without shoes on everywhere if I could and were it not a bit hazardous. Nothing beats walking barefoot on hot pavement in the summer.

We used to kiss all night but now it's just no use

In my mind it's already summer. I dug up some dead flowers and summer knits.

We all look for one thing

I have been having a superbly productive day! I woke up on my own accord just before 8, without the alarm going off (I have been known to sleep til noon on occasion). The sun has the strangest, most exhilarating effect on  me. I've been writing up applications, updating my portfolio, jamming to some 'Sexual Healing' and enthusiastically fixing up some lovely vintage treasures that have been calling my name for weeks now. Just a few stitches and the bust of my gorgeous Cinderella dress now fits like a glove.

Hackney flower market

Spring inspiration

So it was snowing earlier. I am still wearing my shin-length wool coat to shield myself from the freezing blusters of wind from the sea. Thank god I can escape to the land of Free People. Their summers never begin or end, they just are. There are only meadows of flowers or sandy beaches. All the girls have windswept hair, rosy pouty lips and dresses like seafoam, petals and linen. And nobody wears a bra. Heaven.