January Cold & Communion Wafers

A moment of introspection at the start of the new year.

I love the quietness of an early morning. The hum of silence as I wait at the bus stop, pulling my jacket closer around me to try and combat the biting New Year’s Eve chill, comforts me with its patience. London is rarely ever silent, and so I treasure these moments alone with the city before everyone else wakes up, while the only noise is the gentle grumble of the morning commuter cars, or the occasional slow bus. A red refuge from the cold, mine arrived eventually, and as I make myself comfortable in my usual seat on the top deck I think about the year ahead and what it is going to bring.

In January last year I was falling in love, drinking strong frothy coffees with maple syrup in my partner’s kitchen, tracing shapes on the floor with my toes while I watched him make another for our partner. Everything felt possible, throwing myself wholeheartedly into polyamory and new relationships had shifted the ground beneath my feet, and filled me with endorphins similar to exercise. Standing in the garden in the 7am cold in nothing but boots, my pants and leather jacket waiting for Ghost (then a four-ish month old puppy) to go outside, it felt as if not even the icy rain on bare skin could touch me.

This January, I’m still in love, and my partner still makes me coffee, often this time over the stainless steel bar at our shared workplace as I’m finishing my shift and he’s starting his. Most mornings start walking the now adult Ghost before work (I miss her puppy stage, but not the toilet training) and then a cold commute. I’ve been loitering dangerously close to the pits of despair in regards to my future, things not feeling as concrete or possible as they did last year, when my rose-tinted glasses convinced me that love could fix everything. It fixes a great deal of things, but not everything. It absolutely helps though.

This morning, the light slanted through warm and pink toned through the bathroom window, illuminating my bare skin in the dusk as I bent closer to feel the warm glow of the radiator. I soaked it in like a lizard under a lamp before having to leave for work. Every day, I find myself asking the same question - where am I going from here? What’s the goal? What’s the focus? I mop the floor in a repetitive figure of eight motion, back and forth and back and forth over particularly sticky drink spills, and I realise I don’t have the answer. My dreams are flighty, swallows and house martins that dip and dive around the rafters of my mind, swooping into vision then disappearing just as quickly, migrating altogether at points in search of warmer climates. They always return though, as the blossoms begin to bloom and the flowers uncurl, their presence is felt once more, like clockwork. Similarly, my passions reignite themselves to me routinely, without plan - perhaps all I need to do for them to find me again is to wait, and trust the rise and fall of the winter sun and moon: the monotonous passing of time as a guarantee that I am inching forever closer towards this reunion.

And so, I watch. I find my eyes wandering as I walk to work, or while I wait for my bus, vision blurring slightly as I allow myself to lose focus. Every time I snap out of the haze, the gentle translucent face of the moon

is staring back at me, hanging light as a feather, like cotton wool in the sky. It reminds me of a communion wafer, particularly as it begins to slightly dissolve on the tongue: a representation, a vision of something else, an omen of what’s to come: fading into nothingness. But that nothingness is also hope - the wafer melts on the tongue to represent a sacrifice, to transfer that energy into us (don’t worry, I’m not practicing - too devout in my love of gay sex and the occult - but I grew up in Catholicism) and similarly, the moon fades into obscurity in the sea of blue sky to allow the sun to shine. It’s all transition and transference, moments that bring about change.

This January feels like communion - I stand before the universe and ask it to place the moon on my tongue, to taste it as it disintegrates, to feel it seep through my flesh and into my bloodstream, cold as the breeze that whips at my skin. I take my seat back on the pew, knowing we’re almost at the end of the service. The joyous final song awaits, and the step forth into the rest of the year. I want to step with intention, to take the love that surrounds me and fills me with energy (both metaphorical, and physical in the form of carefully made coffees) and use it to climb up to the rooftops to watch the swallows and house martins that represent my dreams as they return for the summer. And maybe, just maybe, this year I’ll be able to slip my feet out over the window ledge, and take flight with them.

Until next time,

Eerie