Trying to make things make sense

The house keeps rearranging itself

Moving before it makes sense

I’m trying to refind the groove.

I’ve been rearranging the house, trying to make the couch less emotionally avoidant by pulling it away from the wall, moving the bookshelf from the place where it gets between me and the mountain. I’m trying to make clearer boundaries and also more softness.

It started when some beautiful new shelves arrived in my home last night. A friend left town and left them behind. I’d always looked at them and loved them, and suddenly I was trying to stuff them into the back of my car and lug them through the front door, at the same time as cooking dinner, dealing with spider meltdowns, and what that president has said now, and the fact of how many classrooms of children are being killed every day.

Everything else was already crammed. Every surface was covered in cut up bits of paper and half-eaten Easter eggs and things that had been glue-gunned together, because one of my children is a compulsive maker. She can’t stop, won’t stop rearranging things into smaller, stranger things.

I turn around for five minutes and suddenly one third of the lounge is covered in tiny pieces of fabric. She peeps out from the middle of it and says, look what I made, and it is a doll with eyes staring back at me, miniscule stitches, stunned at its own sudden existence.

The shelves. I really want to find somewhere for these shelves because they are lovely. They have the potential to contain, hide, display, and make meaning of this chaos.

I start moving things. My child starts crying.

My partner says, I can see you want to move things, but can you slow down? The child is crying.

And I say, I know she is sad. I know because I have been cuddling her on the couch while she tells me she is sad but doesn’t know why.

She says she doesn’t want that piece of paper on the shelf to get crumpled. So we uncrumple the paper.

The shelves find their way into a corner of my bedroom. They become an altar of a few precious things I can look at from bed. I love them.

But they have displaced a pile of things that need new homes, and so a domino effect begins. Many corners of my house are now simultaneously in motion. There are piles of books everywhere, and the curtains are off their rails, and I’m trying to figure out which lamp has the softest light, and will make that corner of the lounge most conducive to surviving the collapse of civilisation.

I want things to make sense, and they don’t. Not here, and not anywhere else either.

I can feel the strong compulsion in this: towards making sense of things, making order, figuring out what belongs where.

I need to quickly turn the house back into something I can understand. But each rearrangement creates a new trail of mess. I can’t settle.

*

I tried to write the other day and it came out like this:

I’m ready to rumpstump over the jellysqabble and lay at the feet of filladon until the floads come up out the slither. It won’t take long. My newt, we aren’t really there yet and we won’t get there soon.

I don’t entirely know what it means. But it came from my body, and I recognise something in it. It feels like turning my shoulder to linearity and sliding down onto the floor, rolling from side to side until my crunchy thoughts begin to soften.

I turn off the small-talking part of my brain and let something else come forward. It’s not clarity, and not quite language either.

*

My child makes many things that don’t make sense. They have eyes (usually) and scales (often) and sometimes tiny perfect sunglasses that fit them.

And I know what that feels like, to just make without needing to make sense, to move without knowing where you are going, but for it to feel right.

I make the most sense to myself as an artist, as a weirdo who feels things. That’s where I feel most at home.

But that part of me is not especially useful when I am trying to make a house behave.

*

Maybe clarity isn’t the point. Maybe it’s just the moment something stops moving.

My home is always going to be a thoroughfare. There will always be more things moving than I can keep up with. There are too many bodies, too many feelings, and too many ideas to hold at once.

I don’t want it to be any other way.

With love,

Rata