This text was written as I learn to live with Long Covid and attempt to regain my creativity. All the posts and some more info can be found here.
The bus rambles along the juddering road, pulling me back into Bristol after a day in Bath to meet up with a friend. In the darkness of December night, lights glow and reflect on the fast fogging windows. Ahead of the bus, in my direct line of sight from my seat at the front, I watch a cyclist glide on the asphalt. My chest tightens and I swallow an urge to cry. Memories of cycling endlessly, effortlessly through London, through Bristol, through the cycle path to Bath, through the lanes of South Gloucestershire in my commute of not so long ago slam into my brain. I am hit by all I am missing: the glowing dim lights, the darkness, the moon and the clouds, the stars, the shadows of birds, the song of the cockerel, the cloying scent of goats, the slither of foxes, the first and last light copper and gold and peach and strawberry, the quiet of dark, the sharp bite of cold on my always exposed fingers, the lashing of rain turning me from solid to liquid, the wind pushing and pulling at me, the freedom to move. I blink and blink and blink until the cyclist takes a turn and the road is filled with only cars and buses again.
Mostly, things are getting easier. I do not dissolve into tears as I once did and find ways to make plans for the future, creative goals I want to meet. Ideas bubbles in my head and I get glimpses of a future in which I am happy. I am healing, my grief lightening in most areas but cycling. I don't let myself think about it and maybe this is why my pain is still so raw. I once joked that I'm a centaur but instead of being half horse, I'm half bicycle. Some days, it was impossible not to believe it. To be atop the saddle for me is to come alive. I have been known to burst into tears whilst cycling from the sheer joy of it. And now, it is gone. No. Here I am, dramatising again. It is not gone. Only, my perimeter of rides has shrunk from endless miles to the one mile and a half that stretch to the nature reserve from my front door. I am grateful to be able to cycle there but I'm also bitter and angry at only being able to cycle there, still held within the nearness of the motorway.
I sit in the garden the following day with The Serviceberry Tree by Robin Wall Kimmerer. I read her words and as often happens with her prose, tears draw patterns on my cheeks as she verbalises what I've internalised but refuse to face. I thought I was mourning my bicycle but I wasn't. I am mourning everything my bicycle stands for, everything it gives me with every ride. As my bicycle spends more time under shelter than on the roads, I have lost the network of life I was once a part of. I have been uprooted and thrown in the violence and destruction of the human world. Roads are too wide and bordered by houses sheltered behind rows of glistening cars. I seek the presence of my friends, of old oaks, robins, and horses. They are not here. The motors and asphalt drown out their songs. The lights of streetlamps, businesses, and vehicles steal the soft glow of the moon and fragile burn of the stars. I can no longer stop and admire the fleeting moment of beauty when I commute. The bus driver would not take kindly to me ordering the bus to stop so I can linger in light and song for a few minutes, the few minutes of my day imbued with life and magic, with the resonance of my soul in reciprocity to the world. The soft yield of earth under my shoes no longer supports me at every step. I am thrown onto hard pavement that hurt my knees. The plastic of the bus arm rest is too smooth and cold. I yearn for the cool ridges of bark under my fingers, the oily warmth of horses cheeks under my palms.
My chest tightens and I let the tears fall.
The garden blurs and focuses. My watery eyes automatically scan rooftops for the familiar figure of magpies, pigeons, gulls, and crows. But who I find is much smaller, much closer. A great tit is perched in the whitebeam on the other side of the garden fence. They flitter from branch to branch, fly to the kornus cousa, try the forsythia, and return to the whitebeam. They utter a trilling song that calls of warning, anger. For no other reason that I am here, I think they call to me to leave. I nearly answer this call but I am weary and the sun still shines. So I whisper to them.
'Hey little one. It's okay. You're welcome here.'
They depart and come back, depart and come back. I remain as still as I can, the book closing around my finger. The great tit keeps a keen eye on me as they continue their shuffling dance. I watch them and smile, hoping they understand I mean them no harm, that I welcome their presence. The bird descends to the fence in the wide open space between the last branches of the whitebeam and the first bows of the forsythia. I hold my breath. They tilt their head and I am convinced they are eyeing me up this time. We hold each other for a second, a moment of eternity in which the garden is much bigger than it is. They take off and zoom at speed into the wooden box on the fence post that my partner and I once judged to be the ideal position for a birds home: far away from where we sit in the garden, far away from the paths of cats we have observed, and far away from the bird feeders so not to be bothered by the loud magpies.
‘Thank you,’ I whisper to them as their shape has fully disappeared into the box they call home. ‘Thank you.’ My voice breaks. I may despair and forget that the world is not just in the gaps between human habitation, that beauty and love and care and reciprocity is still within my grasp, but the world will always be there to remind me. It is there in the great tit that selected to make their home in the one I offered, it is there in the dandelion that glowed alone under streetlight, wonderful and defiant and foreign in the clipped lawn of the business centre, it is there in the squelching on my shoes in the gathered leaves and water by the edge of the pavements, it is there in the moist slippery hold of moss on the metal container I grip to hop over the palette that act as a barrier between the industrial estate and the footpath to my friend the river Frome.
It is easy to forget when I am not surrounded by it, when the vehicles hurt my ears, when the sudden flash of bright lights as the bus open its door blind my eyes, when the fleeting light of sunrise is stolen from sight at forty miles per hour, when I see all that grates and forget to see all that lives. But it is here. It is always here.