To Whom It May Concern
I am a sky where spirits live.
– Rumi, Like This (trans. by Coleman Barks)
There is so much I want to say, and I can’t.
I’m reading The Reactor by a London-based therapist and writer Nick Blackburn, on grief and beauty and feeling. And I can’t say what I want to say.
There is so much pain spilled out in the spring air, so much beauty.
I’m watching La Grande Bellezza for like 10th time, and I’m crying. About death, and love, and beauty.
Love, not a feeling, for a feeling is bodily, too temporary.
Love–state. Love ‘which surpasses all understanding’.
Lately I am told that it is impossible to differentiate between my socially constructed identity and the state beyond it, behind it. It is always behind it.
I’m reading The Reactor outside of Velasquez and Van Wezel, our local coffee shop. A guy with curly red hair and football shorts asks me: ‘Excuse me, where did you get this lovely coat of yours?’
The coat is very bright orange. Christos got it for me last spring when we where in lockdown in St Andrews. It’s supposed to be a classic English coat but in an acid colour. Some well-mannered lady from south of England was selling it on Ebay, just for 10 pounds. And we couldn’t really afford even that. But Christos got it, because we were going crazy, stuck in one room for a year, for two years. We were quarreling a lot, and we were discovering each other and the connection was getting deeper and there was something behind it. It is always behind it.
St Andrews is a tiny university town in Scotland, not many people live there, and this lockdown after lockdown… Our tiny studio room had a tiny window facing an endless field. Two of us stuck in a room, and a view of an endless field. So he got that orange coat, and it came as a surprise, and added something to our time in St Andrews.
How do I tell this to the guy in football shorts? I don’t. I just say ‘It’s from Ebay’ and the name of the brand.
He says, he has been asking people lately, where do they get their clothes from. ‘And it’s always from somewhere overseas, or Ebay…’
He writes down the brand. He sits on his own facing the sunshine, holding a flat-white. I look at him, feelings of terrible loneliness, existential loneliness, and the great beauty overflow me.
There is so much I want to say, and I can’t.
Before leaving, he smiles at me. ‘I think I found the brand!’
What makes him ask people where do they get their clothes from?
This writing is not exactly about the guy. It's about me, and how I feel hurt, hurt by people I didn’t expect to be hurt by. How do they call it, safe space? Is it an illusion – a safe space? A manageable, maintainable illusion? When we meet with people, when we create a circle, a human circle, and we decide to call it a safe space – is it really a safe space? We come into it, bearing our own feelings, and contexts, and coats and the stories about them… Is there something behind our stories?
I feel pretty safe in my psychotherapy group. Apart from other things, we share a mother tongue, it’s so much easier to express my thoughts there. Someone said to me recently: ‘It must be harder to establish understanding between Christos and you, since you don’t share the first language?’ I bet, it is.
Something made me move though! From home country across five other countries, one after another. Maybe, it happened because the mother tongue was never really a mother tongue, it was a father tongue – a language of my father, that is. I never learned my mother’s mother tongue, same as I never managed to get to know my father. Partially, that is why there is so much I want to say, and I can’t.
When do I stop this text? When will you stop reading it? Who are you? Are you listening? Are you following? Why do you choose to read this?
Can I really tell, if I’m speaking to you or myself?
The answer to the last question matters to me a lot, but I don’t know what to say.
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