March Please

Whoopsie, made a oopsie

Hannah, the newsletterer, [only just] balanced on a rock at the edge of a bay

Women in my family placed a lot of importance on being clean, perhaps because there was little else they could control in their lives - Yasmin Zaher

Well there’s a first time for everything. In a great hurry I learned I’d be in transit for the whole of thr last day of March. So, breaking with routine, I decided to write to you on the 30th instead. An early date just couldn’t abide, so I saved your letter in the substack drafts, ready for the month’s true end. But when she got there the cupboard was bare.

The draft is not here. And I think its disappearance is telling me that in-the-moment is a true enough methodology after all. The stuff of life is happening to us all the time. A net of words descends and catches no big bounty, but at least something small and recognisable, with glitter-scales or defiant flaps enough to wonder at for a moment before releasing back into the wordless manifold.

And maybe the missing draft is telling me that March was a mostly wordless month anyway, with a missing last day for me, and a monthlong missing net with which to catch much verbal sense-making. Speech slowed down (and would that be faltering or resisting, maybe both). I became unavailable to most communication, except for practical things like pick-ups and pot-lucks, and impractical but essential things like hugs and singing.

Buying and loaning were forms of communication too:

Library-loaned novels clockwise from left: The Coin by Yasmin Zaher, Solar Bones by Mike McCormack, little scratch by Rebecca Watson, The Maniac by Benjamin Labatut, Amma by Saraid de Silva, Will and Testament by Vigdis Hjorth, One Fine Day by Molly Painter-Downes

All the way from Palestine, the arrival of the pre-order from Bayyāra

From earlier in March: all threaded together, and always good people to trust when your own words turn [for a time] to ash

Until next month, may the word-net catch and release what it needs to make defiant flaps and glitters; or may you allow just the practical or essential things to happen,

H x

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