Your father lives in the attic of a tiny red brick gingerbread house. It smells of bike oil and of incense. We find a sunshine yellow tea kettle on the street and fill it with sunflowers we pick from someone's garden on Barts Street. He tells us about his nineteen sixties orange sunshine experiences with Ken Kesey, dressed in a lavender shirt and a pink tie, a briefcase full of liquid madness. He tells be about an Ernest Hemingway quote he remembers from childhood, that the most important rule for being a good writer is to LIVE, for one ought to have something to write about. I cannot agree more, in essence is this not what my whole madcap journey through these green years of my life is about? We are from a similar egg. He reads us spiritual poetry and lets me leaf through his notebooks, thick with stories. When we leave next morning, he gives me a lined composition books to write in, and tells me to send him my stories. The kindness of this world surprises me every day; the horror too yet it seems that beauty is ever present in unlikely places.
We dance and drink wine and you get up and sing at the front of the bar, the star of our own show. We toast champagne flutes filled with stars and play with words projected across the walls in the gallery downtown, while boys with cut off Ramones shirts and tumbling blonde curls talk about Burroughs in a sweet yet stuck Kentucky drawl.
Every day we get a little closer to the place where my life used to be, where i will be thrown into the madness once again. Who knows when next we will meet? The uncertainty of life is dreamlike and beautiful, but goodbyes will always break my heart, especially to one such as you, who has taught me so much. For now, there is still tomorrow. There is always tomorrow, and if tomorrow fails to come, then we won't be around to worry about it.
We arrive in Chicago as the sun is setting strawberry kool-aid in the sky behind the elephant skyscrapers and the boats dream gently on Lake Michigan and people are walking their dogs and there is a Billie Holiday cover playing on the radio and we have finally arrived, yet we both have so far to go.
We fall in and out of homes and of hearts, dancing the blues and waking to a glass wall overlooking the vast lake, a potent blue reminder of the vast ocean that is soon to separate me from the rainbows. It is always me that is leaving. Goodbyes make my bones feel dead and hollow, like dry and broken autumn branches, white noise in my head.
At the airport the flight attendant asks me to write my permanent address on my luggage tags, yet i am merely wandering. As we fly over the Ireland of my childhood, on a detour via Paris, other passengers open the blinds covering their windows to look at the human world below and the sunlight creates rainbow circles on the roof of the cabin. The rainbows make me cry because my own colour-infused world of palm trees and sheer freedom is so incredibly far away now. My heart pounds in my chest, but at least the pounding is steady and regular, a beat to keep the wild music of my life clinging tightly to the musical bars. Flying over England in order to get to England, what strange games we play. Nobody knows that i am flying right over their heads, everyone thinks that i am still in Chicago. Spaghetti legs, mushy ravioli heart.
And then i am back, back in the rambling, crying, wailing, dancing, afternoons-in-the-park-nights-in-the-pub-mornings-in-the-marshmallow ramshackle city. I am already losing that golden sense of inner peace, yet i am so very happy to be back, so excited to start the next wild chapter. Afternoon tea on Primrose Hill, drinks in our favourite pubs, grimy dancefloors, a bundle of sunflowers, a homemade birthday cake oozing through the cardboard box, a long velvet skirt and three hundred long more miles and i am home and it is my mother's birthday and the kettle is boiling and it smells of fresh laundry and she is there, soft in her pink dressing gown and it is like nothing has changed and i'm home, i'm home.
It is impossible to summarise the things that i learned in the delicate gossamer bubble of California, impossible to articulate what i found and what i have left behind, but now i am here with old faces, old places, with everything that once made up who i am. The Olympics is sending electricity through the city and there is fruit cider and grey afternoons and woolly jumpers, i'm watching Blur in Hyde Park and i'm sleeping in a tent by a lake somewhere in Cambridgeshire and we are those two tasselled and carefree flower people again. There is an enchanted forest filled with dolls houses and paper cranes and a funeral in the mud and all i want is to dance here with you forever. My future is written on the wings of an Angel, of a church with a spire and a canal and a kitten. We have no money and no responsibilities and days are spent riding new bicycles and getting lost in real mazes of books. Boris Johnson is flying through the air on a zip wire and my friends are playing ring of fire and my brother is laughing at my shoes and there is a baby rabbit living in the living room and my mum makes endless cups of tea and there is sharp wit and cynicism and there is less sunshine here but perhaps more love and i am very happy to be home.
