On Returning Home from Heaven
Here is the reason I love folk music: a melancholy voice with only a guitar as accompaniment is the sound my soul makes. The folk movement in America was started by white men who stole black people’s music and happily plagiarized the pain.
I am obsessed by word counts, and for the first time in my life, my last week was spent hitting all my word count goals. My food anxiety disappeared, I napped without shame. While writing a play about purgatory*, I was in heaven.
Heaven is Anstey Harris’ house, if you were wondering. In the south west of Scotland, there is a deceptively large house off a main road where you will find solace if you are looking. I stayed here for five nights, for the guided writing retreat ‘Unknown Feels’. Specifically for queer people, the week took my mind off the wider, crueller world, and wrapped me in laughter and confidence and ease. So what’s it been like returning home?
Well, I cannot stop playing folk music. That’s your first indicator that I am perhaps not overjoyed to return back to England where a hundred thousand white people just tore up the streets of London to show their disrespect (put lightly) for immigrants. Walking from the bus stop to my home, a journey of under five minutes, there is graffiti on an electrical box that says “Free Israel” with a star of David underneath.
I am sad, and sad, and sad, until I return to the home that I have built with my wonderful partner and meet the face of my beautiful cat.
We did speak about Charlie Kirk and Palestine on the retreat, but other than that the outside world was muzzled, bastilled. I have woken up in Liverpool where the heating in my house is broken, shocked by the significant lack of croissants and muesli I have grown accustomed to. I have no money left. Anstey Harris, take me back!
All I can do now is wrap myself in a hundred blankets and obsessively watch The Dog House, shouting at the TV when someone decides not to adopt a vulnerable, down-on-his-luck pooch.
Ok, fine, yeah, I’m the pooch, the metaphor was thinly concealed. I am so desperate for comfort that, in the place of going outside and engaging with the real world, I am taking my anger out on the people who probably don’t deserve it.
I have deleted Instagram, am watching reality TV involving pets only, listening to straight white men croon with their guitars. The fall from grace is made even harder when I’ve come from the queer utopia, nine strangers who I came to adore and instantly understood, who respected each other’s existence without a second thought. There was no tension, no explanations needed. It felt really good just to exist for a moment. It is becoming increasingly harder feel to that, to feel wanted and respected in a skin that looks different to the (seemingly) straight, (definitely) white men who are burning down London.
In quiet revolution I will begin to remind myself of the feeling by turning off the folk music and getting the heating fixed.
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