having a coke with you

Note: this was originally uploaded to my substack 28/02/2022

As you are opening this newsletter I am pressing a cool can into your palm. If you would prefer a bottle, please go to the fridge. I have already sat down and I’m not getting up again.

I hope you are doing well! We are already a month into 2022, and February is biting at my ankles. It better be treating you well, though. How is it where you are? It’s usually colder here but this year is mild. Tepid. Etc.

The matter at hand

These last few days I have been feverishly rereading Having a Coke with You. I have also been thinking a lot about love languages. These two things are vividly connected.

It is an unending joy to fall in love with language. It is not original or in any way profound to say something about poetry being my first love. It’s not remarkable to write about the pink cat notebook my childhood dance teacher gave me, which was home to my first poems. I am not poetry’s only partner. I’m not even her only mistress.

We all have something that forces its way out of us. Something lives in all of us, like a parasite or a lover. We are likely mutuals, so you are likely the same. I don’t write because I have something to say. I write because there’s something that needs out. I’m just a conduit.

I look
at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world
except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it’s in the Frick
which thank heavens you haven’t gone to yet so we can go together for the first time
and the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of Futurism
just as at home I never think of the Nude Descending a Staircase or
at a rehearsal a single drawing of Leonardo or Michelangelo that used to wow me
and what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them
when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank

What is the point if you never find the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank? O’Hara’s mediation on quality time.

It has now been weeks since I started this post

What you have just read has been prisoner in my drafts for weeks. I did have a brief and vivid love affair with Having a Coke with You, an affair that I think every one of us should try out. Busy & personal & frantic love poetry is the best kind.

As I am writing this now, I am a couple hours from boarding a train back to university. I’ve spent the first weekend of my reading week at home with my family. It’s been nice to see my dog, my siblings, my parents. I visited the city I was born in. I walked around a harbour. I ate takeaway we had to drive to collect.

Those of you who live apart from your parents might know the feeling — when you return and there’s something about a place that has changed. There was a death recently in my parents’ immediate circle, and it’s touched everything. It’s been five years since my grandfather passed, it’s been over a decade since I’ve known someone to die before their time, but it’s hard to forget how it feels. Every rainfall reminds you of their favourite weather, every time you run the tap you remember their back in front of the sink, every cup of coffee reminds you of how they smelled — not of coffee, but something as strong. The way their perfume cologne sweat permeated a room. Grief is disconnected. Everything is theirs even when it isn’t.

It’s not even that I was close to this person, it’s the domino effect that has it tumbling through lives. My parents were, so now I am. The stories live on. We all echo inside each other.

I guess Having a Coke with You falls into place here comfortably, in a way. What I try to remember about my grandfather isn’t him walking around the house like he can’t stop walking around the house. It’s not him warning me the bathwater will burn me. It’s not him after the first stroke.

It’s me in bed and him making up a bedtime story about his dog. It’s him teaching me to mow the grass. It’s playing tennis. It’s his armchair. It’s the orange house before he left. It’s the setting sun reflecting in his glasses.

Yesterday afternoon, my parents and I went to the pub after walking the dog. My dad ordered orange and tonic water.

And my mum and I had cokes.

And, just to leave you with some poetry of my own. I often write about the orange house. Mediations on whether it misses me. Mediations on how much a space can know you. I’ll leave you with one that I wrote last summer.

the orange house stands, five years 
without me, with another pack living
violet in its belly. in dull moments i 
think to the fig tree, the way it hugged
the wall of the garage, the way it stared 
at us reading books in the grass. in 
each fig there is a dead wasp, one that
died biting an escape route for his 
sister. on the grounds of the orange
house, there are a handful of wasps 
dead, a handful alive, and none, if 
i stepped foot in the grass i once
taught myself to read in, would 
recognise me

All my love. Take care.

SJ ❤