In Which We Never Quite Got A Grasp On The Day

The Little Daylight

by JESSICA FURSETH

I got on the plane — you always get on the plane in the end. I went to Norway thinking I could always go back to the city early if it got to be too much: the cold, the dark, the silence. I do that now, whenever I leave London: I tell myself I can go back early. Twelve years of living in the Big Smoke and it keeps getting better, or maybe I’m just getting greedier for it? For years my habit has been to always have a plane ticket waiting to take me somewhere, but lately the date of departure approaches and I don’t really want to go. London is gritty, demanding and thrilling, and the constant noise has been a backdrop to every significant thing in my life.

It’s been several days since I came to Norway now, I couldn’t really say; Scandinavian days are so short in winter. Sunset came at 3:45 p.m. today, six and a half hours after the sunrise. Then, once the sun has disappeared, the sky seems to stay blue forever. It is partially because of the cold, minus 12°C today, rendering each intake of breath sharp and the air sparkling clear. I lived here for 18 years, but I don’t really remember much about winter. Until I got here a few days ago I’d forgot how the long, slow dark feels so dense once you’re in it, like being in a submarine at the bottom of the sea. The daylight is small, in length and in intensity, like there’s a light somewhere just around the bend but it doesn’t quite stretch far enough to fill up the sky.

As cold as Norway may get in the winter, I was never cold when I lived here. I’m not cold this time either, even after a week of relatively mild frost in London that nevertheless felt like a severe and personal form of punishment. The difference is that Norway expects the cold, so people accept it and prepare for it, not like the English style of remaining in denial while shivering in thin coats in drafty rooms, wondering what’s happened to the air. In Norway, you dress like a polar explorer, with double wool down the arms and legs and insulated shoes. The trick for managing cold weather is slowly resurfacing from my subconscious, where it’s been buried all these years I’ve been away.

I don’t usually go to Norway in the winter anymore but this year I’m between houses, so I figured my mother’s place in this small Norwegian town would be a nice place to be technically homeless. I was right: it’s peaceful and plentiful here, even in the cold. Everywhere you go is a warm room with ice on the windows. There are no distractions, but somehow I’m still finding the hours slipping away. Suddenly the front door clicks open as my mother comes home from work. The town is sleepy under the snow covering the streets, the gardens and the porches. The roads are empty as people retreat to their wood-heated houses at night, red-cheeked from frost with hair static from wooly hats.

The night comes so early and I never quite get a grasp on the day before it vanishes. The novelty of the dim light distracts me from the things I need to do, as I work in the warmth looking out at the cold, where the disappearing blue light is reflected by the snow. The whole world feels quiet here. I love London more than any place I’ve ever been, I adore the rush and the noise, and I keep thinking this silence will start to bore me soon. But for now I’m just wandering around, from the table to the tea kettle to the bed and back, reveling in the little daylight. Life feels simple here, in the way it always does when you spend time in a place that’s not your home.

I was born here but it never felt quite right, in ways that had nothing to do with the light or the temperature. Now that I’m a visitor it’s okay, it’s even a treat to spend a few days being someone I’m not. There’s a luxury in allowing myself to enjoy the dark and the cold, just for a little while. So I’m just going to sit here, watching the constant changes of the light, drinking in the silence with a thirst that won’t last for long, but right now it feels endless.

Jessica Furseth is the senior contributor to This Recording. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

Photographs by the author.

In Which We Always Thought Of Ourselves As A Good Judge Of Character

At the Finish

by JESSICA FURSETH

The text he sent me, telling me he misses me and wants to be my friend. I respond I would like that too, but I don’t know how. We sigh, as far as that’s possible to do over text, and then do nothing.

That I’m old now, meaning I know you don’t get to be friends, not right away like this. The god of break-ups owns this time, and the deity will make you sit in the waiting room flicking through the thoughts in your head, working through every little tedious thread in the tangle. 

That I know why we broke up but I don’t think he does because he keeps asking me: “Did you leave because I’m so broke right now? Did you end it because I take drugs sometimes? Was it because of that guy you met, the one you keep meeting up with?” I feel the anger swell in my chest when he asks this, because it’s none of these things and yet all of these things, and so much more. But most of all it’s how he doesn’t hear me when I try and tell him. I spent the best part of a season trying to salvage things, trying to explain what the problem was, desperately sifting through all the words in my arsenal to find the ones that would show him how I felt. More than anything I wanted him to understand.

The moment when it started breaking. Of course I didn’t understand at the time but with hindsight I can see it: a freezing day with grey fog hanging low over the city, on a bus because the train wasn’t running. He told me something about what he believed in and how he wanted to live, some dream about communal living and sharing resources and a commitment to social activism. All things I can understand and even admire, but the opposite of everything I wanted for myself, as a fickle introvert with a bad case of wanderlust. And felt an ache swell in my chest, realising in a flash that I’d put my eggs in his basket without understanding who he really was, and how could I have let that happen? I got off the bus and went home alone, deflated. We recovered, but I slowly started to retrieve my eggs, one by one, keeping them safe in my own house again because I didn’t trust him with them anymore.

Some Humpty-Dumpty metaphor. 

That time he broke it off via text message while we were trying to work it out, sending me a missive while I was standing in a train station buying wine for a weekend away. I couldn’t even engage with what he was saying, blinded by the indignity of being dumped by text: “I am ending this because you no longer put our relationship first.” Or something like that; I’m not sure what it said exactly because I deleted it, too surreal a message to exist in the world.

What I remember is that I laughed, then shook, and then I raged at the absurdity, the humiliation of being dumped in the manner of my mobile operator informing me I’ve exceeded my monthly data allowance. When I got back there was a wall of ice between us, which melted as he came knocking on my door late at night. We spent three days in bed, in a time capsule, but it didn’t last.

The fact that I felt relief when it finally ended. Too many repetitions of the same arguments. I’d stare at him in disbelief, across the pub table or across the stream of text messages, wondering how it was possible to have been with someone for so long and have it end in such confusion. How black and white it felt, everything he said. How he refused to allow for the fact that things could change. How I was probably equally frustrating to talk to for him but I can’t see it, because when you are breaking up, you no longer are who you are.

That I’m realising you never quite finish with someone you used to love, not really. My ex and I still possess pieces of each other, even as he lives on the other side of the city where he calls another woman girlfriend and I have someone else who answers to boyfriend. See it didn’t take long; I told you the breakdown was a relief.

The worst thing about this is realising how wrong I was about him. How it took me so long to get to really know him, blind to reality at an age when I really should know better. How it makes me look at my new boyfriend with a twinge of skepticism, wondering what’s lurking under the surface, as I’ve always thought myself to be a good judge of character but maybe not. I don’t often wish things were different, but I’d give a lot not to feel this way as my new boyfriend deserves better.

That I regret nothing about my ex. Not getting into it in the first place, nor any of the things that caused it to end because when it was good, it was fantastic. And when it started to break down, it felt natural. I can never admit this to him though, because it’s cruel. But I know what it feels like to be so broken up about a relationship that you can hardly breathe, and this isn’t it. All I know is that I toss my phone across the table in frustration at yet another text message where he completely misses the point. But even as I do, I know it was all worth it.

Jessica Furseth is the senior contributor to This Recording. You can find her website here and she tumbls here and twitters here.

Photographs by the author.

In Which We Try Not To Be Suspicious

Over and Over

by JESSICA FURSETH

A while back, for about a year, I lived in a flat with a classic roll-top bathtub. It’s one of those features that looks classy when you see the place for the first time: claw-shaped feet, separate chrome taps for hot and cold. Then, after moving day, you go to take the first shower in your new place and you realise you’ve made a terrible mistake: you can’t stand up to wash, but must lie down, like a child, as the shower head doesn’t attach to the wall. It’s simply sitting there, draped across the taps, and you’ll have to hold it over your head yourself. So for the next year that was what I did: I held the shower head in one hand while attempting to get the soap out of my hair with the other, as the frustration built.

It’s been ten years since I lived in that flat, in London’s Camberwell. I’ve had fully functioning stand-up showers in every place I’ve lived in since - I made sure of that because I know now: a good shower is a small but powerful pleasure. I probably haven't thought about the Camberwell bath humiliation every time I’ve had a shower in the past decade, but it’s close. I can confidently say that I think of it at least a couple times a week. If I’m in a hotel, or somewhere else with a particularly good shower, I will wax lyrical about it afterwards, to anyone who will listen and even if they won’t. Because I once had a bad shower year, I’ll tell them, back when I lived in Camberwell. It was around 2006. It was rough! I had very long hair, you see. I remember it well.

Ten years is a long time to think about a bad shower. But I’ve appreciated the hell out of a good wash ever since, so maybe it was worth it? My partner has dubbed this the Camberwell Effect: when a negative experience boosts future appreciation. I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently, after having been sick for three weeks. In the grand scheme of illness it wasn’t that bad, granted, but in the depth of it I was still your garden variety miserable: too sick to leave the house or do any work, and unable to wrap my foggy brain around complex thought. All I knew was that I was profoundly uncomfortable. Until one day, after three weeks in bed, I felt up to going outside again. It felt like a miracle. I walked along the canal for a bit before sitting down to watch the ducks, in complete and utter wonder at being able to this without feeling exhausted and dizzy and seconds from falling over. How long would this feeling last?

It’s been about a month since this charmed trip down to the canal, and I can report that the post-illness Camberwell Effect lasted about three weeks. Or maybe it’s still going? It’s more subtle now, but I think it’s still here. I text my mother some photos last week, with the caption: "Greetings from sunny New York City! When you’re feeling well, all is well." And then: “Is this the sort of thing you say when you’re getting old?!” I thought about this for the rest of the evening - it was the middle of the night in Europe so my question went unanswered for a while. Getting older is a rude awakening when it comes to health - laptop shoulders are real. So maybe the absence of illness, or a really good shower, will become an increasingly reliable trigger for happiness?

My mother, responding in the morning, concurred with my analysis, although I would tell she took the whole thing with a pinch of salt - she does that when I get overly philosophical. And in fairness, New York will certainly thrill even the most jaded of visitors: you don’t need to be freshly bedridden to find a million things to love. But the Camberwell Effect would probably have flourished even if I’d stayed in London, wandering up and down the same old streets. Anything is better than being stuck in my house, bored by Netflix and frustrated by my body’s failure to snap to, in a way only a person historically blessed with good health can be.

These are a few of my favourite things: the first coffee of the morning. Reading great non-fiction in bed. My best friend of 16 years; how our lives are in a striking moment of synchronicity right now. Walking along the canal by my flat. Pho on Kingsland Road. Texting with my best mate; he's back after we almost ruined it by hooking up but now it’s the way it was always supposed to be. Cocktails with rum. Soda water that fizzes against the roof of the mouth. Working on something I really enjoy; that feeling like it’s going right. Sunshine in the city. The lush, damp feeling of London in the summer. A man who knows exactly what to do. A really great shower. To be well enough to be in the world. 

They say that if you start listing nice things every day, soon you’ll find yourself looking for those things and it will change how you see the world. It’s certainly possible to train yourself to be appreciative of a full decade of good showers. Not that I remember most of them - with a few exceptions, they've blurred into sameness. The same goes for that first cup of coffee in the morning, sipped in silence as it wakes me up, bringing with it the promise of the day. It is a perfect pleasure, in part because it’s so very simple. I didn’t even have to do anything to feel like this - there’s no Camberwell Effect at work here. There are certainly things I love just as much as this early morning caffeine jolt to the system, but nothing that’s quite so lovely in its uncomplicated nature. Maybe that’s just caffeine addiction for you, but it’s good nonetheless and I try not to be suspicious of good things.

Back in London, I was walking along the road the other night, the weekend was just starting and my hair has been on excellent run lately. It was still wet, fresh from yet another hands-free shower, but it wouldn't take long in the warm evening. Then “The Jean Genie” came on in my earbuds, and I emptied my coffee as I felt my pace quicken. It was a perfect moment: I was alone, about to see someone I love. It wouldn’t last long, but it happens all the time, over and over.

Jessica Furseth is the senior contributor to This Recording. She last wrote in these pages about the little daylight. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. You can find her twitter here and her website here. She tumbls here.

Photographs by the author.