5 Jan

Somewhere Else

‘There are gaps in the mesh of the everyday world, and sometimes they open up and you fall through them into Somewhere Else. Somewhere Else runs at a different pace to the here and now, where everyone else carries on. Somewhere Else is where ghosts live…’

Katherine May, Wintering (Penguin, 2020), 8.

Somewhere Else. Like Wonderland, or the Wild Roads in the Kingdom of the Fae. We all entered Somewhere Else in 2020. For some it was terrible and terrifying. For others it was an odd displacement of our well known known stress and anxiety by something else. A distant disharmony, the sense of wrongness in the air but not directly in front of us. For me, Somewhere Else in Spring 2020 was a land of incredible blossoms, blue skies, and an open golf course where children made sandcastles in the bunkers and I sat on a hilltop green swinging my legs over the edge. It was writing again, for the first time since starting to travel and teach two years before, at a newly acquired wooden garden table in a patch of sun with coffee and colleagues on the laptop. In the evening I stood outside under the row of beech trees that border our street, looking up at the fading sky as the first stars appeared, and prayed a silent prayer that I would never again leave home for a job in another city. Somewhere Else made these thoughts, dragging us all out of the accepted life as usual into a threshold between possibles. If the world could be upended so completely in a matter of weeks, then no assumptions really held true. Our where could potentially be Anywhere.

Five years later, I wonder if I want to return to Somewhere Else. From the malleability of time and possibilities during Covid everything now feels fixed again, a certain permanence has reemerged and is pinning us down. Routines, schedules, expectations, commitments. In the darkness of this midwinter I retreated from many of these norms and found myself waiting again in that liminal place between one year and the next. A hush and a holding of breath to see if anyone would notice if I slipped away. Long unrushed walks. Gentleness. Candles lit to ward off the cold outside. The possible reemerged offering itself, if I would make space for it. My Christmas reread is The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern. I am Zachary Ezra Rawlins finding his way through the January snow until he falls into a library below ground where stories lie upon stories lie upon stories waiting for him to unravel them. Books are a Somewhere Else. People can be too. Landscapes, art, music, movement. Covid forced us into a different way of life, but we can choose to recapture it in other ways.