Writing on Little Triumphs

I like messy things. Those are what you focus on, the zags, the thread pulls. My gran taught me how to sew and she taught me very neatly. She always dresses very neatly and has very nice scarves that match her outfit and sit in a lovely little tie around her neck. I have a few things she has made me over the years and they are wonderful and fit snug. I wasn’t a good student. Perhaps I say that as an excuse for not wanting to put in the effort to do things properly or not wanting to do them twice. Now I offer to hem people’s jeans but I hope they say no. I don’t like to do it. It’s freeing to leave edges rough. I like being a bit offputting. I can’t picture myself as a well oiled machine. I picture myself as a big tatty piece of the sticky side of velcro. Coarse and fluffy with fluctuating control over what stays stuck or comes loose. Over time I get coated in changing shells of lint. All my collected offcuts sitting on my surfaces, the dust of the things I’ve moved through sticking around to decorate me. If you look very closely you can use the lint to map some sort of through line that would make an impression of where I’ve been. A mixed thing, a congealing at my velcro’s rough edge. I meet other rough edges with bright eyes. Then we are both two wrong jigsaw pieces shoved together. There is loudness in that frayed clicking. A meeting of messies, everything on show, bundles of things, wets and drys, everything too much, all clashing. Something that doesn’t immediately invite you to be its pair, so you get to decide which loose threads to brush up against. I like the oddness of seeing the bundles that make up each thing. You meet these layers unorganised. Not like peeling an onion, more like seeds coming out slowly of the blind end of a pomegranate. That is messy, I like that. I like things falling out and out of order. I like finding more and more uneven parts of something and putting them together. I like meeting them with my own unneats. The best things are messy and layered and sparkly. My eye is always drawn to those ones first. Tenderness is very messy. It is my best thing to feel. Tenderness is honesty mixed with care. Tenderness is rich with fibres and isn’t sudden. It has to be worked. Worn clothing is tender. The fabric takes all your oils and your times and splits at a point of you. The original weave is clean and anxious and you stretch it out against your delicate point again and again and it relaxes. A thing shown as its parts. And some of the fibres will congeal at the edge and some of them remain as boning and it’ll all be marked with fluffy dustings. It is all the makings of something in their unedited bits. The polished bits and the worn bits losing their titles. This is tender. Tender is being a fragile thing with a fragile thing. Holding something and being held by it and both of those grips are more of a caress than a grab. Something that is so revealed that it would fall apart if you pushed it but you would never want to. Like the softness that comes when you warm something. Emollient and slow and wanting all of that. Throwing all your strings out and having them caught. Tender is having a lot of connecting strings and none of them being at full stretch. Lots of different tensions. All the sames and the differences. Seeing a thing at its all parts.

This is an essay from This is What It’s Like.Click here for more information