In a lockdown, the past becomes whatever you want it to be. What do you remember. Sat on a longboat south of Birmingham, I drink coffee while the girls drink juice. They are wearing lifejackets and I am in jeans and a shirt that are tight because I have been gaining weight for the Spring. I can't stop eating. Outside of the picture, somewhere, are Yoko and her father. Yoko spent the night in a B&B and I slept miserably, hot and claustrophobic on a narrow bench, six inches separating me and my father-in-law all night, while the three girls slept in the back of the boat. I kept worrying something would happen, the boat would sink, that my father-in-law would need something or do something, and the night went on and on. I can make a list of three or four moments from the trip, looking at the pictures. I don't remember the rest of it.
The days come and go and I wake up every morning with a brief moment of forgetfulness. What had been dreams and what had been real. I dream now, every night, that Yoko is somewhere else, and I am back in high school or at work or in Japan. My watch buzzes me awake and then it is all there again. Yoko is sleeping next to me, the grey light is coming through a crack between the curtains that we never manage to close completely. It's still lockdown. We still don't know when it will end. We don't know what the end will look like.
The girls wanted to watch home videos and there was one of us in Torremolinos, in Spain watching the sunrise, before Mia was born. I'm on the edge of the video, once sitting in a swing looking out and once, holding Mei in the distance. Yoko and the girls are playing and I am watching quietly, unhappy, aren't I. Or another video of us driving through America in 2012 for my sister's wedding, and as the shot pans to the back, to the girls full of excitement and energy, you can see me and hear my music playing. I'm listening to No Knife, and I am trying, I realise now, to recapture something of being young, of driving all day or night to some show and yet, here I am in this situation, with three kids and my wife, my PhD mostly done in England with no clear future ahead of me and no way back to the past. I chose to listen to all these emo bands, like I was articulating some seventeen-year-old's feeling, even though I was 30. I can't tell what I was thinking — I was trying not to think anything.
The girls bubble and live on — it's a kind of grace. The sun too is a kind of grace, the warm weather which last year was a sign of global warming, of the climate crisis, seemingly put on hold while something else burns metaphorically for a while. I am unhappy now, I can say that without worrying about the consequences. I can tell you why and can even tell you about the past, all the things I've wanted over the years that never happened, how on that longboat trip I had thought Yoko and I might have a night together away from the kids with nothing on our minds but each other. Of course, that was a ridiculous thought, it was never going to happen, but I had it anyway, I still wanted it. I still felt I wanted it.
When you can name something, when you can say what it is, you gain power over it. I write endlessly, for years and years I have been, about how words give structure to feelings and experience. How categories, how naming things creates and solves problems. You pull out the map you've drawn and point to a place: it's here, but here is still just your drawing, some impression of some place that never will be real. Another day ticks by, so what if you can articulate your feelings.
When you can name something, when you can say what it is, you gain power over it. I write endlessly, for years and years I have been, about how words give structure to feelings and experience. How categories, how naming things creates and solves problems. You pull out the map you've drawn and point to a place: it's here, but here is still just your drawing, some impression of some place that never will be real. Another day ticks by, so what if you can articulate your feelings.