What Even Is Harmony

Step follows step. People don’t tell you that. It’s hinted at, take it slow, take your time. Do the basics. I was still walking months after my time at the hospital.1 The nurses had all spoken about exercise. There were casual remarks about their own work-outs, early in the morning or after they’d finished work, quietly encouraging the patients to confide in each other their exercise plans. Mine was always walking. Slightly out of breath walking, restrained down a hill, just pushing my capacity on the way up the hill. I couldn’t imagine bagging myself up in loose clothing for a gym—cotton materials as I wasn’t the body type to host the tight fitting polyesters—nor finding room in a busy schedule to get a hard forty minute work out in between leaving the office and cooking dinner for the boyfriend I was wondering about marriage with. None of that was my life. It would never be my life but an afternoon when it was unlikely to continue raining could be filled with an hour and a quarter of walking to the garden allotments to inspect what it was possible to grow.

It had taken almost ten days to get my sleep back in order. Ten days before I woke before 11am again. Ten days where waking came at 3pm, then going to bed at 7am. Then waking at 2am. Then having no idea what the correct course of action was to fit myself into a daylight routine.2

I knew challenges would come. It was to be expected. It was about time. It was over three months since I’d finished up with the hospital which is just long enough to allow things to slowly unravel again. My mess was a pleasant mess, though. My mind could be tangled on an upset day but it wasn’t disordered.3 Waking and sleeping, eating and cleaning, thinking and allowing myself the freedom to distract myself from thinking were all elements of my managed rotational-living days. Days I was still somewhat capable of putting order to, or at least eventually stumbling towards order.

Step follows step, and it’s amazing how each builds up to another. The hill I was on was difficult. It twisted every so often, just enough that the scenery would change from a lookout over a field towards the city, to a row of houses that somehow had their back gardens built up against the footpath, to a concrete clearing that a hundred years ago may have been a crossroads. Each step lead onto the next but the hill put paid to a rhythm to each. There was no slow rolling of foot from limb from hip socket. Instead it was the solid planting of a foot a few inches higher in front of me.4 It was making me out of breath. It was taking me to a plateau between abandoned housing estates where the owner of the allotments didn’t sell out for what would eventually be failed building plans. Instead they converted some of their wild grass land into little patches, a few metres long, a few feet across, where people could tend to the small things that gave them some occupation in life.

I’d made it up the hill. Despite waking once at 3am, again at eight, and already being tired when I’d set out I had managed to find the renewed energy I’d sought. I might sleep that night. I hoped my struggle up the hill—panting in the autumnal sun reflected and strengthened by never ending concrete—and the free footed descent back down would bring me back to the routine of day and night, night of sleep, day of looking forward to newfound purpose.

My clothes clung to me and my arms had a sheen from sweat. I wiped them with the fleece jacket I had taken off with my own building heat. I had never been up to this part of the city on my own before. I’d passed it on the bus on the three weeks I’d given myself over to a web design course, so many years ago.5 It looked different to how it did from the front window seat. Up high on the double decker the view saw me looking on plots arranged seven or eight in a row, two deep and then a third offset from a footpath. Now all I could see was it was barricaded off. The entrance was open but it hid what lay behind with eight foot high peach-painted masonry stretching from each pillar. I stood before the drive, tired and beaten.

I felt I needed to cool down despite the hostile looking barrier between me and my goal.6 I leaned against the brick wall, tall and imposing, that divided the line between a patient world of growth and the busy world where cars flung themselves around a bend presumed to be empty because no fool would climb this hill when there was a bus every fifteen minutes.

I did want to catch my breath but standing next to what may as well have been ramparts—such was their protection of what lay beyond—I imagined those driving past, catching glimpses of me standing on a long-since tarmacked, mostly now gravelled driveway thought I was a beacon of the wrong sort, up to the wrong thing. That I was the kind to creep into the garden centre and steal all the work tools I could carry.

I knew I looked dishevelled from my trek but I’m not sure why that feeling bedded into me. I’m not sure why I didn’t challenge the idea that I was anything but valid. It was only exercise. A trip to somewhere I hadn’t been to before, all the while working out, finding health, doing what everyone told me I needed to do, but still the idea I was in the wrong stuck to me. It may have been the looseness of weak limbs from the ascent, desperate for rest in a hideaway from a fast moving world that stopped me from putting paids to the notion that I was out of place. That it was my own mind convincing me that with no allotment of my own I’d be seen as trespassing.

I moved on from my perch after only twenty seconds of a rest. I needed to be out of the view of an active, working society even if catching the looks of those tending to the allotments would be a new inspection I wasn’t ready for. I took peace in the few seconds away with myself as I travelled between the searing tyres of those travelling with purpose on the road, gawking at me, and the smaller setting of a place on its own with small stalks reaching to.

I was still sweating as I walked into the centre. I made sure to carry my head high to appear as though I belonged.

It wasn’t shock that greeted me, more the dawning of realisation. No-one was there. There were no sights of lush vegetation to tease me towards a future of green fingers. There wasn’t even an isolated figure turning his beds to prepare for the next planting season. I should have realised nothing would be growing at this time in the late autumn.

I had walked, I had strained, I had lost control of any hold on a steady in-out breath and all I had found was a rocky abandonment with me out-of-place in an out-of-time weed-filled earth-holding.

This was the raw material. This was the baseline I would be greeted with on a cold January morning should I start the gardening course. This was potential but I couldn’t see it. I only saw the falling of my own enthusiasm having brought me there and my own lack of thinking stopping me from considering for half a moment there would be nothing to see.

I looked for somewhere to sit. Surely there would be a place to relax and admire your work if you toiled daily through the spring and summer to grow your few plants. To allow ease to slowly return to your muscles after digging, weeding, spraying and pruning. A place to watch the bees, butterflies and ladybirds in the summer merrily dancing their way between your harvest. There were no benches anywhere. There were a few bins. I walked to one. It was still damp from the morning’s rain. I hesitated from resting against it but knew in that hesitation I would never hold out such was my weariness. I leaned my arse back against the green moulded plastic and felt the droplets of water seep through my jeans and cling my underwear against me.

It felt off straight away, the trapping of denim and cotton against me. I gave into it. I settled further back until I felt the green plastic give with my weight and collapse a little beneath me. I jumped to my feet as I felt it give even more with a shudder.

I walked towards the nearest plot and hunkered down to look at the earth. It was no different to any I’d seen before. It hadn’t taken on some atypical form being that it was specifically designed for vegetables and flowers. There were rocks interleaved in it. It was fibrous, a little. It had the odd few twigs and every so often a small weed grew from it. I pushed my index finger into the soil. It, at the least, didn’t appear like mud. It didn’t have the look of ground that would cling like despair to your body. It bounced beneath my touch. It was ready to give life. I wasn’t.

I wasn’t ready for early mornings doing only enough to fill my day. I wasn’t ready for almost a year of routine where I’d spend my time doing something I didn’t really care for. Gardening would be fine if it was help. Help for me to achieve what I’d never achieved before, a purpose, or help for another whose purpose was gardening. It would be neither for me. It would be filling statistics on some form, in a file, in a cabinet somewhere saying someone with a disability had made something of their days.7 The course wasn’t anything to fill my days because it didn’t fill me with joy. All it did was remind me how sweaty I was and how uncomfortable that was. Hoping against hope that my efforts would balance out in the end against a sickly, sure-to-be-coming bout of psychosis.8 I had to give my days over to finding what would see me through madness should it come again again.

I poked the earth a second time. I could maybe talk to Maurice about helping him in his allotment but this wasn’t my life. It wasn’t even the potential of my life. It was busywork. A distraction from seeking my own land.

I poked the earth a third time, this time with all four fingers and cursed all my ambitions. Earth slid beneath my nails. It was a total, complete failing that I had gotten worked up with such dreams.9 All it had taken to fill my mind with imaginings of a better world, not my own, was the possibility of appearing average and fulfilled. It was no matter to me, in those moments, that I wouldn’t be fulfilled. It didn’t occur to me that all I was seeking was some way to say I was fruitful. It would be better to occupy myself with something I could truly hold dear than it was to grasp on whatever lifeline was casually thrown at me. I needed to be myself, for myself, as that was the only thing that would see me through the worst of who I was. This wasn’t me. This was the one option given to me. I decided I would seek another choice. I would make my own choice.

I stood wiping the earth from my fingers. I didn’t wipe my hand on my jeans because that would give the impression I was working there, doing something I had no intention of doing. Not any more.

I walked out towards the gate and stopped to look back over the centre. There was no benches, nowhere to sit. It wasn’t somewhere to relax and give into a life instead it was a place where those who needed controlled growth gave over to the small parts of living that flowered with their hand. A nurtured living fully their own. I had to nurture myself and the only way of doing so was first realising what wasn’t for me. A year of labour for a life I couldn’t see myself with was only a temporary hold on the failings I couldn’t address. This land, for me, wasn’t about finding my way it was about taking the opportunity to impose my way on the few square metres of raw earth I worked over, that I could make my own. It was a sign for what I wanted in life, a metaphor. For others it was more, for me it was only a symbol. For them it was powerful. I’d had enough of false signs.

I began to walk down the hill, still out of breath, still beading with sweat, and considered what there was in my life I could bring to the fore.

There was nothing but that didn’t mean I would never find it. I had to search it out as each step landed before me. I carried myself down the hill and accepted I had sought and found. It was an absence I found but that nothing confirmed to me it wasn’t something that couldn’t be filled. I just had to keep going.

My feet pounded beneath me. I felt a sharp smack with every fully planted step on the hard concrete path. The soles on my shoe connected harshly and firmly with the sheer falling of my walk. My legs felt each slapped impact run up my calves and into my knees and with those steps I felt the slackening of my hips, at odds with the tightness of my sore muscles, as I careened down the hill. I was loosening my grip on the day, having decided I’d found its meaning, and I needed to catch onto some physical purpose to embed into my understanding of self. I was tired of the day. I didn’t need to walk, I’d walked enough.10

There was a bus stop a few hundred feet ahead. I would wait and my only regret was that the bus wouldn’t take me to my front door. I had exercised and found a realisation but it wasn’t the one I was aiming for.

I took my bus pass out as I approached the tall metal pole the bus would eventually come to. I wanted to know what my life was for, what I was for, but today I knew what I wasn’t for. All that was easy. That was the simplest achievement in life to know what you aren’t.

The bus pulled up and I stepped on. As my pass scanned into the reader the bus driver nodded and I said, “Thanks.”

The bus was busy, when, normally, at this time, it should be at most a fifth filled. I took the last free double-seat and sat anticipating the tiredness that would greet me as I hit the city centre and began the self directed part of my journey home. The bus continued along its twisting route to the town centre and I held back tears. They felt of sadness but I told myself it was for having made a decision.11 I had dug out a part of my soul, one that had given me purpose for just about two weeks, but my now-knowledge would be better in the long run. I looked up towards the screen plotting the stops along the way and thought on how each held a lifetime of people behind them. My lifetime was irrelevant to all but me, and maybe my family. They would be gone, at some point. I would be gone too. I couldn’t waste what little I had with empty desire, with emptiness on courses half-heartedly filling the void inside me entirely my own.

The bus shuddered to a stop and a man carrying a shopping bag, torn apart, and who had headphones hanging around his neck twitched his way up to the driver. He scratched at his nose, over and over. The bus driver handed him back his pass and he took a step towards the rear of the bus, stopped, and pivoted back towards the front.

The bus heaved away and he rocked on his feet as the driver ignored him.

The bus seemed to drive faster, wilder, as the away-with-it man fell back and forth, pitching, grabbing onto the handrails. His neck craned around, him muttering to himself, as he came down the walkway and I watched as every passengers’ gaze turned away. He could have been me. His craziness was there for all to see while mine was hidden away. I had travelled to an organised field of mud and no-one knew.

He walked closer and closer to me. At first I thought him a large man but as he approached I realised he just carried a lot. His jacket was puffy and ripped. His shopping bag was hard edged with solid items within it, bulging where it wasn’t broken apart and worn everywhere else. I didn’t want him to sit next to me. I wanted him to have his own world. That wasn’t my choice and it wasn’t a freedom he could choose.

He sat on the seat opposite me and immediately tried to strike up conversation with the teen sitting next to him. She laughed, timidly. I interrupted him. “How are you?” He looked pleased. We talked. He was smarter than he appeared, strained in some ways, not least in appearance but he had insight, at least a loose insight. The teen remained staring out the window, ignoring the mad people.

We, the mad people, chatted all the way to our destination. As I occupied him, as I kept his sanity to the fore on our winding journey, I caught the occasional stare of people looking with their disapproval completely unhidden. Their thanks we weren’t them plain to see.

Index - Moment 7