Adults. Emma Jane Unsworth

the comment I start to worry. It’s like I forget this stage of the process; like I set myself up for it. She might not reply. She hasn’t in the past. So why does that boil down to a failing on my part? I have to ask myself that, because it does. I didn’t use to have this – this innate distrust of myself. I feel like I have lost my pace. It’s like everything has been speeding up and up and up and I reached my own terminal velocity. I thought my twenties felt like rush hour, but no. My twenties were just pleasantly hectic. The thirties are the real rush hour.

      She replies, three minutes later.

       Miss you Mac

      Well now follow me back and you wouldn’t have to, is what I want to say. Then you could see me regularly. It is within your grasp! But I don’t have the gall.

      I don’t know when all this started feeling like …

      Like …

      I see a picture Mia has posted of her dog.

      I decide to have a think about whether to like it. A like is never just a like.

      My phone beeps. I look.

      It’s a text.

      From my mother.

      I am supposed to pick 12 women who have touched my life and whom I think might participate. I think that if this group of women were ever to be in a room together there is nothing that wouldn’t be impossible. I hope I chose the right 12. May my hugs, love, gestures, and communications remind you how special you are. Please send this back to me. Make a wish before you read the quotation. That’s all you have to do. There is nothing attached. Just send this to 12 women and let me know what happens on the fourth day. Did you make your wish yet? If you don’t make a wish, it won’t come true. This is your last chance to make a wish! Quotation: ‘May today there be peace within. May you trust that you are exactly where you are meant to be. May you not forget the infinite possibilities that are born of faith in yourself and others. May you use the gifts that you have received, and pass on the love that has been given to you. May you be content with yourself just the way you are. Let this knowledge settle into your bones, and allow your soul the freedom to sing, dance, praise and love. It is there for each and every one of us.’ Now, send this to 12 women (or more) (you can copy & paste) within the next 5 minutes. In addition, remember to send back to me. I count as one. You’ll see why xxxxxx

      I instantly feel harassed. I stare at the text for a moment. As I’m staring, another text from her arrives.

      How r u? xx

      It doesn’t feel right that someone older than me abbreviates more than I do, but this is the way it is. She texts me approximately once a week. When I ignore her, she turns up in my dreams. The other night she was in the doorway of my room, wearing a pair of wings – fine-boned and iridescent, like a dragonfly’s. They glistened in the moonlight. When she turns up like that I have to remind myself that the visions are only my version of her – the real her is three hundred miles away.

      I close my eyes and see it. That house. Mock Tudor. Mock everything. Our street was adjacent to a big-dog housing estate and the kids would come and chuck crab apples at the garage doors. I’d look down from my turret bedroom window, feeling quite the oppressed royal. Someone wrote ‘WITCH’ in chalk on the wall and my mother looked at it proudly while I burned. Thousands of years ago, witches were respected as healers, she said. They were wise women in the community.

      And then we got doctors, I said.

      Did we, though, she said, did we ever really ‘get’ doctors like we got witches? What I’m talking about is a gift, not a career choice.

      In the garden there was a huge laburnum tree where caterpillars grew in the buds and dangled down on invisible threads in late spring. She liked bright plants. Pinks and yellows, for good energy, to ward off evil spirits. Lupins, azaleas, bleeding hearts. She dug up the pampas grass after I told her it was code for swingers. In the middle of the front lawn there was a monkey puzzle tree, its base beaded with grey stones, Japanese-style, after something she saw in a magazine. Other things: the crack-spangled patio, the planters polka-dotted with moss, the eternally unoccupied bird box. I’ve been back a handful of times. Birthdays. Christmases. Odd times off the slingshot of another failed love affair.

       A WOMB OF ONE’S OWN

      I lived in Stepney Green, Kentish Town, Streatham. I saved like Scrooge. I wrote for fourteen hours a day. I was in some kind of rocket mode, blazing a way, trying to escape an old atmosphere. I walked home down the worst of roads in a knitted hat, trying to look mad (un-rapeable), with my Yale key between my first two fingers. I had a contact – one, from a kindly teacher at school. I followed up on it. A trade magazine for a supermarket. It was a start. I ate a lot of sautéed vegetables. I had love affairs with men whose guitars were as badly strung as their sentences. Oh, to be fearless in terrible shoes again, oh so fearless and able to tolerate the cheapest of drinks and the cheapest of shoes. Outlet pleather and bad designs but all that time ahead, all that time, to wear terrible shoe after terrible shoe and wake up on another floorboarded, guitar-lined attic room with a leisurely hangover and all the hope in my heart. I’d leave before they woke, leaving a calligraphic note, and I’d go home and close my own door and feel joy when I saw the pictures I’d hung on my walls. The chairs I’d arranged. The carpets I’d chosen. The paint I’d painted. I started to feel what could be a kind of love of creating my own space. A love that could be nurturing and proud, as well as utterly romantic. A love that felt accessible and, if not quite democratic, then self-made. Empowering. All mine. To share with people I might have round, in varying contexts. I was romancing myself. I was also looking after myself. This was progress.

      The first day of my first job, I texted my mother to tell her. She replied:

      Good luck xxx

      Good luck! Have you ever read a less motherly text? Good luck!

      I thought about her at least once every three minutes. I scratched my scalp and sniffed it; it smelled of her. I’d come into my flat and feel her energy there, latent somehow, in a place she’d never been. I missed the North: its winds and mosses; its cool, thirsty cities. I’d look at the weather reports for Manchester and feel glad when the weather was good. I had it as a location to slide past on my weather app. My little darling, I’m glad you have clear skies tonight, I’d think. I sang ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’ so loudly on the Tube once, drunk, that someone gave me a pound. I thought about our old living room, telly and lamp on; a cube of light in the vastness of space. I was an astronaut out on the arm of the mothership, umbilicus stretching, stretching, stretching.

       THERAPY SESSION #1 (DRAMATIC MONOLOGUE)

      Hi, yes, here? Okay. This is a nice office. Plain, but I suppose that’s so I focus on the task in hand, which is no mean feat! What do I think that is? Sorting out my mental state haha. I should probably do more exercise. That would probably make a big difference. I noticed you had a kayak strapped to the top of your car outside, do you like to kayak, or do you have children? [Pause] Oh, I see, well I was just making conversation, I ramble when I’m nervous, I suppose that’s music to your ears. It’s like I can’t stand silence and that’s possibly because my mother was loud at home and when there was silence it meant there was a problem. [Pause] No, I’ve never had therapy before – does it show? I hate sounding like an amateur. Do you know how long it took me to choose what to wear today? Days. Literally. I was thinking about what might make you like me the most and I settled on something plain but with a few flourishes and I’m glad because I see now that’s very much your vibe. I’m not judging you, I barely know you. I know this is meant to be a socially pure zone but I don’t believe in any space you can hurl things into without consequences – that’s just me. Everything has consequences, doesn’t it? Every act of communication