are you sitting comfortably? on stillness and feeling at home

i’ve lived in my current flat for almost a year and a half now. it’s small, and has dark wood floors. most of the chairs inside are red, the colour of soft clay. a few tall trees hover just outside the windows. at the moment their leaves are yellow. i watch squirrels stealing small pieces of twig every day, but i don’t know where they take them. i’ve seen a jay twice, recently. the other day it stared right at me as i took a picture, and then we sat and watched each other for minute or so. i had a fresh coffee in my hand and i couldn’t hear a single noise, despite being in the middle of london. then a train rumbled past and the bird flew out of sight.

when we first moved into this flat, my boyfriend and i kept asking each other to describe it in three words. we were happy. we wanted to relish in it, to feel the words indicative of that happiness on our tongues, like savoured food. the word ‘cosy’ came up frequently in those lists of three. my boyfriend often said that our flat felt like a log cabin, the sort you get on alpine mountainsides, warmed by fire as the snow piles up like shredded paper outside, melting against the windows. 

soon it was autumn, then winter, and we were decorating for christmas—stringing up dried cranberries and tinsel and buying a miniature tree from a plant shop down the road. it came housed in a small, red pot. on our way home, the pot tucked under my boyfriend’s arm, a group of girls called out to ask where we got it from. we hosted a party for our friends, and the accumulation of their warm, happy breath and the mulled wine vapour set off our carbon monoxide alarm.

after a while, the glow of our new flat started to wear off. the bed broke, a few lights stopped working. we found mould on some of our coats. it was cold in the winter and felt too small, sometimes, the coziness morphing into something that felt more claustrophobic. we lightly remedied most of these things, but didn’t invest too much into the flat, because we decided to move instead. there didn’t seem much point in spending money on something we’d be leaving behind soon enough. 

it was around this point, after christmas, that we also happened to have fallen into a  harder patch of time. it might have just coincided with late winter—that cold, empty sunlight of january and february that pools on the floor like varnish, but slips away by early afternoon. it might have been the stress of work, or illness. there were a few hard things in our life at that point. but the hardness stuck around beyond february, and we kept displacing these feelings onto our flat.

if we moved out of london, we’d be fine, we said. that would fix everything. we’d have more space, more time, more freedom. we could live by the sea, in a town where we knew no one, and no one knew us. we could move hours across the country, to a place with huge expanses of air and soil and freshness. across an ocean, maybe. somewhere we could sip cool drinks in the heat of 3pm sunshine and skip down to a dark blue sea after work, to swim in the glitter of dusk.

but we didn’t move, in the end. we were too fidgety to move, too unsure of where we wanted to go. really, it was because we just wanted things to be simpler. we were unsettled by larger forces, and assumed that meant we should unsettle ourselves geographically, too. that the novelty would soothe us, or at the very least provide a distraction. 

then, a few months ago, we decided to buy a new bed. the broken frame was ruining our backs, and it was starting to feel ridiculous that we’d kept it for as long as we had. 

when we built the bed, we also rearranged our bedroom. we strung up lights on the ceiling that looked like clusters of tiny stars. we hung the posters and paintings we’d been collecting from concerts and charity shops but neglecting, leaving them leant up against the wall in their plastic wrappings. we moved around furniture, heaving chests of drawers across the floor, pushing with our knees. from there, we started pouring care and joy back into the other rooms of our flat, too. we stuck photos of family and friends on the walls, found magnets for the fridge, lodged a plant in the corner near the window. we actually watered our plants, which have been growing steadily ever since. (who knew?). 

in the last few months, a certain slow contentedness has crept over us again. covered us slowly, like a blanket thawing cold, stiff limbs. we’re happy again, here in this flat. we don’t want to move anymore. we’ve settled into the rhythms of where we live—the dark wood floors, the red brick building. the familiar network of london pavements that surrounds it, currently slick with wet, yellow leaves.

we go for long walks every day, through a small patch of woodland near our building. it’s full of rare trees that seem to transform as quickly as ice into water. we drift around the shops. we take it in turns to go out and buy each other apple muffins and hot sausage rolls, each telling the other to bring back a surprise despite knowing exactly what we want, and that the other person will know this too. we drink hot, deliberate mugs of tea, and cook slow, colourful food every night. we watch good films and go to bed a little earlier than we used to, enjoying the hush only occasionally cut through by orange lamps and the sound of our neighbour’s footsteps upstairs. it feels like a log cabin again. it feels like a pocket of stillness in a world that, after all, will always be trying to shake us. ‘the world is bound to shake’, as elizabeth bishop said in the sandpiper. i think i understand that poem better, now.

really, and i suppose what i’m trying to say here, is that the only thing that’s changed is us. our flat is largely the same—the red chairs, the slants of thick morning light that ripple across the walls. but we’ve rooted our own feet. we’ve allowed ourselves to invest in our own surroundings, to care more about smaller things, about ourselves. we’ve learnt to enjoy the present, rather than keeping our eyes constantly turned to the horizon. you end up living half a life, that way. 

so, we’ve settled back into our flat. but alongside it, i suppose we’ve also settled back into ourselves. i’ve remembered i like to write, and watch films, and play piano, and now i’m getting better at letting myself do those things without the constant gnawing sense that i should be doing something else. i’ve remembered that a weekend without plans is neither terrifying nor extraordinary, and in fact, really shouldn’t be either. that life, too, doesn’t have to be either. it can settle itself somewhere between these two extremes—into the steady rhythms of the everyday, the sustaining contentedness you find when you let yourself (and your mind) slow down for a while.

as i write this, it’s dark outside. i sit in one of our red chairs. it’s an armchair. it belonged to our landlord’s great aunt—something that i used to find grating, as i had a chair of my own i would have rather placed in this spot—but i like it now. it feels comforting, in some way, to have moulded our lives around the lives of other people—to be able to stretch a hand back into the past and make myself feel smaller. 

through the window, i can see our neighbours lit up in their own windows. the glass glowing different colours—red, yellow, blue. i see a big family sat around their kitchen table, an older woman leant over something on a stove. a young couple watching something on television, the pale blue light rippling across the walls of their room. i don’t stare, but i let the comforting rhythms of their separate lives smooth over the cracks of my own. i don’t try and detach myself, anymore. i don’t pull myself out of this flat, this city, my own head. i sink into them all, sitting comfortably. keeping still.