13 / protea, geranium, eucalyptus

Wrapping up a gift (and a marathon) of a month.

Kia ora from the final scenes of August. This month has felt so large.

At the end of last newsletter, I wrote that the material facts of my life were about to change again. In very, very short: I have turned 24 and moved back to Tāmaki Makaurau full-time. The latter happened before the former, and not, you must know, without one significant [footnoted] hiccup.¹ But in many ways all that feels like it happened years ago. I want to say for the better.

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I started to write this instalment with the intention of releasing it on the 1st of the month. It would have coincided with my move, and marked some very right-feeling new beginning, the one I can’t help associating with August in the kind of self-involved way you always feel about the month you started life in. I don’t think it’s a Leo thing—though I bet the internet astrologists could make it so.

At any rate, I was too busy trying to bookend my life elsewhere to have the newsletter finished before the 1st. The move itself managed to coincide with the mounting state of every other commitment, and, coupled with the ever-present yet intangible nature of the internet, I found the whole situation steeped in a haze of unrest, buzzing low and relentless like industrial aircon.² And then the flurry: of butterflies and responsibility; of admin; of velvet couches; of connection. Of connection. Of connection. Of connection.

There was a bevy, first, where the original newsletter calendar was. There was Starling 14, and two launches, one complete with a paragraph-long footnote drawing you into attending; there was samesame but different’s Poetry Speakeasy, and the Central City Library launch of No Other Place to Stand. There was a National Poetry Day reading/workshop at Mt. Roskill Library, which my friend and fellow poet HK organised.³ And yet as events unfolded there were all these things and more, more to the point I had to see them through without writing about them, just allowing myself to be pulled along or else surging forward, to accept rides places and to run into old friends, to rejoice in strokes of timing, not to break the flow of it all. Moving back here has been the right decision. It has drained my cup, but replenished it—and then some.

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In a rather circular turn of events, I’m back in the same apartment I left last December. Sans K, this time—though they have visited. A few weeks ago, they came bearing a huge peace lily, which now lives not far over from their old desk. I’ve repurposed the desk as a vanity. Something-something, the layers of what stays and what goes.

As you can imagine, I’ve been experiencing a lot of the superimposition that comes hand in hand with leaving somewhere and coming—unexpectedly, delightedly—back again. When the new Issue of Starling went live, I couldn’t help looking across the room, to where the dining table used to be, at which K and I discussed the very early concept of what became their Issue 14 poem. They were going to submit it elsewhere, and then, a few months on, it came to Starling. Where I kept my hands off it! I swear! Between this paragraph and the title of the poem (“It Was Midnight When T & I Finished Watching Velvet Goldmine”),⁴ it’s the closest I’ve ever—knowingly—been to something I haven’t written. K and their formal shenanigans got there on their own. Though I am, of course, glad of it.

The day before my birthday, two days before the Issue went live, K and I shuffled into a large van borrowed from their work. The van was rickety in the torrential rain, but it had good head room, and served us well between Silverdale and Titirangi and even when the rear door came completely open while we were going the wrong way uphill on a one-way CBD street. We were picking up a bench seat and a vintage green lounge suite to populate my living room. We were also picking up K’s recently-purchased chaise longue. It all worked out, despite the rain and the door issue. I remember getting cash out at the roadside service station and feeling a strange rush of autonomy—like when you get a few free hours on a school trip as a teenager.

With the limitations of interior design, my new couch is in almost the exact same spot our old one was, the one we regularly sat on the floor in front of, but occasionally sat on. We sat on it for Velvet Goldmine, K to my left, city-lit. Even though the couch is gone, there’s enough approximation for the image of the space to flicker in. It makes me wonder what other futures, or poems, or revelations, are stacked over this moment, just waiting.

There’s a poem in Short Films that I wrote when I thought I would never be in this flat again. The flat makes only a glancing feature, but it is, ostensibly, the setting, for a gathering that I thought at the time could never exist. It still won’t, of course, in the form that it does in the book. But a few twists of fate have turned an impossibility into a hypothetical, and done so with remarkable ease. All it would take now is a flight.⁵ August has been strange—and bounteous—with its deliveries.

Over the past four weeks, what with my own reading and the nature of shared work on the internet, I have encountered poem after poem about the tragedy and dissatisfaction of August—as though it occupies some place at the heavy-tongued close of a sentence, holding space in which everything goes and goes and is gone. I suppose, in the quiet moments, I can see why. You can always find solemnity if you take even a second to seek it. And August gets a lot of that from the northern hemisphere, all those writers mourning their summer seasons; but this August, to me, has felt completely the opposite of that.

This August, in Tāmaki Makaurau, perhaps owed to the intersection of postponed literary seasons, has been launching and launching and launching. It has settled in the hinges of my jaw and just above my temples, pressing outward: an insistence on happening overlarge for its container. But this insistence blooms, without fail, in company, and transforms into another creature entirely. Whatever panic it was gives way to light, and a steadfast willingness—the kind of thing that draws your heart out, in joking and marker fumes, coincidental coordination; the kind that pricks your eyes in Aotea Centre’s Limelight Room.

August has created space for the best of selves, and becoming. For enrichment and time without fear, time in which hesitation cannot exist because all this is finite, and is laying the foundations for whatever is next, and next, and next, and we will meet that; we will meet that even if we are tired and perhaps especially because we are, because we are and show up anyway. Because we want better for those we care for, and care even for those we don’t know yet. Because all we have are constraints and expansiveness, and because we continue to expand.

Things are changing, and remaining, and enfolding one-another. I hope you are doing well today.

More soon,

T

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Upcoming, in September:

• Our Own Devices: Queer Zine-Making Workshop (17 September)

• Fresh Scripts: Play-Reading (17 September)

• samesame but different: Te Whanganui-a-Tara Edition (23 September)

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P.S.:

H sent the above bouquet along as a birthday gift, from England via Snickel Lane Florist. She said—overwhelmingly, sweetly, generously—that she picked the colours based on what made her think of my poems. I’m bowled over to be indulged like that. To ever be thought of and considered, really.⁶

Grandma, when I told her, said, “You deserved your own bouquet,” which does make me think of the way these are dispensed to you. What the newsletter was, and has grown to be, and what I reach for even inadvertently. What would seem obvious—or saccharine/[rolls eyes] please get a grip—to other people. When K arrived with cupcakes on the evening of my birthday, they’d tucked a stray flower and some lavender into the box. C baked me a cake for the following weekend and covered it in edible blooms. I suppose it’s convenient that this association I’ve unintentionally cultivated is with one of the most common sources of joy in the world. I suppose, as N said last weekend, we can’t outrun ourselves.

With that said, I think I’m going to need to adjust the frequency of these bouquets. There are too many seasons cycling through within months. Too many things to whittle down in writing to you. I’d like to be in touch more, I think. More, and perhaps in briefer doses. In fewer stems? In Shorter Films. (Ha!)

What I mean to say is: when I say “more soon”, I intend to make good on that.

1. May I present what I am calling, a la Higgins, “OH, RIGHT—THE GODDAMN INTERNET”:

In the shortest terms possible: when we arrived at my apartment, the router—which I had previously purchased for said apartment, the first time I rented it (if you’re reading the footnotes as you make your way through the newsletter: yes! I moved back into the apartment I left last December!)—was missing. We went all over the city trying to source one. When we sourced one, we found that the power cable for the ONT box was missing, so I had to organise for a replacement to be shipped. When that came, the internet itself seemed not to be connected, despite an email I had received saying it was. I then received an email about another modem being mailed to me, followed by the online portal telling me I apparently hadn’t joined the company for an internet plan after all, despite having checked thrice, on top of availing of a secondary company to ensure both electricity and broadband were sorted before my move. And—and—and.

In the five days of this saga unfolding, I was also meant to be working beyond-full-time, completely remotely, for four different corporate/creative bodies. Consequently, I racked up GBs and frankly-too-many-$$$$ of additional mobile data, subsisting almost solely on lattes so to capitalise on café WiFi across the CBD, while also finishing my final pass of my book. In the telling, I suppose it sounds a bit bohemian. At the time, it was stress without end.

Ultimately, with screeds of forum screenshots in my phone and a great degree of apprehension, I returned to my apartment on the 5th. I tinkered with several largely-ambiguous settings in the Deco app, which had for the most part been absolutely no help, then almost collapsed with relief once my Twitter feed, of all things, refreshed. To put a pin in all this: thank heavens. (Also, the surplus modem—also a Deco—arrived the following week.)

2. I always discount Junes and Julys. I should never. I should never!

(I should remember the flurry of Augusts, too. Or perhaps this one is unique.)

3. Even if we cannot quite face calling ourselves poets! I suppose we are that, though. There is the whole Book element of it all. (Perhaps I’ll talk another time about the ‘poet’ thing.)

4. No surprises, after last newsletter, who the titular T is.

Side note: saying “titular T” makes me think of James Acaster’s bit about the top of the tea.

5. The same route as the YDW travelled in the footnote below.

6. My similarly generous, London-based friend K—yes, I hear you; a different K—mailed me a copy of Yrsa Daley-Ward’s The Terrible, which I have started and cannot wait to continue. It was a double delight to receive, first for the book itself and second for the fact that I held it in my hands and knew it had come from the other side of the planet, that place which is closer than ever and yet has never, given the past couple of years, felt farther off. I’d have loved to wrap K up in a big ol’ hug, but as per I had to screech at her over WhatsApp.