i think humans are constantly searching for empathy and camaraderie in all things and even the simple fact we’re continually pummelling time capsules out into the depths of space is a plea for the aliens to see us and understand us.
i think people with big feelings get a huge amount out of speaking to, and heeding the advice of, other people with big/bigger feelings!
i think that i love poetry so much because it’s the practice of taking one single moment or element and representing it in a way that everyone can love and understand.
neil hilborn wrote this poem that i really love called ‘the future’ in which he relays this MOMENT. the ending lines in particular are the kind of gradual build into a feeling that no matter how many times i read, i always get something from. i always manage to remember how it felt to perceive the future as this concrete thing for the first time in my life.
the moment was when i was half asleep on some coach through belgium at about 5-something-am and the sun was just up and the coach driver was playing ‘saving private ryan’ for some fucking reason and i could just hear it all muffled because i had earplugs in. i hadn’t slept all night, i’d been on a ferry for the first time in my life, and i opened my eyes and saw this row of massive fucking turbines. i’d never seen so many wind turbines and they were just THERE!! queued up in this thick fog so they were bursting through, one after the other. and all the number plates were different, and the roads, and everything just wasn’t quite like anything i was used to and i realised (properly) that the world was a lot bigger than anything i’d ever seen and that i’d explored so little of it. i had it all ahead of me, and i could go there. i could be 40 years old and go to new zealand. i could be 60 and go to athens. before this single important second, i’d had this kind of weird apathetic acceptance that i was going to be stuck in things i knew forever and although it was such a tiny step outside of the uk, it was my first step so it mattered. i’m not trapped! i’m free and i’m going to go everywhere and learn and understand and grow and feel!
when i came home from this little adventure, i gushed about all this in my diary; about amazing things i’d seen, how fucking far i’d walked, some boy i had big feelings about (who has notifications on for these blog posts but still can’t text me back somehow. you know who you are.) but most importantly i wrote about how i HAD to make it through every shitty day forevermore if it ever gave me a chance of feeling this big important feeling again.
long story short: i had another moment like this the other day, in bristol with liv, watching neil hilborn read out ‘i’m so lucky’ and ‘the future’ on stage with his passion and his enthusiasm and all the words that mean too much to me because i’m attaching my own connotations - and now i have a book on my shelf that he’s written in that says ‘stay lucky’ and jesus christ i definitely will
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