If you could take two strangers
Leaning left and right
At a certain place and time
Like you took these strangers
And our two strange lives
And made us new
And took us through
And woke us up
Liquorice and peppermint tea.
I’m sipping it now, embodying its sweetness, baring witness to steam dance from ceramic into the still air between me and Mel. Our backs are draped with winter sun. It thaws the chill the ocean left crusted to the edges of our bones.
Have you tried it, peppermint and liquorice tea?
When I was young I did not care for liquorice. The red stuff yes, naturally, and hopefully by the bag full. The black? Out of the question. The black occupied a space in my world beside coffee, wine, cigarettes: the bitter, the extremes, the inconceivable to a feminine mind still spongelike, a body like a shoot a long way from bloom.
Liquorice peppermint tea became a lesson in trying things you assumed you would despise. In this way liquorice and peppermint tea shares a family tree with cherry tomato, banana, eggplant (though only the kind with crispy edges and no where near the sludge of a ratatouille). The flavours and textures one learns to love remind the mind to test the idea, the unfamiliar thing; touch the dewy tip of tongue to a different human, to push into experiences out the present realm of normality. Expand your world for a while. If it’s a cigarette, be sure to keep your distance.
Today marks four months since I have drunk coffee, indulged in wine, smoked cigarettes.
Today I love cigarettes and coffee and wine but not liquorice. Today I adore bananas, especially when smothered in nut butter. Even more so when lain upon perfectly scorched toast. Tomorrow Mel will fry eggplant in gochujang and I’ll still think about it the next morning.
Today April is over.
Today I am opening the front door to the cool breeze of an evolution, one who waited patiently in the outer atmosphere.
Today is as good a day as any to take my own hand and help myself up onto a higher step.
This moment here is as good as any to come to clamber up to the next stage.
Today is as good a day as any for you, too — it may not feel it sometimes, yet days treat us as equals. To time we are no less than any other. The trick is to remember. To keep waking up to yourself, to the sky, to the sweet peppermint-liquorice-melange of the world.
I do this - the hand taking, the clambering ascent - with a letter to April, as I sip tea and attune my inner antennae to my own voice. For just a while, tune out the others. The other voices are excellent yet they cloud. They huddle and crowd and I am not immune to claustrophobia. I - and you, probably - require space and time. So seek it, take it. Do it in May or any other day.
Dear April,
You took me to one of the places where the sea meets earth. The place I was born. You are a song. I remember the moment. I was in the midst of that heavy, sweet sticky mist that blankets a girl falling in love.
April, you were a shifting sand dune of a month. There were couches stacked upon couches. There were the weighty arms of an illness into which I fell, and then clambered out ten times as fast as the last time. In this way, April, you were - you are - better than perfection: you were the winding path of true growth, of fertile and non-linear expansion.
You threw sheets of rain but mostly you were warmer than you have been in the past. We questioned Autumn. I, and the bodies I watched bathe. The large ones, the young ones, the frail ones who lowered gingerly into hot magnesium their limbs and folds of skin, to soak away whatever was embedded unwelcomely. The muscular ones who pin dropped into the cold, deep pools. The young woman who lay her head on the chest of her lover, gracefully unfazed by my eyes or any others.
April, you were loneliness that seeped out like honey. You were a great potential, and yet I realise my challenge was to keep an eye on the horizon of possibility while choosing rest.
April, you showed me that it is possible to take the edges of the table of life and flip her over. You showed me that the aftershock of the thud would demand stillness, and a hard kind of recovery. That the change in environment would raze faulty structures, reveal old wounds.
You showed me the wings of heart could still flutter to the music of crush, this inner motion testament to a great and near-complete healing. You taught me, as you shifted beneath me, about the sands of chronos, the hands of saturn, the intricacies of time.
You opened my eyes and my pores to beauty, to poets. You brought petals for my tea and bathwater. A renewed energy, a wooden-floored space for turning pages.
You were a time for folding towels. Your passage reminded that the movement of hands can mobilise a mind. Instilled into my bones that despite Rilke’s instruction (seek solitude, seek solitude, seek solitude) my creativity is better lubricated by the presence of others, strange or beloved.
April, you were trial and tribulation. Patience and preparation.
As we quietly enter May and I wish my mother and best friend the happiest of birthdays, my mind wandered for the first time in a while back to Dear April.
In playing the song my affection for Frank deepens and I am touched my the sense of that girl, five years earlier. Would she be proud of where I am today? Of all the careers I have tried and not so much failed - you could say that, if you were to stand from a certain angle - but moved through, been a student of? Would she agree with my choices? Would she accept the lines of living that adorn my skin, the way the curls against neck coil more tightly than those facing sky?
Her pride would be a wide-eyed kind, I think. The press of her lips a genuine curve, if mildly alarmed. And I trust that if we were to sit down to a cup of peppermint and liquorice tea and explain to her my reasoning - my path, the process of soul unfolding I am learn to trust a little more with each passing moment, month, grain of sand - the alarm would soften and settle like a coastline after hightide into something between warmth and joy. She might burst with it. She might raise her sweet, sparse eyebrows and crease her forehead as she learns of the twists and turns which led here. I’d try not to notice how swiftly the grooves rearrange themselves without trace.
Dear April, thank you for the moments. For the perfect romantic comedy on the blue couch beside a remarkable woman. For the conversations on the highway with another. Thank you for my sister. For the moon under which I swam naked. For the nights that brought more sleep than I’ve been accustomed.
Thank you for your cocoon. The three grains of sand that have found their way between my sky blue sheets. Thank you for illuminating how I’d been pumping my veins with pressure, crowding every orifice with need and impatience that may just have actually been greed, or in the very least energy waywardly placed. Thank you, for paving the way for May to reveal the release valve.
Dear April, when we meet again I have a feeling you and I will be proud of each other, of who we were, the old leaves we will have tread into earth to be re-birthed, the many masterpieces of eyes into which we will have gazed, inquired, swam, turned away from in order to find others more suited to hold our own.
With love, until we meet again, many times -
Ruby x
I believe that no matter what, it make us new
Take us through it
And wake us up again
What we had won't be the same now (same now)
But you will make something new
And it'll take you through this
As always, thank you for reading. How was April for you? Could you describe it in a sentence? I’d love to hear in the comments below.
These are such beautiful and poetic reflections Ruby, it was a true pleasure to read. It's always so lovely as well to find fellow writers from Melbourne here on substack 💙