the grand return
childhood places, mothers, and memories
the shells cannot be brought back with us and my mother yells from the north, a call i’ve received before. dawlish is a seaside town. rockpools and crabs and fresh fish and chips. the gulls sit in wait for me to finish. sinning, to come over here and ask for vegan ice cream.
The above is an extract from a poem I am tentatively calling ‘DAWLISH’. I wrote it (and others) on my return to the holiday town of my childhood. When I think of happy memories, the kind I have assumed only reserved for non-abused children, I think of Shell Cove. This is not to say it was a perfect place, or that my memory does not also falter over small moments of incongruence: the early signs of anxiety and depression, familial unrest. It is just to say that what makes up my most precious childhood picture, is centred majorly around this place.
My dear friend and fellow poet, Kristiana, created a personalised poetry zine for myself and other Patreon subscribers, and it was delivered to me (almost serendipitously) the week I was due to leave for this trip. As part of the process, I had filled in a form with personal anecdotes, places and things special to me, in order for Kristiana to get a better understanding of each of us. Inevitably, my mind went to the red cliffs of Devon, the landmarks that signal a coming home, a returning. The name of the zine: The Red Cliffs. The prelude to what would be an emotional revisitation.
As we drove further and further south on the motorway, I began to notice the signs of my youth. Gloucester and Cheltenham and Exeter and Babbacombe. Teignmouth and Plymouth and Torquay. (And a particular shoutout to ‘Daddyhole Plain’, which my partner was incredulous about, especially when I started shrieking with sudden recognition). It was exciting, the familiarity of it, knowing these places by name. Once we arrived, it was an after-dark jaunt to the Co-Op (the only shop open past 9pm) for supplies. I felt confident treading the same roads.
Night turned to day to night again and I was struck with something. The confidence and initial excitement wore away and I was left instead with melancholy. Below is the murmurings of a poem I’ve yet to finish, a diary entry of sorts:
i sleep in starts falling between this reality and theirs, the one where i’m called by a different name and my mother makes mozzarella cheese and tomato pasta, before she started burning it.
I was decidedly sad. And there were those cheeky little mummy issues again, rearing their heads. I would call what I experienced for the next week of my trip a grieving process, sped up and smattered with pockets of genuine nostalgia. It wasn’t just my mother I longed to call and couldn’t (complicated dynamics, the belief that I would not be received with the soft touch I wished for), it was my Nan. My lovely Nan (more like a mum to me), who died years ago, and who very much played a part in my enjoyment of this seaside spot. I couldn’t call her either - though for different reasons - and the loss kept me up, wandering naked into the living room and watching the moonlight over the black ocean, furiously scribbling nothing words, fragments that only made sense in the brief slip of a second between my head and the page, difficult to be transmuted.
It was all rather dramatic. Though it played out in my inner world in a way my partner hadn’t before witnessed, used to the physical manifestations of my emotions: phones thrown in frustration, cardboard ripped, an endless stream of tears. Without noticing or deciding, I was more introspective. I kept secrets between notes app and brain, communicating on the page in more arresting moments, rather than spill my sacred knowing to a witness. I felt mournful, each return edged with anger or desperation or a deep, deep loneliness. I was tired by it. My limbs refused to take me where I most wanted to go.
And of course, that place is inaccessible. Like the cliffside pathway we couldn’t travel, I too cannot go back. Not to childhood, nor to an alternative adulthood where my mother and I get along, and she loves me correctly. Unmoored now, I must step forward with a new name, and settle the stirring turmoil, accepting my chosen life as enough.
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