I’m an hour of a flight away and I can’t seem to come back down.
Do you ever listen to a song and you’re gone? How do you come back? I’ll tell you where I am. Where I really, really am.
When I listen to Big Jet Plane by Angus & Julia Stone, I am automatically taken back to my room in Harrow, London with earphones in to drown out my landlord’s snoring from the room next to mine.
She said “hello mister, pleased to meet ya”
I wanna hold her, I wanna kiss her
It is 2017, May, and I’ve been leaving early to walk to my internship at a travel agency because I don’t want to pay for the bus fare; I am saving every penny I can save to top up my oyster card for a trip downtown instead. The only consistent payment I can make is the rent to my landlord which I realise I am more than lucky with. (My friends and fellow interns are living in smaller rooms for twice or triple the price.) I’ve been avoiding my landlord for a different reason. Somehow it feels awkward, now that she knows I let a lover sleep over when she was away visiting family.
She smelled of daisies, smelled of daisies
She drives me crazy, drives me crazy
I spend nights not thinking about work at eight o’clock the next day. I have a ton of coffee anyway. It never affects my sleeping pattern, no matter how long I stay out. I am living and not letting a moment slip. I am not letting that happen anymore. After work, I grab my friend Laura and we enjoy walks by Embankment, looking at the skyscrapers imagining how terrifying it would be to work in them. Women in heels and suits walk past us, their eyes somewhere in the future. Looking at apartments and balconies from afar, Laura and I watch the Thames move from where we sit in front of Tate modern, fantasising.
“Imagine you were living there.” We take in the sight of tall apartment buildings, lights flicker on and out again.
“We are living here.”
“But what about there. That must feel infinite.”
Then we head to the tube station, I head for the Jubilee line, Laura takes Hammersmith & City, and even though we aren’t out of the city, it feels like we’re going home to a different reality. Going into the city is an escape. How many other places within places could be an escape?
Then another night settles in. Two AM, lying awake, writing passages and poems, smelling a cigar’s smoke coming from my open window. Perhaps from the neighbour who watched me bring that lover home.
Be my lover, my lady river
Can I take ya, take ya higher
It’s a quiet neighbourhood. Rather peaceful. Occasionally I can hear people down the street yelling but they’re only ever passing. I keep my window open when it rains.
Gonna hold ya, gonna kiss ya
in my arms
There is this urge to go back to that tiny room that never felt restricting, despite its size, it made my words reach my biggest audience, it gave my courage wings. Listening to Big Jet Plane, I wrote my first collection of poetry.
Even listening to it now, it makes my fingers itch, and I feel comfort. Comfort that feels out of reach most of the time. This is how I imagine it feels like to be someone thinking of ‘the one that got away’.
Gonna take ya away from harm
and so much soft longing.