Some Murmur

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I moved to Amsterdam five-and-a-half years ago, ten days before the Brexit referendum, an act of relocation that felt like running along a path in a computer game and having the tiles fall away, burn up, or turn to dust behind me. I remember seeing one of those spoof newspaper articles at the time that said: SHOCK NEWS: THOUSANDS OF BRITONS REALISE THEY ACTUALLY LOVE THEIR COUNTRY. And that felt very true, I was in love and there were things I had taken for granted. For example, an ease of being in a space, a way of inhaling the fresh, damp air after the rain, feeling connected to the history of a savoury pie eaten out of a plain paper bag on a northern-bound train. It was the physicality of the landscape I was after, the self of the groundstuff, the traces of ancient hardships that lay low in the architecture¿the context by which I had been shielded and into which I had grown. Waking up to the result of that referendum felt like something had abandoned me, or me it. The details were uncertain. The evaporation of a parent. Like looking away for a moment and then looking back to find out that everyone is gone. Like the landscape wasn't mine anymore. It never had been. Something had been there all along murmuring under the surface. Something that I thought I understood but that had in hindsight never been a part of me. When I found out I was pregnant, not long after the Brexit referendum, it felt like a part of me had died and like a second part of me was steadily dying. I don't want to sound ungrateful, because a lot of people feel a lot of things about procreation¿about wanting babies, not wanting babies, really wanting babies, having babies, not having babies, really not having babies, how you should have babies, how you should not have babies¿but the way I saw it, from that side of the expansion, was that some unknown and unknowable event was lurching towards me, and its manifestations were showing up all over my body, rising out, bearing down. And this unknowable event, irreversible and now unstoppable, was a passing through. A ritual test of endurance. The black hole that was forming inside was gathering matter, gaining momentum, and I was being sucked in and shrunken and replaced. Matter begets matter. I was physical, becoming more so. Various parts of my body on various days were taking on the properties of stone or lead. The internal world rather than the external was where things were taking place, was where the news was, the threat.