how to step into loneliness

26/02/24

So, Swirling Smoke is out.

I remember that club like it was yesterday. The Colly, except it was actually called something else, but we all still called it ‘The Colly’ from our older sisters and brothers, and the young’uns who came before them...

It was big, at least, better than “Smack” over in the other town with its one pound jägerbombs and strange, monochrome, checkered floor. Instead, The Colly really was like a Colosseum, huge inside, fake great big pillars and plants littering the place. I remember one time going dressed up as a piñata, a few haribo packets half-heartedly stuck to my body like some sparse coral reef. I remember a guy saying my name sounded like “ca-ching”. I remember sitting on the empty, closed off staircase to just scream. And no one could hear me, the music was so loud.

When we’re young, we don’t know things can be different. We don’t know yet that our script isn’t the only script. I didn’t know how to leave, back then. I hadn’t seen someone leave and not become the butt of a joke. But the thing was, by existing, women were always the joke, whether we stayed or left. Boys were always the main characters, the ones in the right by proxy, back then. We were just things to experience, like learning to drive a car, or drinking for the first time, existing only for them, and it almost felt easier to be someone’s property than no one at all.

This is all just my script, of course.

I am learning, years later, that it’s probably easier to be someone to yourself than to see yourself as property.

I remember I had to leave eventually, because I left my hometown, and I remember coming back a year later and watching an old friend light up a cigarette, the glow brief and ephemeral like a snuffed out star in the dark. I vividly remember wanting, more than anything, to walk over and pull it right out of his hands. I wish I could go back and hold nineteen year old Catrin and just say, very gently, “you don’t need to be here.” I wish I’d gone for a walk out in the light, instead.

How to step into loneliness? There isn’t really a way, is there? You just do.

Anyway, time to say goodbye to this album. I guess it’s time for you all to say hello. It’s yours now!

Thank you so much to the wonderful Darina for this amazing music video. Check her out here.