Correspondence From Limbo

A couple of times a month I send words and pictures to them via the internet, correspondence delivered from the land of limbo.

– Paul Dean: A Year in Stardew Valley: Life, Labour and Love.

This is both a story and a mission statement.

Well, it is more a description of a place than a story, but I hope you’ll forgive me. The description is of the town I have lived in since I was five. It’s very self-indulgent.

I hope you forgive that too.

The description is only tangentially related to the description, connected in the most round-about sort of way. But, as I said, it’s an indulgence.

–

I am back in Hampshire, but I wish I was anywhere else.

Those who know me know that I have nothing nice to say about my home town, that I try to distance myself from it as much as possible, both figuratively and literally. It’s not that the town isn’t nice. It’s a lovely place to live, surrounded by vast, open fields, and a river that cuts through the northern part of town. But the town itself feels like an empty limbo of pubs, overly expensive houses and parks full of listless, apathetic teenagers with nowhere to go. It drains people of their sense of urgency, their ambition, their desire and ability to do anything.

At least, that’s how I see this town. An outsider might only see the trees, the river, the general sense of  “niceness” the town emits, a form of pleasantness that permeates everything. They’d be charmed by the old steam railway that still operates, running back and forth between the town and the various small hamlets that dot the area surrounding it. They will gaze at the expensive goods in shop windows, never wondering why the locals never patron the expensive, high-end stores. They’ll laugh, amused by the town’s claim to fame, how it has been labelled Britain’s “capital of watercress”. They see these things but fail to see that, outside of those little flashes of quirkiness, the town has no real identity. That there is nothing to do here but drink. Drink and wait out the days. 

It feels like time moves both quicker and slower here than anywhere else, seemingly endless days flying by at a pace both fleeting and glacial. 

–

I’ve been splitting my time between lying on my sofa trying to write and working at the local shop. Part of a big chain, it’s stayed open despite the Covid-19 pandemic. I wear a mask and gloves whenever I go to work, only taking them off when I have breaks to eat food and recharge before getting back to stacking shelves and serving middle-class people and those same apathetic teenagers.

Only a few of the customers bother with PPE, and I have to field questions about why I wear a mask, how it feels, whether it is hot underneath it. I answer the questions with almost the same response every time; my parents are in the most vulnerable age group, and I don’t want anything to happen to them. Most people scoff slightly at this. Even those who are sympathetic still don’t wear a mask. Why would they? They don’t have coronavirus.

The population of this town is ageing. A residence survey taken in 2010 revealed that roughly 25% of the people living here are aged 65 or over, and that number has only increased as the decade has progressed. The town is old, and conservative and backwards. It has repeatedly elected a politician called Steve Brine as the area’s MP, a man who has a history of voting against gay marriage in the UK.

There’s a phrase that is often thrown around on Twitter, one used when talking about the Republican party and the current president, the crisis’s the world is tackling right now, anytime that someone is backwards and regressive; “I don’t know how to explain to you that you should care about other people”. I feel like shouting this whenever I’m in this town. I have to tell people why gay rights matter, why laws protecting trans people are important.

During one shift I have to explain to a customer that Black lives matter.

–

I’m currently spending most of my days listlessly sitting in front of a blank page on an otherwise empty screen, hoping that I can summon up something good to write.  But, try as I might, I have struggled to put digital pen to virtual paper. I’m unsatisfied with everything I write, nothing feels good enough for me to share.

Creatively it feels like I’m pulling teeth.

But what to do? Well, if you’re reading this, you will have guessed the solution that I have come up with. I have started a blog. The aim is to try to have at least two pieces of writing a month: a diary piece similar to what you are currently reading, and another feature that will be a bit more varied in content, from short stories to pieces of critique and reviews. My hope is to improve my writing through the process of sharing it with others, gathering feedback from those who wish to contribute. This website will also act as a portfolio of sorts, a place where I can exhibit the things I have written from all over the internet.

Making this learning process public allows me two things. Firstly, it means that I can gather the aforementioned feedback and comments on my work from a large group of people. These criticisms will probably also be more constructive and useful than what would be elicited from my family or close friends. And, secondly, making this a public process also means that I will be held more accountable to write stuff. It’ll mean that, if I only release one piece of writing a month, people will be aware of that and can call me out on it. It’ll mean that I’ll actually do the damn work, instead of just sitting around wondering why I’m not doing anything.

So, those are my hope for this blog/website/project/thing, a depository of all the writing that I’ll be doing for the foreseeable future. I hope you’ll stick around to see what I come up with. 

Some of it might be good. Most of it won’t be.

Whatever the result, I hope you stay with me. I hope I make you proud.