First published in Antlers of Water, 
​ed. Kathleen Jamie (Canongate, 2020)

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1.

We arrived in the autumn, as the warm days declined. We brought boxes filled with our respective pasts, and we stacked them in rooms that were not yet familiar. We merged our two lives in one place.

This was the first house we had shared, Roxani and I, and the first time either of us had lived in this town. We knew no one, and had little idea of our surroundings. Our only compass points were the supermarket, the train station, the hardware shop: practical places, each less than three minutes’ walk away.

In those first few weeks, as we tried to turn this house into something we could call a home, our world shrank. The space within these walls was what we saw and what we talked about. The smell of emulsion, of white spirit, of wet plaster, was what we breathed. We stripped wallpaper, replaced skirting, laid carpets, built furniture. We took bare rooms and helped them hold the life we had imagined. We populated this place with ourselves.

Those days were mostly spent indoors, amongst the tools of our labour: the brushes and the scrapers and the innumerable Allen keys. And when these were put away, they were replaced in turn by cardboard, empty boxes strewn like the leaves that were falling, then, in the garden.

It was not always a happy time. The space between what was and what could be, the awful list of things undone, was always on our minds. Both hopeful and wearying at once, the focus on that work, that space, became a kind of narrowing. And so we made our way outside.


2.

Turn right from our front door, then right again, and you find yourself, feet scrunching, on a red gravel path that leads down to the river. It takes, at most, a minute from the house to the water, and some days each step feels like a sigh, a heavy breath expelled. The path goes on, beneath overhanging trees, then splits — one route hugs the riverbank, the other a long row of flowerbeds — before joining again beside a shallow weir pool. A little farther upstream, an arced footbridge, just wide enough for two, brings you to the opposite bank.

We have taken this walk almost every day in the months since we arrived. Most afternoons we turn back from that footbridge, along the other bank, a mile or so from door to door. But when the weather is good we continue: around the park that fringes the town, or else north along the river.

This repetition, this following in our own footsteps, began as a kind of escape, and it still serves that purpose. When we’re tired, and our eyes ache from a morning in front of the computer, it always helps to walk, to go and then come back. But doing so like this — the same few routes, over and over — soon became something more. It became an intimacy.


3.

Things were drifting towards winter when we first began to walk, so we learned these paths in a time of disappearance, of contraction. Branches were sparsely covered, then bare, and birds were leaving, then gone, for another year. The perennials in the beds along the way died back, and the ground was dark and wet and cold. The river rose and grew faster.

This was, in some ways, the ideal time to get to know a place, when there is less to see and be distracted by. Everything felt stripped to its essence. We noticed the familiar, first of all. There were the birds that stayed throughout the year: the blue and great and long-tailed tits; the crows and magpies, rooks and jackdaws; the robins and the wrens. There were the dippers, with their broad, white bellies, that slipped like rain into the river. And every now and then there was a gallop and a gulp of blue. Kingfisher! The bird is gone before its name is even spoken.

Mid-winter, the white hellebores began to bloom, and the snowdrops not long after. The conifers — the pines and firs — were resolute throughout the short, light-lacking days. And even on the greyest afternoons, there was always a readying at work. No steady point of stillness or of balance, there was always expectation.


4.

We fell in love from a distance, Roxani and I, at opposite sides of an ocean. The times we’d spent together had always been punctuated by longer times apart. So to find ourselves here, in these months of presence, side-by-side almost every hour of the day, was a kind of luxury. It was also a kind of learning: the lessons of proximity.

Our walks became an extension of that learning. Day after day we reminded ourselves of what was here, of what we knew, and we tried to know more. We nudged each other towards noticing. What will this bud become? What might those new leaves be? We asked questions, looked for answers, and, where we could, identified. When spring arrived, we turned trees into wych elms and willows; we turned butterflies into small whites and orange tips. We tried to untangle the mesh of birdsong that hung between the branches.

This acknowledgement, this taking account of what belonged, was an act of care, and also of commitment. Over days, over weeks, over seasons, it was a process of coming-to-know. As the names we gathered for the things around us grew, our sense of where we were in turn expanded. An enrichment took place, an accumulation of knowledge and affection.

To be attentive, to be curious, to care: these are the makings of love. For love itself is a kind of expansion: a growth, and a willingness to grow. We knew this place better by knowing it together, by making it — in name and thought — a home. It is always a big word, that: home. And in those months, between us, it grew bigger.


5.

For more than a year before we came to this place, Roxani lived in a country in which armed conflict was an ongoing presence. Her work took her to places where few tourists would go, and where violence intruded on the everyday. She lived with those dangers, and I lived with the possibility of them from afar. I feared what could happen to her, and I imagined, repeatedly, the phone call that would bring me bad news.

Those months of worry, and of waiting, were not easy. They held familiar shadows. When I was sixteen years old, my father died, suddenly, and that memory still looms. Like many whose lives brought early encounters with grief, I know well the dread of losing what I care about, the anxious anticipation of absence. It lives in the chest, that feeling, lodged like a parasite between heart and lungs; and it guides the behaviour of its host. Too often, I have steered myself away from joy and from devotion. I have avoided what can be lost rather than risk the possibility of losing.

This was a fear that had always precluded love, a fear that had ensured loneliness, and that had led me, inevitably, towards regret. But in that time of separation, of counting down days from an ocean apart, I learned — having never previously understood — what it meant to muster hope, and to enact it, again and again. I learned, too, to see risk not as avoidable, but as imperative.


6.

Fear cannot be prised apart from love. Indeed, the possibility of loss, and the continued recognition of that possibility, is essential the process of loving. It is part of what fuels that process. After all, the opposite of the dread I once felt in my chest is not love — not even close. It is complacency.

The lightness that wells at the sudden song of a wren is not a product of the melody alone, but of the silence that precedes it and that just as suddenly returns. The song is buoyed by its brevity. Likewise, the bright cumulus of a cherry tree is embellished by the knowledge that its blossoms soon will fall, and the honeyed warmth of autumn is sweetened by the imminence of winter.

Love, too, is lifted by lovelessness; it is made more present by the prospect of its absence. Love is sustained by the memory of what came before it, and the anticipation of an after. Fear, in this light, is not separable from gratitude. It is both incentive and reassurance. And this is where hope arises: in the knowledge that what is cherished can be lost, but that only through cherishing might that loss be averted.


7.

Now, together, our worries are mostly less immediate. They are the usual frettings of two people in their thirties, sharing a home. We worry about money, sometimes, and we worry about work. We worry about things that are bad in the world, and we worry that they will get worse.

Sometimes as we walk, we talk over what is troubling us: one speaks and the other listens, asks questions, and, when needed, reassures. We share what we’ve been working on, the words we’ve read and written; and in doing so we ease the knots that have tightened through the day. Our conversations are accompanied by the fuss and whisper of the river.

To get outside like this, to walk away from screens and deadlines, is to see our surroundings as both refuge and restorative. It is to find comfort in the movement of our bodies, and the presence of ourselves and each other in this place. It is the most ordinary of indulgences.

And yet, of course, this refuge is never truly divided from those things we might wish to escape. It is not possible or responsible to pretend otherwise. At least, not for long. And though we feel, always, the consolation of what’s here — that sigh of wonder and relief — this place to which we turn is not empty of anxiety. To come to know it, as we have, is to see the ways in which it is vulnerable. To come to love it, as we have, is to encounter worry.


8.

Our first half-year in this house brought a deluge of dreadful news. Climate change, now seemingly unstoppable; waterways choked by plastic; the cataclysmic disappearance of insects; depletion, decline, extinction. While the gaze of these reports focused elsewhere, none of them excluded here. They described a damage from which no place is safe; they told of harms already upon us — harms that are only getting worse.

Amid the expanding lexicon of environmental catastrophe, it is no surprise that there are new words for fear. After all, to pay attention to what is happening to the world, and to imagine what might come next, is to be afraid. It is to be struck, deep, by a double-hearted horror. We, as human beings, are responsible for this devastation; yet we, as individuals, are helpless to reverse it. Both patient and pathogen, our suffering is guilt as well as grief.

‘Eco-anxiety’, some call it — a term that has, at least, the benefit of lucidity. ‘Solastalgia’, others say — which does not. These words fix a label to the chronic alarm that, increasingly, many feel. Like a lepidopterist’s pin, they fasten that feeling to the page. Now, they seem to say, we know what we are dealing with. Now we understand.


9.

Worry is not an illogical response to the problems that face the planet. Those problems are monumental, and the more one learns, the harder it is to be anything but horrified. To put a name to this worry is an understandable urge. The magnitude of its cause, and the sense of impotence it engenders, feel new. They feel specific to the times in which we are living. And for some, that specificity, that name, is a kind of comfort. But for me, the opposite is true.

In the years I spent avoiding commitment to something or someone I could lose, I was never in doubt as to the problem. I knew dread was at the heart of it, and I knew, as well, where that dread had come from: the loss of my father, inescapable still. But to acknowledge that feeling and to call it mine did nothing to loosen its grip. To fixate on what was particular to my experience, while ignoring the ways in which loss, and the fear of loss, are in fact entirely ordinary, even banal, was to create a barrier to change. That change, in my case, came not from identifying specificity, but from recognising likeness.

The same is true, it seems to me, of the words we choose. These neologisms — eco-anxiety, solastalgia — are lines drawn in the air. They differentiate unnecessarily. And in doing so, in narrowing the lens like this, such words risk obscuring our best source of hope. What we talk about when we talk about solastalgia is fear. But what we talk about, as well, is love.


10.

In a week when Roxani was away, I walked the same few routes along the river. I went from home to home again, across the bridge and back, and on warmer days I went farther. I walked alone, but looked for the things we look for together. I noticed what was changing — the incremental shifts as spring turned into summer — and I noticed what stayed the same. My attention, it seemed to me, was never really mine alone.

This ongoing intimacy with place has bred an ongoing litany of concerns. Some are specific and immediate, while others are imprecise and look towards the future. There are times when I find myself pushing them aside, to keep from being overwhelmed. But it is never possible to do so for long. The fear is always present.
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To say that there is hope to be found amid this fear, is not to say that disaster — climatic, ecological — can be averted. I am not at all convinced it can. Rather, it is to say that without enacting hope it is not possible to love. And without love, without cherishing what might one day be lost, then, truly, there can be no hope.