Sylv

I've been... Putting off writing this particular post, I think, at least for a little while. Sylv has been promised and then not delivered over and over again for four dang years - and no casual reader wants to know the explicit traumas and excuses I have for that.
When I was young and bad shit happened, I wrote. Furiously. Passionately. I wrote through the night, in the back of my notebook during school lessons, hiding in the bathroom at family parties because I had all these ideas and this energy and I had to do something with it and it was the most important thing--

I didn't stop writing until pretty much bang on two years ago. And then I did. I just stopped. I wrote maybe a few hundred words in the space of a year. Forced myself back into it, said I was going to finish The Fall, punished myself for not doing it... It wasn't important to me any more. It didn't matter.
I felt like I'd let Sylv down. Like I'd let him go. Thinking about him hurt too much to do anything with. This time last year, I had a fully completed, half-edited novel, just needing a few polishing touches... And I couldn't do it.
Letting myself write other stuff was probably the best thing I did on that front, but really I know it was the personal growth and finding home in one's skin and all such poetic things from the past few posts that really healed it for me.

So, I'm trying to... Articulate it now.
Sylvestus is about a magic island that appears in the middle of the Indian Ocean and the beastly gods which walk upon it. It is about the Roman invasion of that island and one seemingly insignificant man among them. It is about fire tigers and dusty moths and giant bears and sword fights and tribal warriors.
And it's about running away. Reinventing. Starting over.
Aka, what I've become very good at in my life.
And it's about finding home. Turning back. Embracing the hollow space inside yourself and calling your own life your home.
I was so full of hope a few years ago, when I first was writing Sylvestus and knew what it was going to be about. I was discovering myself and other people, falling in first clumsy love, having people tell me they hated me - I had already been through heartbreaking trauma, and I had recovered from it, I had come back, and I was going somewhere. I wrote ~250,000 words in the space of just over a year about the island and the Romans and Sylv - and even as I declared through him that one must come to terms with their trauma and face their own mistakes to truly be at peace, I kept running. I was going somewhere and I didn't know where and it was terrifying.
Which is why the re-write and the drafting and editing of what would become Vol I: The Fall was so impossible.

It won't be easy. I'm not fixed. And he isn't finished. Vol I is finally, truly, ready to be officially released to the public on the 22nd August, 2019 (aka next Thursday). Vol II is, erm... Well, I've written seven and a bit chapters of the first draft, sooo...?
I'm really struggling right now to express how much Sylv means to me. As a character, as a person, as an idea... And yes: as a story and as a book. He was one of many characters I made and wrote for with the creative writing community that I spent most of my teen years in; I only kept writing him because the community had drifted apart when we'd just come up with an awesome storyline I wanted to play through; and then, somewhere along the way... He came to mean so much to me. The original plan we had ended much, much differently. Almost exactly the same on a grand scale, but so unimaginably different in the smallest, and most important, way.

Sylv means a fucking lot to me, y'all. He's not my oldest character. He's not the most like me. He's not the hardest to write or the easiest or my favourite.
But right now, he's the one I needed. And I think this novel is the one I've put more of my heart into than any other. Hours, and drafts, and pain, and anger, and anxieties, and so much love.

So it would mean the world to me if you could support it when Sylvestus Vol I: The Fall comes out on 22nd August, 2019 (yeah, forreal this time. I gave myself less than a week between the announcement and the release date to force myself to not back out).

More details will follow closer to the date (and more art, and the playlist, aaaand...) but for now you can subscribe to this page on the right-hand side, or like the Sylvestus FB page for more frequent updates.
Apologies for the dour tone; it's extremely nerve-wracking to make this announcement for real at last, and it's very... Vulnerable. But I promise this is exciting.

And the novel is very, very good.

A Home in Your Own Skin

It's been a long one. I realised in January that I was done running, done reinventing, done leaving: I was going to learn to stay.

And I have been. I have been working, more than anything else these past few months, to come home to myself.

A home is only a home because of the space inside. We all have that hole in our chest, that empty space in our stomach. We try to fill it with a person who doesn't fit right, a hobby which flickers out when the depression hits, money which will always disappear, vanity which will always come back sour. It's a familiar story: the love stories tell us that only one true romantic love can fill the void; the motivational speeches tell us only pursuing our career passion can; the Bible studies teacher tells us that the ache is a longing for God.

I should backtrack: that last one converted me to Christianity. I still believe it. But I'd spent a fair few years trying to make clumsy prayers and a weekly meeting with people who told me I had to stop being queer to love Jesus properly fill that hole, and that wasn't right either. God was there, but He doesn't fill the hole for us.
So I asked myself, my therapist, my counsellor, the world: how do I fill it?

And the echo came back from the cavern in my stomach:

Why does it need to be filled?

This aching empty space in my chest is as much a part of me as my rising lungs, as my scarred fingers, as my short-sighted eyes. You don't need to fill up the space. A home is only a home because of the space inside.

I'm writing this on a hostel bed in Morocco. Three hours ago I was shaking, trying to hold back tears, forcing myself to recover from the gut-churning shame and terror of being stranded in a foreign city on my own, from the injustice of proving everyone right who had warned me that I was unsafe as a "lone white female", from the dissociation of wondering if this was how I died - disappointing my father after he explicitly told me how not to get robbed and murdered in Morocco - after all the bullshit I'd been through to survive this far.
I showered. I considered my options. I forgave myself. I sat on the roof terrace for a few hours reading. I made a plan to be better prepared next time.
And while I read and considered and recovered, the Muslim call to prayer began to ring through the city.

It feels like a hollow comparison, like it shouldn't be mine to claim. A white queer of Jewish descent, converted in their late teens to Christianity? How dare I find peace in another's religion, another's culture, tradition?
But I did. Every single day in the corner of the library basement where I studied, the call to prayer would come from the dilapidated, unmarked converted-seminar room makeshift Mosque which backed against the window I sat beside. Almost every day, for three years. The same call. The same words. The same intonation. The same song. The same faith. Half a world apart. I hadn't considered that I might miss the call to prayer when I graduated, but I was glad to hear it now.

And wherever I am, I am home.

I'm writing this in the same notebook on a hostel bed in Luxembourg. It's been over a month of traveling, of finding the home in my own skin in an enormous world. There's a thousand stories I could tell, amazing things and weird things and hilarious things and things that were actually upsetting at the time (e.g. nearly drowning in Venice - that's another post), but at the moment I'm just contemplating home.

I'm writing this from a train station floor in Brussels. Trains delayed and cancelled, staff unhelpful, bag too heavy, journey almost over, grades unsatisfactory, heart broken - I've spent weeks exploring every corner of the continent and seeing amazing things, taking problems as they come, but in the end it's news from home that breaks me. I hate it, I hate it, I hate it. I've ridden on the back of a scooter through rush hour traffic in Morocco. I've been caught in a Venetian storm huddling in a shaking doorway with an elderly woman who I couldn't bring myself to leave alone. I've watched the sun set and rise in a dozen different cities.

But what was the point of all of it if I'm just gonna get back to the place I live and break open completely again?

It comes to me in my own lamentations.

I sat on the end of a pier in paradise - a deserted island near Borneo, wild jungle behind me and a coral reef below my feet. I watched the sun set between the islands, over the ocean. And as it did, I watched someone... They must have lived on one of the islands. And as I sat and watched, they paddled out in a kayak, into the middle of that empty space between the islands. And they put away their paddle, and they sat in their kayak in the middle of the infinite empty ocean, and they watched the sun set. And then, they paddled home.

I'm writing this from my desk in Swansea. People's hate has done such awful harm. But the world is so wondrous. And it's there, with me. When it becomes overwhelming - these things that are too close to home, the hateful people who live nearby, the nightmares that wake me sobbing, the flashbacks that come in a cold sweat and a flush of itching bones at the wrong moment - I breathe out their cruelty, and I breathe in a sunset over the ocean in Borneo, and a person in a kayak paddling out to watch it every night, and a Venetian storm, and a Moroccan traffic jam, and an ancient Italian woman's withered hands in mine.

I'm writing this from a sunset in Borneo. I hope you find yours.

A home is only a home for the empty space inside -

we do not criticise the sky for

holding nothing but the sky,

do not criticise the stars for hanging in

"empty space",

rather than being printed on the Earth's ceiling.

They say that if our atoms were the size of planets,

there would be more space between each of them

than between the two farthest stars in the galaxy.

Think of that:

galaxies in your body,

between every cell;

that hollow space no more empty than a cloudless night sky;

 your soul infinite,

illuminated by sunsets wrought

in every shade of gold,

a space beautiful for its emptiness,

not a building or person or monument in sight -

just space

and light

and you,

paddling out into the middle of the ocean

every night

to watch the sun set

and know that you are home.

You are home.

(c) Tatiana Webb, 2019