by Cécile Somers-Lee
Home
is where the books are
the shoes
the clothes
the superficial stuff
and the secrets
the notebooks that contain unspeakable notes
to self
about others
but also about self
and life, imagined differently.
Home is the place I return to after I‘ve been traveling.
It’s where all the things are that didn‘t fit in my suitcase,
all the things I wish I had put in my suitcase.
Home is where I land, hide, recharge, unpack,
even the non-pretty stuff.
Home is where I am blissfully unseen
in clothes not intended for pleasing
writing in said notebooks
stuff I can never show
unless I fictionalize the fuck out of it
which right now is an appealing thought:
fiction will allow me to get closer to the truth;
fried in the fragrant fat of my own imagination
the story will taste better,
smell of cinnamon and garlic butter
pine needles in sauna baths
second-hand books and success.
Home is a door I can close, floor-to-ceiling windows and borrowed scenery.
A Stocksund sofa from IKEA,
my Bergman island striped in white and blue.
When I’m alone I can stretch out on it,
when I’m not, I have to sit up straight
and ideally reply “lovely” to the question “tea, darling?”
YOU ARE NOT HERE, my invisible mug says,
and that’s exactly how I like it.
Home.
Alone.
“Can you,” the shrink I have invented for myself asks, “explain where this thing about needing to be alone comes from?”
Perhaps to avoid feeling judged? As soon as there is someone / anyone else in the room, there is judgment. Another pair of eyes = judgment. Another brain = judgment. Another body = usurpation of space.
Get off my sofa, it’s mine.
“Shouldn’t you love the man on the sofa?”
I should, and I do. But if we’re talking about coming home, then Me + the space = home. Me + the space + someone else = distress. Perceived judgment. Restlessness. Sometimes annoyance.
“What’s under that?”
That’s the big question.
“What’s under that?”
Underneath the why of my need to be alone? Purity. I’m a chameleon, so even your thoughts make me change colour.
“Oh, come on.”
Exactly. ‘Come on!’ Why don’t you believe what I tell you?
“Okay. Tell me why you make things up.”
To seem more interesting? Because I want to be special?
“No one’s special. Your hero Phil Stutz says so in Lessons for Living.”
Maybe I lie to be believed?
“Because…”
Nobody believes my truth.
“Who’s nobody?”
My mother. She’s the über-nobody who never believed anything.
“You promised never to write about her again.”
That was a lie.
“To be more interesting?”
To get off the hook, to say anything at all.
“So what’s under that?”
A layered lasagna of lies and besame mucho, and freshly grated nerves.
“What’s under that?”
Cleverness.
“Cleverness or clever-cleverness?”
Fuck off.
The shrink I have invented for myself doesn’t flinch when I swear. Her name is Fiona and she and I share a love of f-words.
“What’s under that?”
Fear.
“Very good. Remember: it’s always either fear or love.”
What is?
“Everything.”
I feel like I’m talking to myself.“
What’s under that?”
Loneliness.
“Is loneliness fear or love?”
Can be either or both, depending on the circumstance of the long-distance memoir writer.
“What’s under that?”
The Sub Ground Floor.
“And under that?”
The Skirting-Around Department.
“And under that?”
Is Z and Keeping my mouth shut.
“And under that?”
…
It’s 1976. My mother, early forties, tanned and shapely, beautifully bronzed legs in a golden bikini, sits in a deck chair on the beach of the Lido di Tarquinia, near Rome. She glows, like a sunkissed ad for Coppertone, which the Italians call Coppèrtônè. The kid on the bottle’s logo has her little bikini bottom pulled down by a playful dog: my entire life story, right there on that blue and brown bottle of suntan lotion. The dogs I fear (no matter how small, no matter how playful), my exposed bottom (“show our guests where the hot water bottle burned your buttock!”)
I am her ever-obliging party piece, because the story of how I was burned on the very day I was born never fails to draw gasps of empathy and horror. I was born at home and the nurse they sent to help my mother clumsily, imperfectly wrapped the tea towel around the stainless steel water bottle, having filled it with boiling-hot oil for longer-lasting heat. The nurse shoved the steel sausage under my tiny body, I imagine to make up for the body warmth my mother should have given me by holding me close? The exposed bit of steel burned through my flesh.
My mother tells her audience I cried for two hours until I could no more.
My mother likes to exaggerate.
I like to think she didn’t this time, and picture barely born me screaming my lungs out.
“Your desperate need for attention was born on the same day you were,” Fiona says, and I love how understanding she is, how well she reads me.
“Perhaps you’re right,” I say. It’s a compelling idea.
“Although your mother’s narcissism may have something to do with it.”
It being my near-insatiable desire to be seen.
Or perhaps it is my obsession with The Look of Things. Clothes. Shoes.
I own books called How To Be Parisian Wherever You Are.
Answer: Wear vintage Levi’s blue jeans and a crisp white shirt with black bra showing.
At the writers’ retreat I attend, it’s too fucking cold for a shirt sans t-shirt. We all wear stuff that keeps us warm. We are here to write; on s’en fout what we wear doing that. No one reading words on a page can tell what the author was wearing when they wrote them.
Still, I sometimes google “how to look like a writer.”
Hemingway on a boat with an upside-down merlin.
Susan Sontag underneath an Olivetti typewriter poster.
Joan Didion, skinny as hell, leaning against a car with a cigarette.
Maybe my mother + inherited (?) narcissism + fear cocktail is that I am afraid I, too, am superficial. ‘Salati in superficie,’ salted on the surface as it says on the packet of the Pavesi crackers we eat with dollops of Nutella on our Italian beach. And by forever chasing appearance in all its facets, I fear I’ll miss the essence of my life’s real desire, which is to write and tell stories, wild and flamboyant and completely made up.
Utopia is where I don’t lie
not to myself nor to anyone else,
is where I do not embellish,
not even on paper.
I haven’t found it yet, this Utopia called home.
I am still travelling, searching for it,
my suitcase filled with high hopes
of landing and finding,
solitude a must,
sofa and tea optional.
Cécile Somers-Lee is a voice artist, IMDB-listed scriptwriter and published poet and writer. And yet, like Penelope, she keeps unravelling the weavings of her novel Cornflakes for the Underworld, which is now more than twenty years in the making. Lately, however, the notes in her Ulysses writing app are hinting at an estimated arrival time of Christmas. She divides her time between London and Luxembourg, and dreams of secret time pockets in which to finish all her other writing projects.
