THE SPACE BETWEEN NARRATIVES, SUNDAY NOTES

 

25 May 2025

A Sunday between the sheets. Coffee cooling beside me, and a few madeleines gone soft from steam, a stack of notes I probably won’t finish reading. I’d stayed up the night before watching Europa, von Trier’s metallic, trance-like fever dream, narration like a spell, trains cutting through post-war fog, and that strange, weightless tension of sleeping through history’s aftermath. I finished it with the faint feeling I’d been hypnotised and then sent back into my reality, disoriented and suddenly aware of the hum of some birds. 

This morning, I opened Écrit dans un jardin, and there was Yourcenar, steady and lucid, walking through her garden and into my head like she’d always had a key. Like a balm, her garden meditations, not quite prose, not quite poetry, just her mind walking slowly, picking things up. No drama. Just air and leaves and a kind of careful noticing that felt like an antidote to all the cold narrative control of the film. 

It was strange; that switch from haunting to stillness. I didn’t plan it that way. Sometimes you just fall into these aesthetic collisions. I sat there a while, knees tucked up, the covers twisted, thinking about how we swing between chaos and quiet like it’s the most natural thing in the world. Maybe it is. Of how easily we move between the violence of the world and the gentleness of private thought. Or maybe we don’t move at all; maybe we’re always carrying both, like mismatched luggage. 

At some point, I got up and ran a bath, half-ritual, half-intermission. Lavender oil, mostly because it was there. Some bath salts I pretend were chosen for intention rather than scent. I didn’t light a candle or anything dramatic, just let the heat do what it does. Watched the ceiling a bit. Let the thoughts float, stall, come back softer.I stayed there until the water cooled and my fingertips took on the texture of old paper. 

Some Sundays don’t tie themselves up. They just sit with you. Muddled. Gentle. A little scented. They’re for letting your mind trail off like steam from a cup, absurd, tender, and not quite ready to be useful. 

 xx t

image courtesy ©tedoré