the unfolding days

It is my birthday and so I am thinking about time that has passed, and time I have left

It is a rare, sunny February day— my birthday —and I am walking with my family to the British Library. In Bloomsbury Square, crocuses glitter the grass, glowing backlit gold. Crows call, their voices louder than traffic, louder than children’s laughter; I look up and see one in each tree and another that waits on the ground, down amongst seed-chasing pigeons. Double-decker buses pass dark brick townhouses at the top of the square and over the heads of tourists taking photographs, more crows fly. The city—they caw—belongs to them.

I have unbuttoned the long, black coat I found the week before in a secondhand shop, and around my bare neck my amethyst birth charm jangles with a feather pendant, bought to mark submission of my book manuscript. In my pocket are two small boxes of paper-twist bangers belonging to my smallest boy. Earlier, following a drumbeat and finding ourselves turning the wrong way down an alleyway, we had stumbled into London’s Lunar New Year celebrations for the Year of the Dragon.

Under criss-cross strings of red and gold lanterns, the orange-fringed head of a dancing lion reared up. My smallest boy, blue eyes wide, clutched my hand as the pavement reverberated and the lion made its way down the street towards us, pausing at buildings to deliver its blessing. We stood watching, beside gold-laden tables of charms and souvenirs that spread across the alley, and my eye was caught by a paper dragon in a shop window, concertina body held between wooden sticks. I suddenly recalled a photograph pressed in the pages of my teenage diary—three dancing lions in the Lunar New Year parade of a northern Thai city. My boy, spotting the boxes of coloured banger snaps, tugged at my hand, pulling me back.

It is my birthday and so I am thinking about time that has passed, and time I have left. If—like both my Grandmas—I am lucky enough to make it to ninety then I have now reached a halfway point. If I am lucky enough, I have around two thousand more weeks. But I have seen enough of the fragility of life to know that those weeks could be days, or even hours. ‘She felt she had lived only half of a life’ said the husband of a friend (who died when she was around the age I am now), speaking with overwhelming beauty and bravery at her funeral. ‘She asked that we live—really live—the other half for her.’ I think of her often: as I kiss my own husband goodnight; as I note a fresh line on my face in the morning mirror; as I watch my children grow.

It is a leap year, and so this February will have one more day. ‘What will you do with this extra day?’ questions a writer I much admire. My eldest boy was only a few hours off being a leap year baby and so for me, the twenty-ninth of February will always be tied to him and his arrival—because that odd, found day in February was the first full day we were together, he and I—the first I spent as a mother, star-struck and shattered, waking in the hospital on a day that came from nowhere, to a new baby in my arms and a strange new self. Now, almost sixteen years later, my February baby folds me under the crook of his arm as we walk together into the British Library where we find books—and many worlds—that I have shared with him over the years, books he has taken from my outstretched hand and made his own.

I linger over a cabinet containing Ursula K. Le Guin’s drafts and drawings for the Earthsea novels, her hypnotic handwriting looping across the pages of a ruled notebook. In my bag, I too have a notebook—a present for my birthday—paper waiting for words. Once, I would have felt daunted by a new notebook, but I now see its pages—like the unfolding days—for the gift they are. On the birthday card he made me, my eldest boy drew a camera—a painstaking pencil rendering of my old Canon AE1. I stood it on the mantel beside a card with a red vase, this one from the parents of my teenage best friend, she who sent an air-mail parcel to me for my nineteenth birthday but who never saw her own—a girl whose loss I felt across continents and feel, still.

On the day of the Lunar New Year parade, walking though Nakhon Sawan I came across a shop down by the river with a red and gold facade, its interior darkness filled with hidden treasures: lanterns and candles, glitter balls and lion heads. Pressed against the window glass, I noticed a paper dragon—concertina body held between wooden sticks. As I stood outside, watching the smoulder of six-foot tall incense and listening to a rising drumbeat, a huge dragon approached, snaking its golden head. A little ahead of it zig-zagged a man carrying a pole, from which was suspended a lunar ball in a gold cage—the dragon’s hope for immortality, always just out of his reach.

This dancing dragon, a blur of glowing eyes and many frenzied legs, stopped at each shop, ducking his head inside for good luck. His arrival was celebrated by the lighting of a string of large red firecrackers that hung on the shopfront and exploded with reverberating bangs. As he passed me, I was momentarily overwhelmed by the scent of gunpowder accompanied by a rush of movement, sound and whooshing air that felt like an intensely palpable magic. A few days later, at a picnic in a wood beside a ruined temple, I unwrapped my nineteenth birthday present—in my hand I held a red and gold concertina dragon.

Thank you for reading,

Laura x

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Notes…

As you may have guessed, I’m currently reading this book inspired by the

In Haste

podcast.

I'll be using my new notebook for this gorgeous writing course with

Kerri ní Dochartaigh

The excellent exhibition we saw at the British Library was Fantasy: Realms of Imagination .

I wrote about submitting my book manuscript and buying the feather pendant here.