#46

On Ruminating

You’re mine, mine, mine, mine
You’re mine, mine, mine, mine
You’re mine, mine, mine, mine
You’re mine, mine, mine

I look beyond the confines of mine bedroom, babe - a hollowed out hoard of protective wares - and see a small, flickering tail lying wait in a tall willow tree. A well-fed cat, cream-coloured and coy, perches at a branch’s edge in preparation to bite. A murder of silken crows descends in one, full swoop as the cat takes aim and pounces, teeth bared, opal and brite.

Trauma strikes when one least expects it. As much as I have sought and strived this year to clear a path forward of pure and unrelenting light, the cat shall plunge its claws deep into mine belly-flesh, tangy and tart. I plug the wound with gauze and nothing works. The blood, crystallised and treacle-like, clings to my fingers.

Lily Allen in the visualiser for Ruminating, from the studio album West End Girl, released October 2025.

On a recent weeknight, I sit in my car and sob. An unrelenting, guttural retching which causes an unpleasant hoarseness within my throat. Bathed in the glow of the cherry-red stop light, my head hurts. The tears frustrate me.

For all her flaws, faults and misgivings, Lily Allen reverberates softly through the speaker system. A staccato drum beat, a lingering piano chord, Ruminating. Her fifth studio album, West End Girl enacts, to me, a chronological narrative; the stages of grief one experiences within the breakdown of an intimate relationship, marred by realisations of infidelity, narcissistic abuse and coercion.

Ruminating, angel, is how I’ve been feeling for quite some time. A house brick to the back of the head, unrestrained. A bog, a trench, a slog, which prevents one from truly moving forward. Allen expresses her longing through an obsessive repetition of the possessive pronoun, ‘mine’. Her anger can be heard and felt as the pain seeps from her, her pitch heightening and her volume escalating with each and every line.

There are no lessons here, no teachings, only needless harm.

I look, as always, to Heathcliff; tired eyes boring beyond that English window pane, in sleepless search of that ghost upon the Yorkshire moors. I imagine Mary Shelley cloaked in black, retrieving a charred and bulbous heart from the funeral pyre, rejected by the flames. I seek a hand to hold, an organ to fuck, and a cavity to crawl into, anything to pacify the headache. It shall take time for this rumination to cease, “Fourteen years,” Carrie (1976) grins through blood-soaked teeth.

Should I turn toward God’s light, I feel I’m grateful for those in my life who have been present in the most sickly of hours this year. The friends I hold dear who’ve allowed me to be ugly, repugnant and selfish. A listening ear to horror which doesn’t bare hearing. Twelve months beyond, I return, I hope, anew. Triumphant with an anger which, still, will simmer beneath. In a bar, a restaurant, a coffee shop, I present myself as a near-functional human being. If not for the patience of those loved ones, I know in truth I would have lost it, irreparably - petered down into the muddy pits and dug a little deeper, just for fun.

Lizabeth Scott in Desert Fury (1947) dir. Lewis Allen.

In talk of life, love and practice, I remind myself of the important of intimacy in the living, breathing here-and-now. Bright, wide eyes, belly laughter, tight squeezes and happy tears.

While I long to relay this tenderness to you acutely - wet, warm, hard and soft - I realise that it can never truly be transcribed in digital form. As I work through this worry, I consider the art of letter writing with deeper care and urgency. Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller, John Keats and Fanny Brawne, Franz Kafka’s Letters to Milena. Twenty twenty-six marks five years of letters to you, in the dark of night, at the back of a packed train carriage, in a hospital, a parlour, in Heaven. I wish to share these words in analogue fashion, ribbon-wrapped and wax sealed.

When you speak with someone, a loved one at that, how do you wish for them to feel? What do you wish for them to touch, to hold?

As we rest at the precipice of a new dawn, babe, I try with all my might to not be thrown back into darkness. I consider all I’ve done in these here twelve months: travelled alone for the very first time, encountered strangers who have since become good friends, reconnected, reconciled and atoned those friendships I’d neglected and, finally, advocated for myself - for better or for worse. While this was a year of Ruminating, twenty twenty-six doesn’t have to be. It can be brite, warm, joyous and exciting. While that cat may claw and lacerate, each unpredicted sting will lessen with time.

I have nothing to be afraid of.