“A slick new leaf / unfurling like a fist, I’ll take it all”

I recently bought a nail shade in Black Cherry but I can’t bring myself to paint my fingers and toes without hearing Elektra Abundance declare “I despise a night-time colour in July” in the back of my silly little impressionable brain, even though the foreseeable forecast on my iPhone says non-stop rain until next Monday. Throughout the past three books on my bedside table, I’ve travelled to Charles Webb’s moneyed suburbs of Pasadena, and across Eve Babitz’s hot, hedonistic Los Angeles; now, I’m rereading The White Album and Joan Didion’s praying for rain in Malibu. I guess the grass really is always greener where a drought’s concerned, but somehow I don’t think Didion is yearning for uninspiring marshland and soggy cherry blossom.

Truly, I’m a child of short days and endless evening. I was born two days after Bonfire Night, and my dad once tasked me with blowing out sparklers on my birthday cake when he forgot to buy candles for the occasion. I adore the poetry of a climate that allows for the marriage of turtlenecks and T-shirts, dresses and sweater vests, and socks and heeled sandals. I’m more stirred by Nora Ephron’s bouquets of newly sharpened pencils marking the beginning of the school year than by floral blooms in spring, and there’s definitely something to say about Gilmore Girls being my biggest comfort blanket when at least half of every season takes place in mid-September and October. Cut me, and there’ll be streaks of copper and gold among the red.

So, I’ll take rain in autumn. Give me dark windows decorated with hundreds of tiny trickles and their haloes of blurred headlights. I’ll warm my cold, drenched bones with seasonal spicy hot drinks in gingerbread, cinnamon, and pumpkin flavours, and make frizzy hair fashionable with berets and faux fur bucket hats. When rusted, heart-shaped leaves drift like sailboats in puddles that span the path of the park, I’ll cross the entire sea in a single leap; but I’m tired of running in the rain.

When I’m not officiating sartorial marriages, I nurture a long-term, committed relationship with the habitual. I’d go as far as to say that my least sexiest quality is the fact I fucking love to make a plan and stick to it. Or at least, I try to. Count on me to compile a folder full of important documents for our holiday — and also lose my boarding pass for someone to spot on the floor just 10 minutes before we board the plane. It’s all about finding your balance. Far from Didion’s relentless dog days, I’ve become accustomed to a clockwork calendar of seasons – an understanding that the endurance of dreary, wet winters will be rewarded with bright, balmy summers. Only this year, after what feels like the longest winter of our lives, it seems that the deal’s off.

Deep down, we’re all just dumb descendants of worshippers of the sun and the moon. Before we had the ability to bend light to our will with the flick of a switch, our lives were governed by the cycles of morning and evening; we awoke with the sunrise at dawn, and slept under shadowy moonlight when darkness fell; to survive — and indeed thrive – was to adapt under the rule of two giant spheres in the sky. Fast-forward two million years — and even as I write this surrounded by fairy lights, the warmth of the kitchen light from the open door next to me, and the colourful flare of an antique Tiffany-esque floor lamp in the corner, Manchester’s moody grey skies creeping in through the window are a string of missed notes in the symphony of my body’s rhythms. I’m caught in a cycle of closing my front door while pressing play on T Swift’s ‘‘tis the damn season’, before realising that it is in fact not the damn season!

But if a single piece of glowing carbon connected by wires and a battery can trick our silly little brains into wakefulness, then we can shepherd ourselves into the rebirth of spring. The end of one of my favourite Ada Limón poems — and possibly some of my favourite words ever — reads, “Patient, plodding, a green skin growing over whatever winter did to us, a return / to the strange idea of continuous living despite the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then / I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a slick new leaf / unfurling like a fist, I’ll take it all.”

It’s a rule of mine to always bring a book wherever I’m going, and the collection in which this poem features is often the book that I drop into my tote when I’m halfway out of the house. Each time I come to feast on Limón’s fervent revelations, my hunger is different. Sometimes, I’m searching for heartbreak I can sit in, a person to reciprocate my rage, or a way to simply name what I’m feeling; every time, I lick my plate clean — running my tongue along the edge of my knife for good measure. This time, I’m devouring the promise of new beginnings — and tomorrow, I’ll paint my nails mint green.