The Here and Now: My New Favourite Place

One of my best friends has tattooed on the inside of each of her forearms, just below the elbow: ‘here’ and on the other ‘now’. I recently told her that it’s the best tattoo I’ve ever seen. I don’t think I fit tattoos and I’m glad I don’t have one, but I kindly asked her that, if one night in a reckless abandon of consciousness I decide to visit the tattooist, could she please not let him engrave the Chinese symbol for soya sauce, but insist he writes, simply: ‘here and now’.

The reason being that lately, I am a bit obsessed with the concept of ‘here and now’. It is somewhat depressing to call the most natural thing in the world ‘a concept’, but as a life-long resident of my head, and having met many fellow thought-dwellers, I think we’re as far away from the here and now as a society as we are from planet Eris. We’re just as familiar with it too. Still, it does sound like declaring an obsession with breathing – I heard of this awesome trend called ‘inhale’ the other day and I am so keen to try it out. Sadly, that isn’t too far away from the truth either. (I’ve learned a lot of new things about breathing, but that’s for another blog post.)

I would like to explain a bit more about this ‘concept’, but to do so, allow me to muse back to last Sunday morning.

I woke up in London and it had just stopped raining. The sky had the colour of white wet towels and the air was humid and fresh. The kind of fresh that means the droplets of rain have washed down with them the aerosol particles in the atmosphere. I took my MacBook and a red Moleskin notebook and made my way to a coffee shop. I had been in the same coffee shop the previous day and made a point to return as it was just the way I imagine coffee shops should be: cosy but bright, busy but spacious, noisy but unobtrusive.

The ceilings were high and there were contemporary, wet-paint artworks on the walls. I sat at a window table and ordered an oat latte from an Asian lady with peach-blushed cheeks. I expected my coffee to be a cup of foamy, sweet deliciousness, but as my milk came from the Poaceae grass family, instead of a cow, it was curdled and bitter. It didn’t matter. I never finish my coffee anyway. Next to me sat a man in his sixties. He was snowy-haired, with a grey polo neck and round glasses. He had crossed over his legs and was reading The Sunday Times while eating his salmon-cheese bagel.

Across from me sat a girl – actually, a woman in her twenties but I assumed she was the same age as me. (Despite factual evidence, I still think of myself as a ‘girl’.) She looked very much like a French friend I had at university, called Marie. When I took my glasses off to focus on the screen in front of me, I couldn’t make out her contours any longer so in my head the two images merged, until the blond, blue-eyed girl sitting opposite became Marie in a black sweater. She sat alone for some time and then came another girl. It was apparent from all the Oh-y-osh-I-can’t-believe-this and the You-haven’t-changed-at-all! that the two hadn’t met since middle school. One had gone to study in Berlin, which I had already kind of guessed by her squared, vintage-Casio digital watch. And the other was an architecture student in Cambridge. Ed Sheeran’s ‘Thinking Out Loud’ was playing softly in the background and though I loved to be thinking about someone calling me ‘darling’ and loving me ’till we’re 70, I put my AirPods in and played a ‘creative concentration’ playlists to block out their conversation. I was clearly becoming too invested. Was she going to break up with her boyfriend? The two seemed to be having a good time, but did this mean they were going to meet again? I hoped so.

I opened a white Word document and got ready to write but the cursor sat blinking and I soon realised I couldn’t. Something was pulling me back. I could say it was distraction, but it wasn’t, because my mind was uncharacteristically quiet. The wooden chair I was sitting on was hard and I felt held. Gently, a sense of warmth spread through me. It started somewhere in my chest and spilled over up to my throat where it gripped and relaxed me in equal measure. I kept looking outside the big window at the Ocado buses delivering groceries, the relaxed, Sunday-justified step of passers-by. Usually, I would have gotten out my phone to upload a story, to share this idyll with whoever was currently co-experiencing the day with me. Not then. I didn’t understand why, but I couldn’t move, I couldn’t think, I didn’t want to describe the feeling, the moment to anyone else.

Then slowly as my system adjusted to this newfound state, the realisation came to me. This was what being present felt like, this was the here and now. And praise God, it was perfect.

 To Reality
With Love,
N.