22. Swampfeather Season, Part I: The Magic
Confusion / comprehension
In this edition: 2024 did not get better. At some point you have to let go of the strings of rationality for a while, which are often just as much of an illusion as anything else. This will be another three-part series, this time accompanied by a sketched-together demo EP of songs I’ve written in the last six months. They all fit together, the songs and the writing, but I’m not exactly sure how - so feel free to consume the pieces as you like.
“Girl. The way this is all going to be a Figs for Breakfast…” Ferdi looks down the U-Bahn platform, and then pointedly back at me. It’s their birthday, late September 2024.
I make a noncommittal noise. “Yeah. No. I don’t think I want to record any more of this year, to be honest.”
They shrug, and set their mouth in such a way that makes it clear some things are inevitable. “We’ll see.”
I haven’t wanted to write, and at the same time I’ve been desperate to write. Notebooks full of things scrawled directly from my brain. I haven’t written like that since I was a teenager. I started sometime in the summer, I don’t remember when, and I have written labels and notes all over the books telling myself not to read them. Not yet. So I haven’t checked. Perhaps at some point they’ll help me make sense of a year that I find it so hard to understand. But this isn’t yet the season for sense-making, it seems. We’re still amidst the strangeness.
The first of the birds was a crow. At least, I think it was.
Many of the birds that would follow were also crows, singular and in flocks, and many were not crows, and some were not even birds, but this first one was alone on a branch above the bike path in Hasenheide, and it saw me long before I saw it.
I called it a crow in the song I wrote, later that day. But I called it a raven, just after it happened. I know this because I was, as usual, as I am in such a large percentage of my life, sending a voice note to Lisa. I scroll back in my phone and listen. Wednesday 11th September, and I’m sort of mid-rant about something.
“And I’m like, I’m not going to engage, I’m sitting there thinking, I’m not going to engage. So, oh – this is great, a crow just dropped a nut in front of me to break it. I’m tempted to help it out. I think they got it open. Did they get it open? Let’s see – almost.”
There is a crunching noise, some shuffling, and then the voice note stops, and a new one begins.
“Okay I had to send that message because I accidentally turned off my screen in trying to pick up the walnut. And I opened it, but I lost the raven, I can’t see it anymore. Come back, raven, I opened the walnut for you! Oh, maybe I should have just left it. They thought I was taking their food. Come back! Oh, there you are. Come back little raven! Okay it hasn’t flown away. I think it’s checking me out, seeing what I’m going to do. Alright I’ll walk away, so it comes back for its walnut. That’s so cool though. Damn, that’s really cheered me up. That’s really good. I kind of want to wait and watch and see if it comes back. Maybe I’ll just stay here for a bit.”
Why did I say raven? They look very different in Germany – the crows here are hooded crows, with grey feathers on their neck and back. I can see a dark bird in my mind’s eye, perched on the branch, watching me carefully. Was there grey? What was I noticing? Was it a slip of the tongue? Does it matter? It doesn’t, does it? And yet I stand in my kitchen, relistening to the voice note from five months ago, interrogating my past self. What did you know? What have I forgotten?
I sing “crow” in the song, and so that’s the story that’s preserved. That’s the detail set in stone, and I don’t know what it would change if that word were different, other than throwing off the rhythm of the lyric. What I was trying to meaningfully capture was the moment of connection – you’ve dropped this difficulty at my feet, and I can help, and I’m helping. I’m not going to use it to trick you or hurt you. Have a good meal.
The fabric of time has a strange, painful quality to it at the moment – which admittedly seems to happen every winter, and just started earlier this time around. I look at the calendar, piecing together events, seeing little boxes that I know didn’t turn into actual meetings, seeing empty squares my memory can slowly fill in with this face, those words, that meal, these streets. This happened, then that, then that. This is what I thought would happen. This is what actually happened. What actually happened?
If I look at the squares too long, they start folding up on each other, like the template for some strange multifaceted polyhedron that I could cut out and glue together – this tab here, crease here, connect here. Create something with odd space inside it, an uncomfortable construction, as though I didn’t follow the instructions in the right order.
So many things feel out of order. I’m feeling things out of order. A huge emotion that doesn’t feel justified or make sense until something else happens, weeks or months later. A lingering set of threads still pulling at something long, long past. For several weeks in autumn I was getting what I called “emotional notifications” – something in my body would react seconds or minutes before I received a particularly loaded text message. I’d wake from deep sleep for no reason, phone on silent, too early. I’d stop in the street or on a path in the woods, perplexed. I didn’t know how to avoid an anticipatory response to something I didn’t know was coming. How does that even make sense? I archived chats, turned off the buzzing, and still it persisted.
“Well, we’re certainly not going to read into this as some kind of deep emotional quantum entanglement,” says Carrington, thoroughly amused, as I relay this phenomenon to him. “Even though there’s definitely some kind of deep emotional quantum entanglement,” he continues, laughing to himself.
I’m so grumpy. “Literally, what the fuck. The whole thing is reinforcing the most fucking woo-woo corners of my brain and I super don’t need that right now.” I know he’s indulging both me and that woo, the part of my existence that overlaps with a somewhat fantastical interpretation of the world, and I almost wish he wouldn’t. I’m pushing for the cynicism.
I know there are quarters where I’ll get the opposite. I show up to C and H’s place with the vivid red mark between my eyebrows that appears for reasons I’ve never been quite able to place, except inner turmoil or tiredness. “It’s not like it corresponds to a wrinkle or a place where the skin folds. And it moves around a bit. It’s been happening since I was a kid,” I say helplessly.
“Witchy as fuck,” says C, eyes wide and grinning.
I can’t be grumpy about it, when they are being so endearing and affirming. There are so many weird commonalities between our respective histories, and they always seem to know the exact feeling I have about magic. “Wait ‘til you hear about the squirrels.”
The Botanischer Garten is especially lovely in autumn. For a while, they’d blocked off the paths to one of my favourite corners, but they’re open again now. It’s mid-October and I’m meant to be meeting up with Betül, but she’s been tied up with visiting relatives.
I grab some lunch and head over to the little grove of trees that is in fact all one tree. I’ve been convinced since the first time I came here, five years ago, that this is a Court of the Fae, a place where the fabric between planes grows thin. The trunks rise from the earth at a curve, indicating the common root system, encircling an area of dirt.
I’m gripped by an impulse. I think of the lake, the week prior. So dramatic, Carrington had said. Yes, exactly, and I stand by it! I’d retorted. Something in me needs to remember how it makes me feel, to obey the pull of the strange and storylike.
I put my bag down, and check the surrounds. There’s nobody who can see me, as far as I can tell. Facing the largest trunk, at the deepest point of the grove, I sink to a brief curtsey. I’m thinking of all the things I learned as a child about the rules of the Fair Folk. As I stand again, there’s another strange tugging somewhere in my body. Call that a curtsey? It’s not enough.
I try again, deeper this time, sweeping my face towards the earth, and as I raise my head I notice a squirrel perched on the base of the trunk nearest to me, off to my right, very close by. It’s watching me carefully. By the time I’m standing fully upright again it’s started approaching tentatively, until it’s sitting almost at my feet, looking up at me. We regard each other for a long moment, and then it scampers off beyond the circle of trees. I lean my head against the nearest trunk and start crying.
Once I gather myself, I go to sit on the bench next to the trees with my lunch. A moment later, the squirrel is back, looking up at me from the path nearby. A second squirrel has joined it, and is foraging for acorns in the grass. I regard my lunch doubtfully. “Is this what you’re after? I don’t think you’ll like it.” I place a small amount on the ground, some distance from my feet, but the squirrels couldn’t be less interested in it.
Instead, they busy themselves with burying acorns, but periodically come back to look at me expectantly. I’m unable to answer them, nor they me, but I think we’re agreeing on something. I voice note H, telling him about the tree and the squirrels as they leap around me.
“I’ve been very careful not to step into mushroom rings. Because, you know, I don’t want an unscheduled trip to the Fae realm. But then again, my Mum last night was saying that I do need to take a holiday, and I told myself I wouldn’t go to any more airports, so maybe this is the solution. It’s just that you can’t schedule those kinds of things and god knows when I’d be back. Could be a hundred years or so. Or the blink of an eye but I’d be very old. Or I’d be the same age but my mind would be very old, like those Narnia kids. Who’s to say? Probably safer to just find a more local destination and stay away from the mushroom rings.”
The best advice Mum offers me is on the day of the lake, ten days earlier. I am shivering, unable to stop – not a panic attack, not a dissociative episode, but some third thing I am profoundly undelighted to have added to the repertoire. “Shock, I think?” I’m saying down the phone, gripping the edge of my coffee table. “I’ve missed my appointment, I’m hosting Unicorn tonight, I’ve been in meetings all weekend, I don’t have time for this,” I tell her.
“Honey, you need to get into some cold water. It’ll reset your system. Can you go to the sauna or something, use a cold plunge? A bath isn’t going to cut it I think.”
My brain is working, but only slowly. “Well… I could… but I think uh, fortunately, I live in Berlin and it’s October and fifteen degrees outside, so I could also just go to the lake?”
“That’s a really great idea,” she says. Mum hates cold water, refuses to get into the ocean unless it’s bath temperature, but she knows me. She remembers. “I really think that’s going to help you.”
And she’s correct. I grab a towel and a picnic blanket and walk right out my door, onto a bus, then a train, and then – shedding my clothes swiftly at the shoreline – straight into Schlachtensee.
(“You walked into the lake?” asks Carrington. “So dramatic!”
“Yes, exactly, and I stand by it!” I retort. “I needed to be the most dramatic version of myself! I think it’s very healthy, actually!”)
I barely feel the cold at all. It’s just all clear cool beautiful water glassy clear smooth deep green and then trees, still half the leaves all gold and sweet and russet and crimson and then ducks nearby splashing and sand falling away under my feet and then just as the edges of sharp wet chill start to chew at my shoulders I turn, treading water, and there on a branch I’d walked right past is a grey heron. It’s watching me impassively, more detached than the squirrels will be. But it’s not asking anything of me. It’s just calmly bearing witness, adjusting its feathers. I’ve never been so close to a heron before.
There’s almost no other humans at the lake today – I see a few walking along the other shore. I dive beneath the water once, twice, three times, because it only really works if you get your whole body in. I think about what makes a place sacred. I think about all the people who’ve been here, all the people I’ve been here with, what it means to be here alone, what the heron is thinking about me, whether the ducks have opinions on the matter. And then shivers start again, but this time they make sense, so I know it’s time to get out.
For all that nothing makes sense, I actually have never felt like I understand my own feelings and their effect on my body so much as I have in the last six months. Something happens – a pain, a tension, a relief – and I can connect it to a cause. This stands in total disagreement with the roiling confusion that sweeps me from one hour day week month into the next, and yet the two things have to exist at once. I understand – I don’t understand. I name my emotions twice a day, when I remember to.
I’ve been thinking about what the concept of magic is, and I suppose in the end it’s about processes we can’t perceive or comprehend, such that they become either invisible or impenetrably mysterious. We find causal links between two phenomena, two states of being, two points in time, despite a lack of tangible connection. We know things without receiving the information, or things change, transform, disappear, without an apparent or fathomable force acting upon them. Magic! If someone walks through a door, we understand why they’ve disappeared from view. We know about electricity, and how one can summon light without ever touching the bulb itself. Magic requires us to not understand.
Carrington and I are walking along Regent’s Canal on a night in early January 2025 when I describe myself as being some measure of “credulous” when it comes to the occult. It’s nice to be walking along a canal with him again – since he moved back to London last year, I’ve missed having him living around the corner, available for spontaneous canal walks. After fourteen years, we are often good foils to one another, and it’s very calming.
“That’s not a very generous word to use about yourself,” he says.
“I’m projecting,” I reply. “I suspect you think I’m joking when I say these things have an effect on me, but I don’t think I entirely am.”
“Hmm. Yeah, no, I did sort of think that was the whole bit we were doing. Disconcerting to learn that’s not the case.”
“On some level it is a bit, I guess. But I think, uh, if you get right down to the centre of the matryoshka doll of my belief system, there’s a sort of Baba Jaga-type witch living in there, who works with magic but is sort of wry about it.”
He looks at me with his eyebrows lowered for a beat. “Sure. Okay.” We’ve reached the yellow-lit street again, up away from the dark water.
“I mean, there was that dream I had.”
“Yeah. The dream was very weird.”
It’s there in my journal – 24th October 2024 – written upon waking.1 In my dream I was late to Heathrow, bag not packed properly… none of these clothes are useful – 45 minutes until the boarding closes, will a taxi get me there? Yes? Where do you even find a taxi these days?
Later that day, Carrington and I meet to walk along the canal in Berlin. He’d flown in early the previous morning to make it on time for a bureaucratic appointment, the kind you can’t miss.
“And so I got to London City airport, and was trying to scan in – and it turns out I’d got the wrong airport, I booked a ticket from the wrong airport,” he’s telling me. I grip his arm, eyes wide. “What?” he asks.
“Uh – was it – wait, finish the story.”
“Yeah so I was meant to go to Heathrow, and the gate’s closing in 45 minutes, so I was trying to decide whether to take a taxi – what?”
“What?”
I pull out the journal. We stare at each other.
“Well, how’s that for emotional quantum entanglement?”
It’s autumn, sometime, some night, I’m in the midst of it. I’m in my bathroom gripping the sink and vibrating all over as I think about all the things flying at me and from me, hectic, incomprehensible. I think so hard, so hard, so hard, imagining that some of this weird magic can emanate out from me, and not just pour into me. If I think hard enough, maybe it’s a two-way line, maybe I can do something – something – anything –
Exhausted, my own creased face regards me from the mirror. If there’s two types of magic, I think at her, then there’s changing and there’s knowing. And maybe you only get one. What if you only get one?
I think about what it would mean, to change without knowing. I think, I want to know. I want to know. I want to know.
Part II will come soon. You can sign up to receive it with this one magic button:
I read it, after all. I shouldn’t have. Or maybe I should have. It hurt. We have to go gently on that path.