Indoor Voices 🤫🤫🤫: Coffeecore: The Winter Garden

1.

Even you, my little flâneur, need to get out of the city sometimes, no matter how much you love it. Take the 憧れ line to northernmost end, and get off at the last stop. It is neither the country nor the city here, but a kind of in-between-place where everything is shifting. The old estate with the winter garden is going to seed on the edges, and there are certain places where the plants get the upper end in the sticky mid-summer, but it not a ruin yet.

You enter through the conservatory, where you can feel the water content in your veins and the ferns touch your legs ever so gently as you walk to the makeshift counter, and order from the small machine the colour of a particular variety of chalcedony. You ask for a doppio, for the doubled arches and the enfilade of doorways that ratatats its way into the heart of the house, where glancingly, you think you see something and then blink and don't. Desire is fickle that way.

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You thought the city could teach you everything there was to know about ornament; its infinite variety, but here things are different. There is a sinuousness with which the cabbage roses climb the the courtyard pilasters, the budding peonies with their heads drooping full and heavy. Their scent lingers in the air, hanging on the dew, which forms and forms in unending drops. You catalogue the features of your absent lover with an accuracy that is architectural, planned out and sketched as if you have already fashioned this estate, with its fountains and pillaging gardens, slowly pushing out the walls and stones. You could not have this in the city, that which is formed itself and maps onto you, but here, in the distance, at the end of the line, in the conservatory knocking back a little white cup, the boundaries cantilever out at the centre, acclimatise to your longing.

Absent things are more present everywhere else: in windowpanes, in shadows, in long and luxuriantly curled hair, wrought in impossible stone. There are some things, though, that must always be drawn from life. You run the length of the glasshouse, tracing your fingertips against the fogged glass for each of these things, so many of them and then just the one, over and over, unutterably waiting.

You climb the blush pink stairs that curve like remembering. When you met last spring you promised to remember everything, but there are so many meetings, there in the Coffeecore metropole where everything is possible and all the lines cross at the centre. There was a particularity with which you reflected each other, mirroring, as if you were the same sides of some exponential continuity shooting up along the y-axis. You went to the park together, the wilder one on the hill behind the botanic garden. You named the wildflowers and the grasses, the dog violets and cowslips and red valerians.

You could do this again here, and more, you think, watching the fountain, overflowing with the recent rain, pour over onto the mossy stones of the inner court. This is a hallway where, if you sigh heavily, it echoes back and echoes again, into the other corridors. How many sighs have lingered here over the years, how have they accreted in the colonnades and fluted borders? The sun lands between the pillars like the ivory keys of a Dutch clavichord, just now turning from cream to a soft yellow at the edges. The Well-Tempered Clavier is tempered well, yes, but no one said it would be easy, little flâneur, easy to hum along with your ricocheting fingers. Point without counterpoint ceases to remember anything.

If you fashioned a makeshift ring then, was it kept? Treasured? Hidden? There is a particular type of chalcedony called chyrsoprase, and a snuffbox somewhere made of it. There is no snuff in it now, as it sits on the dresser, holding you imagine-- what thing so happily encrusted? The peonies are like heavy stones as you lean against the mat of the vines. You trace their curvatures. Encrustation tries to keep things here as long as possible, to fix them in time, space, memory, so that they remain precious and cannot slip us; trading one archway for another, the sun for the sudden shade. If the vines grew around your fingers and the roots came up and the leaves spread, you could be fixed here forever, grown into a frame. The city never ceases, it moves and moves, but here you could be fixed. Is that what you want, to be the fixed point in a compass rose, to at once orient, fix a north, and stop spinning? Would the universe still run and clang in your absence, would the doors still open and announce themselves with a small ring of the bell? Absence is kind of difficulty that suits you-- you are always in one place, thinking at once of someplace else. This is the trick of the city, that knows how to both the place and the someplace else when you leave it.

In the conservatory you can hear laughter and the clink of glasses, the tables filled but not uncomfortably full. The city smells like the city but the winter garden smells of so many things: the flowers, yes, but also the marble and the shale, the slow-mouldering finishes, vetiver, tomato leaves in spring rain, oleander branches, an unspooled length of cassette tape. Somewhere behind tress a crane or an egret dips its bill into a little stream, calling.

All at once you forget words, forget the ability to write a single letter. The wrought iron rim of the table grows cold as the sun starts to set. It is in the crepuscular that the winter garden is most alive, at dawn or dusk when the sun is biting the lip of the horizon in a kiss, the kind that draws on and leaves you gasping at the end, whether for air or for everything. If you look in the fountains or the ponds you will your own face reflected. You long for it to be that other thing, who you would rather be than yourself, the two selves now, each to each. The puddle ripples at the touch of your hand. You drop a small grey stone into it. The dregs of your espresso have adhered to the saucer.

It is a handsome saucer. The coffee set is wood and stainless steel, coated with a ready-tarnishing silver that hasn't yet browned. Its shapes are geometric, final, mirroring the Forms which the Coffeecore Extended Universe, being a sometimes thing of Platonists, thinks approaches most the beautiful. If you are careless, you will knock the saucer off the garden table and it will break. The philosophers would tell you that its two broken halves, once made intimate again with glued porcelain, constitute instead one mended soul. Point, Counterpoint. The clavichord hammers leap past the double frets in a distant sitting room. BWV 847, for it is no crime here, where the ornament skews itself intentionally uneven, to prefer the minor key. The spoon hovers near the edge of the bowl, just above tipping.

When it is winter, you will take the same train to the end of the line again, again when it is winter, and in the night the towers of the skyline and then the stars illuminate the falling snow. You will skate alone on the black ice of the frozen pond behind the house, the cold tips of your fingers singing. You will trace with your skates the name of the one whom you have wanted, over and over again in incised loops. In another city somewhere, on the obverse side of ours, you petition the sky that it will be recognised, this yearning's name-- patterned into the cream, the clouds, the bent page-corner of an open book.