“The trumpets, meanwhile, still blare forth

 ‘The Truth and nothing but The Truth!’”

Virginia Woolf, Orlando

The final few hours of October’s final evening have always been spent in a solitary state. A speckled blanket cast over my head, thin cotton against my back to make up for the sticky, self induced heat of my surroundings, and a curtain–mostly drawn–beating against the open window and occasionally letting the spring rain spit upon my sheets. Nothing but dreaming upon pages. Nothing but sweat upon my back. Within my self-imposed discomfort, I have found an annual, uninviting ritual. A ritual that primarily consists of my questioning; how uncomfortable can I make myself before it becomes palatable? Habitable, perhaps? I’m not sure, not really.

Within this climate, I typically resort to reading. It is not a night for self-reflection, October is never so. My personhood is almost entirely pacified in October, for it is the month of dreaming, and I have conceived too many characters out of too many people to see anyone or anything as entirely tangible. Thus, within those final few hours of October’s final evening, I clamber up, and up, and up. I sit with the rabbit and the picture-book duck and take tea and talk backwards. I settle. I have settled in too many worlds to find footing in my own. I think I’ve read enough books now to say with great certainty that I am made up of cut-out imaginary worlds; I have slathered paste down their spine and stuck them within my own memory, as if they were mine, and have been mine for years and years. 

Needless to say, this feeling doesn’t just pertain to my own personhood as a writer and my habit of veiling myself every October. Writers have always been born from a melting pot of other writers, who in turn have been born from a melting pot of their own, and so on and so forth until all we are left with is fairytales and folklore, semiotics and language. This remains the case for me; I am a basin, sat atop a washstand, collecting water and gurgling. A drainpipe, digestion, all one and the same. A catchment for stories and off-cuts from author’s interviews, swirling like milk through the marrow of tea leaves. Fiction is the only truth I have ever known, and whilst it is quite uncomfortable to spend one’s last October night hidden beneath one’s blankets; it is not, and never has been, an entirely lonely practice.

Perhaps you might join me this evening–why, your tea has only just begun to steep!

Emmanuelle Kate.

Editor’s Note.

The Secret Garden Journal

A Tea Party with The Man in The Moon