The clouds in England have 2 ways of moving - part-time and full-time, and when I say part-time cloud movement, I think of the sheets of clouds that often plague the sky, a continual greyness that feels painted deep within the sky, with flickers of movements from the layered clouds. Then there is full time, the clouds throwing themselves across the landscape, often at record speed, granting us patches of blue and brief kisses of sunlight that feel like a gift with putting up with the abhorrent weather. Before I moved here, I often stared up at the clouds, asking them for an answer. In my science classes as a child, I was fascinated with the names of clouds and where they belonged in the spheres of the earth, their ability to affect my mood so greatly. For years I recorded videos of clouds, in hopes of doing something with them - making a film, writing a piece, using them as a tool to get back to something creative within myself.

I’ve never considered myself to be one of those lucky people that finds things on Facebook Marketplace, or even on the side of the road. So often I see my friends post on their Close Friends stories to marvel at the thing they found, a desk for their room, sofa for their living room. The best thing I once (my flatmate) actually found was a broken Macbook computer near our bins after a big snowstorm in 2022. She took it inside to take photos of it, and tried to sell it for £50. Sometimes I see her repost the listing on Facebook.

My day of luck came the other day when a rickety grey table was left outside someone’s house. I had just gone to the shops to get the rest of the ingredients for a cake I was making, and in quick succession found myself tucking a tiny carton of milk into one pocket, a package of butter in the other, and carrying this table home and into my garden.

I washed off the table and a spray-painted blue chair that’s been living in a stack in the mess of the garden that’s covered by a small papery awning, to sit at it immediately. I felt confused but delighted, much like the cats that visit the garden every evening, looking for attention and some form of understanding. After sitting for 5 minutes, I ran back inside and grabbed my crate of cherries from the fridge, along with a small knife, its blade no longer than my thumb, paper towels, and a bowl, and brought them to the table. I sat and started pitting them in the way I imagine my Baba doing so, our brief moments overlapping in the kitchen, the joy in seeing her knife skills pass to the other women of my family. I could just get a cherry pitter, I tell myself as I do the first few, but as every summer rolls around I find myself enjoying this motion of moving a cherry in one-felt swoop to half it and remove its pit. I did this on autopilot while staring up at the clouds, occasionally popping an unripe one one into my mouth, wondering how it got to be like this, part and full time. 

I thought about this table during the different chunks of my week, during downward dog in a yoga class and seeing a freckle I didn’t recognise, my heart pumping faster that I could count, giving myself the time to realize that the freckle was a scratch and in allowing myself to forget about it, it vanished, just as many of the grassy stains have disappeared since first cleaning it up. I thought about it when making Turkish coffee for my friends on my birthday, the lights in the kitchen not working and in the glow of their phone flashlights, I filled them in about one of fights I had with my roommate earlier in the day but neglected to mention the tiny act of resolve, the lack of apology but offer of wood stain for my table when I was ready. I thought about it on a walk around my neighbourhood when trying to find inspiration to create, thinking the table was perfect to write at but also to take Zoom meetings when allowed to work from home, taking a new path that still leads to London Fields, and hearing a toddler practice violin from a big bay window. I thought, that should be me right now, reeling after an 11 hour day of sitting at my desk, thinking of all the ways to make Outlook appear friendly, inviting to my tired, glassy eyes. 

I have thought a lot in terms of part and full time, my part-time job working in an office taking closer shape to that of full-time, full commitment and energy, even on the days I am not contracted to work, a sense of guilt that fills my Friday mornings for the day a week of which I am not obliged to answer, full-time being in terms of my art, being a musician, a writer, a leader, first and foremost, though hard to quantify for if I am forcing myself to go on a walk to feel connected to my creativity, is that just as much being an artist, I ask myself, struggling to find the hours or even the motivation to do the things that are rooted in the way I perceive the world. 

I saw one of my favourite writers, Rachel Cusk, speak on Monday night about her work and writing and approach to it all. She was soft and kind, often looking for the right words to speak on the heaviness of human existence, yet knew herself deeply, and spoke of the lack of doubts she had when engaging with her work, the writing, that for her, the work of learning to write was participating in the solitary act itself, away from people, a dance with sacrifice, one might say. I felt upset by this at first. I couldn’t envision a world of both, or, rather, of reality intermingling with my wishes.

There is a feeling I have when I spend time with my things - playing, writing - I’ve noticed, since I was a kid, in the way my clarinets come together, as I often talk about, or in the way I engage with words, their structures, narratives as a whole and how I might get to create them for those I care about most in this world, for people I have yet to know and may never encounter for longer than a moment, a brush of fingertips in exchange of a sentence, a glance across a concert hall, but then there is a reality, a growing up and acknowledgement of responsibility, of tending to what’s in front of me, the panes of wood on my table resembling that of my inbox, in need of sanding down, 

The feeling of never having enough hours in the day has haunted me since I was a child and I often wonder what It would feel like if it didn’t, if there was enoughness within creating and I didn’t view the work in terms of what to apply for but the ideas I could flirt with, even for a brief moment, not needing to take shape to mean x, to be valid to be awarded, on display, for some higher purpose. 

I remember getting a book about the daily routines of artists and writers and thinkers when I was about 16 and reading it feverishly, imagining myself engaging with art, with coffee breaks throughout the day, and feeling this very sense of enoughness, not promised in the book, but alluded to in the continual engagement with one’s craft. I am one to forget the artists with part-time jobs, my boyfriend Sidney reminding me of Franz Kafka working for the civil service and Richard Serra removing furniture from homes.  In conjunction with this was a rise in myself of wanting to be “productive”, the word casting a spell on my mind and the instant rewards of clearing an inbox or doing a computer task scratching an itch in my brain, finding a way of taking priority over playing and writing when they fluctuate in emotion, in feeling, in inspiration, promising sameness, stability, security.

When I was 18 my then-boyfriend asked me what my ideal day would look like and I didn’t know he was really asking me, “What do you want your life to feel like?” He got angry with me when I listed a day in time blocks, optimising my day to get exactly 3 hours of practice done before noon, score study for at least half an hour, edit, copy, paste, mechanically. I can’t help but feel angry with myself, too.

There is a third way the clouds move in England, which is not at all. On days like today, the sky seems to stand still in beauty as though drunk on Aperol spritzes, the clouds parking themselves and asking to be looked at, begging me for an answer. What will you say, Michelle, what will you say about what you do? 

I don’t fully understand it all of the time, my relationship to part and full time, but it grows, the two inform each other even when not wanting to the bat the other an eyelid. As I sit down at my table to begin cleaning off its legs, I say, I play and write, and do other work sometimes, too.