Wait.
Wait for absolutely ages. Wait for so long you almost forget.
Distract yourself from dwelling on it.
Convince yourself it was never meant to be like those things that people say won’t pass you by.
But never truly believe that specific thing happened for a reason.
Push it to the back of your mind, like that mug with the long-faded pattern that sits in your kitchen cupboard. Even though you don’t need it any more. It is not used and no longer serves a purpose, but it is there.
Until, maybe, one day, when you weren't expecting it, it serves a purpose again.
All the world is not a stage
Earlier this year I wrote a poetry show about my relationship with creativity. How it was something I treasured as a child and teenager and then put it away in a box named' ‘stuff I used to do’ when I became an adult.
During the writing process, I reflected on something that happened around the time of my A-levels. It was the time I ‘almost’ got to play Ophelia. Not just in a school production, but in a competition for schools and colleges to win a chance to perform at the newly reconstructed Globe Theatre in London.
In the end our college didn’t enter the competition and this was a story I dwelled on, until it lived its own life in my subconscious. Every time I heard that Kylie and Nick Cave song the memory would resurface. Any time I saw a copy of that Millias painting of Ophelia a set of ‘what ifs’ would replay once more. As time progressed the more trivial it felt.
Binning the box
A few decades later I found myself turning the experience of this ‘lost opportunity’ into a poem. And as I performed the poem in a fringe show at various festivals during the summer it felt like what people call ‘closure’. It felt like I had taken my box named ‘stuff I used to do’ and started to do the stuff I loved to do again. And I lost the box to put it all back into.
However, it was not until this week, after seeing a social media post about a new spoken word night, that I got closer to what the term ‘closure’ could actually mean in respect of this trivial matter. A matter so trivial I remembered it for decades. So maybe wasn’t so trivial to teenage me.
I emailed Shakespeare North Playhouse and asked if I could come along to perform my poem at their new spoken word evening, Scratch, one night. They replied and said ‘how about tomorrow?’. I had no other plans, for a change, so I said yes. Within 48 hours of seeing the social media post I was in a the shiny new Shakespeare North Playhouse performing my poem.
And I got closure. A few decades later, I had performed in a Shakespeare affiliated space. Swish stuff.
Closure through community
The theatre’s poet in residence, Charlie Staunton, created such a welcoming and supportive evening, as so many spoken word evenings do. Each one has its own sense of community, and the ones that are still welcoming to newcomers are some of the best.
The evening had pieces with humour, heart, emotion, community spirit and imagination. We are all better for being listened to. We feel like we belong. A sense of community is created through sharing. We get to make progress, breakthroughs, and in some cases closure through doing so.
We are all better for hearing other perspectives, experiences and escaping through imaginative lenses.
Sometimes a poem or a piece of writing helps you put a piece of the jigsaw you didn’t even know was missing into place. Sometimes it is your own poem or writing, sometimes it is someone else’s words that help you. Some times it is someone finding something new in your work that you hadn’t even noticed was there.
Sometimes you get closure by opening the boxes you had previously marked as ‘closed’.