Jae is troubled by philosophical questions. She mulls them over in private and spends many hours discussing them with her grandmother, but finds no answers. But when her grandmother dies she leaves Jae a perplexing note: "seek and ye shall find." Th...
It is a cold, crisp morning and Jae stares through her bedroom window feeling a rush of resentment towards the bare branches of the old magnolia tree in the front garden. As spring approaches it's become her habit to make daily checks for buds, within which hairy little capsules lie dormant a brief yet magnificent blossoming. When these flame-like shoots of concentrated energy appear on the twigs, Jae knows an extraordinary process will have commenced within the tree, one which will soon produce a luminous vision with the power to revitalise her soul. For the precious few weeks of full bloom, the first thing she'll see when she wakes in the morning will be an exquisite profusion of dazzling pink pastels directly outside her window, as if she were rousing from sleep in the Garden of Eden.
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This year she desperately awaits this moment convinced it will have the power to rescue her life force from the steadily encroaching emotional wilderness that continues to engulf her. But when, each morning, the branches continue to show no signs of life, a fleeting rage comes over her as if a personal injustice has been inflicted. Today, predictably, there's nothing new to see. Irritated, she slumps despondently back on to her bed thinking that the barren, lacklustre tree perfectly symbolises her life.
Although at first, after leaving university with a degree... and a baby... she was happy, even grateful, to be living with her parents, it now feels mundane and repetitive, and slightly embarrassing at the age of thirty-three. They live in a perfectly nice three-bedroom detached house in a perfectly nice Sussex village, but for Jae life is dreary, each day the same as the previous, despite Chloe, now age five, providing her with all the challenges of parenthood. She feels trapped, without point or purpose, and is convinced she has the potential to do, and be, so much more, although she can't say what. A critical voice in her head tells her she's become bogged down in Home County averageness, in humiliating mediocrity, and is slowly suffocating to death.
She stares gloomily up at the knobbly artex ceiling and thinks, the tree and I are both in suspension, sunk in a wintry catatonia waiting in silence to blossom. But what if we never do?
A few minutes later she gets out of bed and heads to the bathroom. Her long brown hair straggles down her back and she notices her nail varnish is chipped and needs to come off. After a quick wash, she retraces her steps to the bedroom trying to ignore the lingering feelings of disquiet. She picks up her phone and makes her way downstairs for a cup of tea. As she huddles into her dressing gown to keep warm she absently scrolls through her Facebook newsfeed and checks WhatsApp for messages.
When the kettle boils in noisy fury she realisesshe's been mindlessly watching a video of miniature goats jumping on a bouncymetal bridge. She sees her reflection distorted in the shiny metal on the sideof the kettle. A hideous gargoyle stares back. She thinks, there must be something more than this monotonous, predictable life.Does anything I do mean anything at all? It seems to Jae that she'sexperiencing her life from a hazy distance as though she's standing behind awindow pane blurred by rain while everything takes place on the other side, outof focus and remote. I want to find peacewithin myself, to be settled and content like I used to be
