It is one am on a Thursday, and the light from my phone screen outlines the corners of my room in a quiet blue haze. I am alone, a little scared and a little lost. February has carved all daylight out of my schedule, and, in my dirty bathroom mirror, my face looks almost as grey as the tired winter skies.
It is the time of year again when limbs begin to feel heavy. When I remember that I am in the same skin as the 17-year-old who found showering for the first time in a week the only productive thing she was capable of doing, I tell myself that I hardly recognise her now. But her fingerprints are still found on the hours it takes me to get out of bed each morning and the unticked reminder to brush my teeth at least once a day.
I remind myself that I have done this before and turn up my music.
“no one visits me here but you”
This is the first line of No Visitors, by Scottish indie-folk-punk singer The Narcissist Cookbook. Matt’s singing is gentle and melancholic, lingering on each musing of the song’s narrator – the Delphic oracle – as she softly mourns her long-distant past.
The lyrics are reminiscent of a culture I have spent my life studying, and they swiftly pull me back into a reflection on my own past. I visited Delphi around two years ago. The edges of the memory have not yet frayed with time; I recall looking out, on a steep and rocky mountainside, into the wide valley, rugged with its stony exoskeleton, as if a limestone giant had fallen and scattered its remains across the mountain pass.
I had recently turned 18 – an age that, up until that point, I wasn’t sure I would make it to. I was slowly learning how to live without terror, to accept my body and the space it takes up, and to direct my thoughts away from my own destruction. I was coming out of the most difficult few years of my life, and, for the first time in recent memory, I could imagine a future in which I was happy.
The sky was so blue: gazing at it felt like staring into the iris of an incomprehensibly large god. The high stone walls amplified the soft birdsong, and despite the February chill, the sun felt warm on my skin. My friend turned to look at me and smiled, “You look so pretty in this light! Let me take a photo”.
“and you want to ask me something i can tell”
An old olive tree spiralled out from a ledge a little way up from the ruins we were stood upon. We made our way to it and sat below its pale arms, playing the songs which had accompanied us through our teenage years on a low volume from our croaky iPhone speakers.
Sitting there, I felt I needed an oracle. I had so many questions: will I always feel like this? Am I where I’m supposed to be? Am I who I’m supposed to be? Am I worth loving? Who am I?
The wind rustled my hair and the pale olive leaves to the same tender tune. My friend noticed my damp eyes and put her hand on mine without saying a word, and, to my own surprise, I found myself entertaining the thought that maybe it was all worth it to be in this moment.
I had forgotten that oracles don’t give direct answers. I had forgotten that her words cannot be understood without the insight of retrospect.
“i guess a temple is wherever you go to find your god”
I have been studying Classics since I was 12. Now, with exams approaching – ones that I am not sure I am capable of passing – I find it a little too easy to lose sight of why I love the subject. No Visitors reminds me of how it feels to see yourself in people that lived millennia ago, and, through them, to realise how fundamentally human we all are. When my mind whirls on me, repeating that I am uniquely unimportant, overly emotional, and mad in every irredeemable manner, my subject reminds me that I am not alone in my fears and that they will not bay at my heels forever.
Through Matt’s familiar voice, the oracle remarks that “nobody’s looked at me like you look at me for Apollo knows how long”, and I find myself at both ends. At Delphi, I found myself praying at a site that people have come to, beaten and bruised, with their struggles for thousands of years. Stood at the temple – crumbled with age yet no less beautiful – frail heart still beating, I may not have realised it at the time, but I did find a god of sorts there.
“you don’t need to keep your worries to yourself”
This is the final line of the song: a conclusive statement which stands out amongst the elegiac nostalgia of the prior verses.
Looking back over the photos we took, I can see the apprehensive joy in my smile. I was still too scared to let it reach the corners of my cheeks, anxious to carefully conduct every aspect of myself in the hope that it would help me feel more in control of the world spiralling around me. I wasn’t used to recovery yet – I felt mad and blind – and, despite all of that, I was more hopeful than I had been in years.
I think now that I felt happy, but I was too afraid to admit that to myself at the time, pushing my feelings to the corners of my mind and gazing back at the prophetic relics surrounding me.
The song fades into the quiet night, and it strikes me just how far I have come since that scared girl stood below the Delphic ridges. This winter, I know that I will make it to the longer and brighter days. When I am struggling to function, my partner, my family, and my friends remind me that they will love me no matter what, and I have learnt to believe them. I am reminded of how it feels to be terrified and lost and to keep going anyway, and I am reminded of a line from another favourite song of mine:
“We held on to hope of better days coming, and when we did we were right” – The Mountain Goats, You Were Cool.
My best friend gave me a pocket watch with this line engraved on its surface for my 18th birthday, and it still makes me tear up. This winter has been long and grey; I may be afraid, and sometimes I may feel alone, but the cold eases a little every year, and it is one that I have learnt well to bear.
The winter does not last forever, and none of us are without visitors.