Here it Was, the Start of Life
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This extract is reproduced with permission from To Rest Our Minds and Bodies by Harriet Armstrong (Les Fugitives, 2025).
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Most of my early readings were on anthropology. The course guide had said that anthropology was the study of meaning and that was what I did want to study, meaning, I did very badly want to know what things fundamentally meant. I still felt that everything around me had some hidden core, I felt that the most important and central meanings were concealed and had to be effortfully unearthed. I really couldn’t wait for all those meanings to be revealed to me, I would do anything to have all of those meanings revealed.
The first anthropology lecture was on gifts. There was this theory that gifts served the purpose of binding people to each other. If someone gave you a gift then you were bound to them forever, or until you gave them an equivalent gift. If you gave them an equivalent gift then the bond would dissolve and you would be free. This was different to commodities, which were not socially meaningful, and tied nobody to anything.
In our seminar the supervisor Christina asked us if the seminar was a gift or a commodity. I thought this was easy, I said It’s a commodity because we pay tuition fees. Christina looked disparaging and almost actually hateful then and she said I’m not paid enough to be handing out commodities. The implication then was that the seminar was a gift, and that I was bound to Christina for the rest of my life. I felt that one of us had surely misunderstood the concept of the gift completely.
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That year I had to share public spaces with so many people, my bathroom was shared with six people and my kitchen with eight. This bothered me, I didn’t want to get up to go and make breakfast and be faced with some shirtless boy cooking ramen. I felt very visible all the time with all those shared things. All those shared things and the public courtyards which connected them made me think all the time of Foucault’s panopticon. I was constantly thinking of Foucault’s panopticon, then.
One morning I was cooking porridge and a very tall boy with this golden bob haircut came in and started cooking porridge too, both of us with our little pans on the induction stove. He said Hey and I said Hi and he said I’m Luke and then we had a long extended conversation about how he was a Master’s student studying computers and I was a third year doing some vague multidisciplinary social science course. It was a very boring conversation but I was so disappointed when both our pots of porridge finished cooking, I watched Luke leave the kitchen and I wanted to follow him down the hall shouting And tell me what exactly do you learn about computers. It wasn’t just because I wanted to prolong the conversation, the fact that Luke was studying computers really did make me think there must be something fascinating about computers which I had all along failed to detect.
I loved complex but ultimately arbitrary emotional dilemmas.
I stayed in my room for the whole rest of that day, sitting by the window on my laptop. I spent a long time looking through Luke’s Facebook account and I discovered that he was very popular. There were so many photos of him on Facebook, pages and pages of photos, and he was having a good time in almost all of them, at the pub or in someone’s well decorated and darkly lit room. He had a very serious face in lots of the photos, he just stared at the person taking the photo very passively without expression. He looked very handsome when he did that passive face, he looked strikingly similar to Tilda Swinton. In my favourite photo Luke had eyeshadow on and was doing a quiet half-smile and standing with his arm around a person who was, I guessed, his girlfriend.
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I went to an event where you could talk about neurodiversity with different people in the university who were supposed to help you with your problems. This was an activity I was somehow owed because of having dyspraxia and I felt bad about this, I felt that I would be really wasting someone’s time sitting down with them and talking about dyspraxia. It felt like sitting down and talking about how I might knock over a glass of water by accident sometimes, I didn’t see how I had earned that at all. I was already feeling in some vague and unarticulated way that I had no access to the things I needed, and some excessive kind of access to the things I didn’t need at all, and didn’t deserve. Still, though, it seemed right: to pursue help.
The event happened inside a conference centre, and had trays of little sandwiches and tropical fruit slices lying around on the conference tables. No one mentioned all this food, it wasn’t for us. I sat down and then people walked around and helped me with my time management. They passed round giant sheets of paper which listed every day within October, and you could write your schedule and commitments on the page, using a biro. Somehow I ended up planning out my month in a huge amount of detail and writing in all the different times in which I would work on my readings and essays on the giant sheet, I spent almost an hour doing that and at the end I didn’t really want that random schedule, I felt really guilty about that, about the whole thing. I hoped that by the next workshop I might have some more material problems to discuss, some commitments to reschedule, something new to plan for.
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My friend Anna came back to university and we went for a walk along the river and discussed our summers. Anna had spent most of the summer in Spain with her family and now she was navigating a situation where her friend Grace accused her of being too emotionless in arguments. It wasn’t that Anna was unkind, Grace just thought she seemed unmoved somehow, too passive and disinterested. This was the sort of situation I could talk about endlessly, I loved complex but ultimately arbitrary emotional dilemmas. It was linked, too, with this robot joke me and Anna were always making, the joke was that we both felt like robots, like we were acting on our environments robotically, without real emotion or any kind of organic desire to engage. Me and Anna talked about the robot thing a lot. Sometimes we would see some appliance, some kettle or TV in the common room or an old discarded lighter on the street, and we would say Oh look, another robot. Occasionally Anna would stop and say Hello robot! That always killed me, that Hello robot extension of the robot joke.
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Anna and I were both taking a course on language and the first class was very disappointing to us. We had thought the course would address language in the broadest sense, that it would break open our social relationships and senses of self and in breaking them open illuminate some great singular truth about connection and communication, really about life itself and love and meaning, but instead the class was about some process where babies’ throats change as they age. It turned out that as babies got older, their throats got tighter. This was because it was easier for babies to speak when they had a more tight throat. For some reason though it wouldn’t have worked if babies had been born with that tight throat, that tightness had to develop progressively and very gradually. Anna and I kicked each other under the table as we listened to these descriptions of the babies’ increasingly tight throats. On the way back to our rooms we bought a giant packet of custard creams to share because the lecture hadn’t made us feel good at all.
It was hard to know what it was that I wanted to learn. I wanted to learn something that would shock me, something that came from someplace very far outside of myself. I was tired of learning things I could have pulled out of my own mind very easily and passively. It was really hard to think of things that might shock me like that, it was hard to think of things that were outside myself.
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That evening I went into the kitchen to cook some pad thai ready meal which was made up of lots of little packets of ingredients which had to be heated separately and then combined in a huge pan, it was a really inefficient ready meal. Luke was in there too, frying tiny pieces of aubergine. Luke was acting like a model of an approachable, delightful person, he was acting like an actor placed inside my kitchen to delight me. He had created an impression of a heartbeat where he kicked the loose wooden board beneath the stove so that the board vibrated and made this great alarming thudding noise. I had never met anyone who would do something like that, who would just stand around the kitchen very casually and freely showing some random girl a heartbeat impression on the clapboard. The noise didn’t especially remind me of a heartbeat but it was an evocative sound for sure and I was so charmed by how hilarious Luke found his own heartbeat impression, he really was adamant that I kept watching as he kicked the board again and again, and again and again made that great thudding sound, and somehow it did become hilarious, all that thudding, all those fake stupid heartbeats. In the background of the heartbeats I could hear Luke’s music, some genre of pop music I had never heard before, some hysterical breathy pop music that made me feel anxious at first and then this new thing, I wasn’t sure what it even was, what I should call it.
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I started going into the kitchen when I thought I could hear Luke in there. The kitchen was right next to my room and my room’s walls were very thin so this quickly became a very consuming project. Sometimes I actually heard Luke’s voice but mostly it was the vague echoes of music that I heard, or even just footsteps or the opening and closing of doors which I for some reason linked with the concept of his presence. Often I was wrong, it wasn’t Luke but someone else, and I would have to perform some action which would both explain my presence in the kitchen and legitimise my immediate departure. I would turn the kettle on, for example, or take someone’s random orange to my room, and then sit at my desk, totally deflated, sometimes for half an hour, even longer.
It felt almost illegal to be inside his room, it was so intimate.
But then sometimes it would be Luke. We would both grin and say Oh, hi with almost sarcastic delight, and lay our ingredients out on the counters, set our pans down on the stove. One evening Luke told me about his dissertation project, designing virtual reality models of real-life objects: trainers, doorways, wheels. He said that his friend Callum was making a robot which could categorise personality based on five traits: agreeableness, openness, conscientiousness, extraversion and neuroticism. I told Luke I had none of those positive traits but high levels of neuroticism i.e. a bad personality and he laughed a lot. As he laughed he passed me a teaspoon of his curry and I couldn’t even taste the curry because I was thinking about how his fingers had touched each piece of onion, each piece of potato, some of the lentils, some of the mustard seeds, all of these things which were now inside my mouth, and I said, Oh, it’s amazing.
*
On Friday I accidentally walked into the kitchen while Luke and his girlfriend were cooking together. Luke’s girlfriend was wearing a dressing gown but then also lipstick and had some kind of pattern on her nails which was lots of swirling lines intersecting with each other. She said Hi I’m Mia and I realised there was music coming from my phone and Mia said about the music Is this Mitski and I said Yeah. I took two falafel balls from the fridge then and put them on a plate and left without acknowledging Luke at all. I really left just carrying that horrible plate of cold and actually wet falafel balls which weren’t even mine, a cold plate of some random person’s wet falafel balls. In my room I tried to keep distracting myself by brushing my teeth until my tongue and cheeks were stinging and covered in tiny red bumps. I was listening to Mitski really loudly, so loudly that Mia could maybe hear it from the kitchen. Mia and Luke might have been kissing to the Mitski they could hear through the wall. Mitski heard through a brick wall, that must be a romantic sound.
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It snowed that night, it really snowed in October and I woke up the next morning with snow covering my windows because they were slanted skylight windows which the snow could actually settle on and eclipse completely. When I opened my blinds it was as if I hadn’t opened them at all, the snow was a second and unopenable blind behind them and the room stayed dark. I walked to the botanic gardens and looked at the plants all covered over with snow, all of those snow-covered plants just lying there indistinguishable and yet retaining their endless separate Latin names flaunted on endless little placards. The names really did nothing, it was obvious that the plants were all the same, that they were stupid impotent things unable to dig themselves out or to uncover themselves at all.
There was a lake in the centre of the botanic gardens but it wasn’t frozen over. When I got back to my room the windows were clear again.
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In the kitchen that night Luke was making some terrible meal, a piece of ham on a microwavable potato waffle. I said I thought you were vegetarian and then I said Why are you eating that. Whenever I had seen Luke in the kitchen before he had been making a really lavish feast, something with fifteen ingredients, something like six separate little salads with totally non-overlapping ingredient sets. Luke said loudly and weirdly as if he was pushing something out of himself Mia broke up with me. I almost took his hand then but instead I said Do you want to have dinner. My heart was beating almost audibly, I could feel its beat inside my arms and chest, it seemed like they were throbbing, hot with blood. Because really I felt very lucky in that moment, I felt absolutely blessed and like my life was finally about to start unfolding and revealing some beautiful core which had been promised to me all along and which was finally here: here it was, the start of life.
We ate in Luke’s room. It felt almost illegal to be inside his room, it was so intimate. There were plants everywhere, hanging off the shelves and off the suicide beam I also had in my room. Luke had turned off the overhead light and lit the room with only his bedside lamp and the weak light attached to the sink so that everything was hard to see in any normal level of detail, everything looked vague and gold but at the same time clearly foregrounded and emphasised. All the edges in that room were gilded, the edges of Luke’s face, the fine edges of his cheekbones. Luke sat down in his desk chair and I sat in the plush ‘lounge’ chair with the low coffee table in between us, Luke’s little fern resting there in the table’s centre, all its felted leaves curled inwards.
I asked him questions about what happened with Mia and he cried a lot and said Thank you so many times and answered all my questions with very long and incoherent answers. He gave off the atmosphere of someone being assaulted by memories and unable to fight them off. The memories he told me didn’t tell any kind of story: he was remembering the time when he had sex with Mia on the roof of a library, the time when they had bleached each other’s hair, when he developed some kind of skin infection on their holiday to multiple south-eastern French villages. Luke kept saying I was no one before Mia, I was no one before her and then telling me some other memory, some other detail of him and Mia’s intimacy, that was the rhythm of the conversation: all those directionless memories and the idea of Luke as no one in the time before them. All those timeframes were activated at once there in Luke’s room, the time before and the time during and then this undefined and frightening time after. It did seem very awful when he described it like that.
I realised as I sat there facing Luke that all my life I had assumed, in some unconscious way, that truly overwhelming emotion was false, that it was some person’s false invented category, some false construct like femininity or borders or like the specific layout of a particular city or the random tastes which were supposed to be found inside some wine. I had spent my life believing that emotions were the products of cerebral meta-narratives people constructed about their lives, a means of fabricating meaning and elevating life to a more human or more noble level. But here it was, true devastation, and it had nothing to do with meaning or narrative. Here I was with Luke, observing some great breakdown of internal boundaries, some dissolution of the self. Here I was, with Luke curled up in his desk chair opposite me, his face lit up so warmly and so softly in the sink light as he looked me in the eyes and spoke of the deep burning inside of him.
*
Being in my room acquired a new quality that week. It was partly material. I was treating the light in my room differently, I was really limiting the light in some warm dappled way like Luke had done, keeping that sink light on constantly and the bedside lamp also. I was listening, too, to so much of Luke’s music, so many women breathing loudly and anxiously, so many women wailing. I kept listening to a song called Door, this woman singing You open the door to another door to another door in a clear startling voice, that Door song really spoke to me and I did feel that there was a door to another door opening as I sat there in my room in the dim light.
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Harriet Armstrong was born and raised in Oxford. She has had short stories published in Confingo Magazine, The Georgia Review, the Virginia Quarterly Review, Giramondo’s HEAT literary magazine and Forever Magazine. She lives and works in London. To Rest Our Minds and Bodies is her first novel.
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