I want the multivalence of moons: moons for the passing of time, moons for the female body, moons for longing. The moon as cipher for that city in an e. e. cummings poem where ‘everyone’s / in love and flowers pick themselves’. Moons for tides, in every sense.

IT’S HER BIRTHDAY IN THREE WEEKS AND I DON’T know what to get her. We are recent friends, friends of only a year’s standing, but I think she will be in my life forever. I would like to give her something that wishes the length of that forever.

Sewing is a kind of productive daydreaming: Maybe I could feel this way, if I made this garment for my body. Maybe I could be this kind of person. The clothes available to buy are limited, but you can make anything you can think of. Sewing is imagining, not just assembling, a self into being.

More fundamentally, as writer Sofi Thanhauser puts it, ‘Sewing something for yourself implies belief in a future self.’ Pressing the lining today means I will stitch it into the outer shell tomorrow. Inserting a pocket now means one day it will hold my hand. I clip into the collar corners; learn and execute the finicky couture of buttonhole

Like gardening, sewing is an investment in the future—in what sort of person your future self will be, and how she will feel about her body, and what she will want to wear.

Between sewing, writing, and cooking, my life is full of making. In every act, I savour.

You work full-time but remotely, isolated from the rest of your London-based team. I work three days a week at the library, social but ill-paid. Neither of us is quite happy, but we walk around the waterfront each evening and love every detail worth loving, and I have lots of time to sew, which is a way of escaping reality.

When I go to pick it up, 婆婆 | Por Por presses on me not just the Pfaff, but also a box of tangled thread spools, a container of pins, and a basket of orphaned buttons. Some of these belonged to my great-grandmothers. I was frightened of their harsh faces, the unhesitating way they hit me across the hands when I misbehaved. It was not until I was

Your face is nearest to me of anyone’s in the world, and every day I’m overwhelmed by your beauty: your pianist’s hands, your patience, the deep safe scent of you.