It was as if some greater force pushed its foot against the book and would not allow me to go any further. A hard nope, not today love.

In 2023 I thought: Well I’ve got a great idea! Let me go back to an empty drawing board and begin with the single idea but take it in a far better direction. I can salvage it! I must have tried it from three different angles, each time with a fresh new take, and each time I couldn’t get anywhere, battering me further in an already violent process of artistic letdowns.

This book was not meant to come to fruition but I had spent three years on it. Like a relationship it’s time was up and fate doesn’t care how much was poured into it. A partner might leave, just as a book might fail. In the moment it is excruciating because all that seems left to you is the unretrievable time, wasted and used up. Where does one go from a good old-fashioned heartbreak, if you cannot get your investment back? If the time given away to a great man whose hair you used to tuck like iPhone headphones behind his ear (or in my case a book), is spent and that is that. What do you do??

I flushed tear-wet tissues down the toilet bowl for the 5967th time. Then I packed up the manuscript, notebooks, and ephemera of Project S, dumped it in an archive box we got from Officeworks and pushed it to the corner of the room.

In February 2024 I opened a new document and started a new book. Beside me was a newly constructed archive box, empty as desert.

Shortly after this, in March 2024, I announced my sabbatical and left the internet.

Artistic heartbreak works similarly to regular, age-old, romantic heart break—in that what you hoped for, the wishes and dreams repeated in the mind, get shattered by a less than ideal reality. Romantic situations often cite betrayals, but these also exist in the artistic space. As does grief, uncertainty, self-esteem battles, dishonesty, disappointments, and emotional up’s and downs. I could connect a beautiful purple thread between what happens in human love relationships to what happens in the artistic process—since art straddles between humans in hope of connecting them. Therefore these overwhelming emotions we feel in our daily lives are reflected in our artistic lives, too.

Like someone going out and cutting their hair after the dissolution of their relationship, I did what we all do: began again.

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During my sabbatical I found myself becoming quite interested in symbolism. The layered meanings and narratives told in objects: A grey moth, a blackbird, a parked car, an over-used key. My resistance to this new interest could be traced back to the reality that much of the world is far too fast to consider reading an article let alone a book imbued with symbolic language. But it is not our role as writers or artists to submit to mass appeal if we have a deeper desire to create outside of these parameters. I’d argue our role is the opposite—to push the parameters long past their stretching point.

I LOVE SYMBOLISM, IT IS IN MY NEW BOOK, AND I WOULD LIKE TO READ AS MANY BOOKS ON SYMBOLISM I CAN GET MY HANDS ON. LIKE THESE ONES ABOVE, WHICH ARE IN MY CART CURRENTLY

I didn’t take a 2 year sabbatical to deny my desires or interests

The purpose of my sabbatical was not to take two years away and write a book I believed everyone wanted from me, but to write something as true to myself as I can get with the time I carved out for myself. For someone who has been creating online in some form since 2007/2008, exiting for two years was big deal, and I was not going to waste such a gift on contorting myself backwards into something I did not want to do.

In my new book I began lacing in symbolism. And let me tell you this great thing: It has satisfied me to no end. In symbols I am finding something that soothes, excites, and helps me make sense of things. In an increasingly confusing and shallowed world I am hungry for meaning; symbolism is one of the things that has the capacity to fulfil that human hunger for me personally.

The great dream: Sharing meaning with readers

This newfound layer of my work has given me unprecedented levels of enjoyment in my writing life. Though there are other things too, but today we are talking of symbols etc. While I could forgo this due to the state of things and dwindling attention spans, if I did I would forgo a great and new passion that has brought so much joy to my craft. And it is only quite new! It may be a classed as a pipe dream to maintain hope for a thing like deep reading in the climate we find ourselves in, but to relinquish it would be to betray my artistic instinct.

On YouTube I discovered Angela and her uncle: Dr Uncle Jerry, who both host a podcast called The Swiftie and The Scholar in which they interpret Taylor Swift’s discography. Dr Uncle Jerry brings a vast amount of knowledge and passion to interpreting poems, and in this I discovered my desire was answered in the fact that 57,100+ people are liking a clip from one of his literary interpretations. Perhaps not for me, perhaps for a global superstar, but it is happening nonetheless.

What is the most exciting to me is the possibility of interpretations from readers. It is a deeply emotional book— after ’s first read he cried and to make up for the emotional blow of the book we ordered pizza from Dominoes. Joel experienced and interpreted many things differently to how I experienced them, and it is this that I am looking forward to. I cannot know the true life of a book until the readers make it their own. Readership completes the circle of authorship for words are imbued with life when they are read.

Threading these interests into my work has made me very happy. Though this book is fucking heart wrenching. Sorry about that.

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A faded green sign says: Population 1,097. We both know I hate this town, its useless pride for a teenage sporting team and pervasive narrow-mindedness. Grey clouds droop in, as if moving over this area is their worst responsibility. Everyone calls it a sweet stopover, a nice place, but it has been terrible for both of us. Though I doubt you would ever admit this. We meet by the football field with the peeling scoreboard. Exhaust smoke lulls. My suede jacket, red as Valentines, is slung over the passenger seat, yet neither of us buy into Hallmark sentiments anymore. Years have gnawed away at the puppy flesh of our youth, a beard has cropped up on your face, and I am not who I used to be. Less pliable, perhaps. We fumble through comparing our adult lives: city apartments, calendars, impressive fidelities, faking satisfaction with how things turned out. Now, you feed a sausage dog every evening at 7:30pm and you're in between girlfriends again and we're both panting like liars. We move together but everything is darker. It seems we're not kids, anymore.

A lone raven is picking up the trash people have left behind in the car park. You ask if I get home sick and I do, but only when I visit too often. A phone vibrates from your pocket. It's your father. He wants to know where you are since family dinner will be ready in 45 minutes. We hug goodbye in the generous southern cold, and you flash an easy smile that convinces people it's closer than it actually is, like those magnifying mirrors on your Ford—objects in the mirror are closer than they appear. Later we'll toss in spare bedrooms drafting texts that we’ll sheepishly backspace. A cheap, familiar fragrance will scent my winter stockings, and when I empty the pockets of my jacket I'll feel something folded up, instantly believing it to be a handwritten note, but it's not. It's the silver foil of a condom wrapper.

Blind, I’d told my friends after our breakup twelve years ago. I'd imagined a carefully planned marriage proposal followed by cherubic babies with straight eyebrows, and my friendship group knows this so I take care to avoid the topic of these meetings. We do this, I think, because our urgent youth grew tired a while ago, and our togetherness seems an easy way back. Over the last decade, we've convened in the dead orange of autumn many times. After each instance I decide it is the last time. This is the fifth year in a row we have returned seeking companionship in this town. But this time, like every time, we do not find it.

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A lighting technician once told me of the dramatic effects of lighting, how the direction it is cast could turn us into an entirely different looking person. A prism shows us one stream of light can split like a shared pear. Quirky there, caring here—faceted glass, hanging, spinning, throwing light all over the place.

The book of beauty advises us to try collagen powders, and sea kelp, and take time to understand the negative effect of excess sunlight on the vellum of our skin. Ageing is a horrible thing when we secretly want to be wanted. Once we were a plump orange, dangling. Now we're shriveling up and losing our value. Our hands will show our age, it’s a dead giveaway, say the experts. Combatting age means not forgetting the hands: you’ve got to moisturise them, wrap them in cling-wrap, and preferably, sleep that way.

But what else can a hand do?

There are violin hands, who know how to make dead wood sing. Or worker hands, lined dark with years of earth work and splinter scars from fence posts or shovels. Mother hands, doctor hands, hands of kids covered in sugary grime. Scooping hands, braiding hand, making hands. Hands scarred or missing fingers. Then, too, the hands that tend our dead, brushing their hair for the very last time.

Not this year or the next, but fifty years from now, I might lose strength in my fingers from a vicious arthritis. How long will I be able to grasp, grab, caress my lover after that? Perhaps my hands will photograph a friend of mine in my young years, and that photograph will be passed around a rectangular coffee table while she says, “here I am on my birthday, in Rio.” Sugar might sink to the bottom of the cups, and all her friends will reminisce on the times their bodies were more capable of leaping, holding this one image in their used and spotted hands.

Red light therapy will not save us from getting older. If we want youth forever we must take a photograph and ready our graves, it is the only way. Otherwise our elbows will sag and our skin will go lax. Men will say yes, in fact, beauty is a losing battle after twenty-four. We will be called long gone at fifty though part of us understands it really isn't that much. We know this because almost everyone is trying to live longer. Fifty years is simply a blip, one brief note in humanity's continual ballad. Getting older is terrifying, isn't it? But look at us, wanting it all the same.

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No, I say: I will not be a good mother.

Doesn’t desire and natural tendency need to match up?

Strawberries are reddening, a couple are arguing, and the ravens are loitering around to see if there are any berries leftover.

Does it matter that I’m almost certain children might tear me in half? Babies are sweet, but some mothers shit themselves, some partners go off and fuck someone else because their wife has not had sex with them since they bought the baby home, three weeks ago. My body would be ravaged—torn straight through—and I’d still have to wonder if he’d leave me when I balloon up like a stretched creature to groan out a son or daughter to pass on the family name. Spine is moved, hips are moved. Tits crack, bleed and ooze mustard-hot pus. Death, too, has his hand in the birthing room.

We have greatly disappointed each other so we say nothing as we pull out from the farm. When we drive past the German candy shops and the town’s goodbye sign, I think about rolling down the window to bellow at the ravens on the side of the road. Here, have my strawberries! My biological purpose. These damn eggs. He turns on a popular podcast and three men fill the silence. When I look over I see he has no berries in his cardboard basket. Usually, I’d offer a strawberry, sun-red and round, but this time I don’t. Instead I eat ripe berry after ripe berry until there is nothing in my basket.

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*This is a piece I wrote on sabbatical, and I’m happy to get to share it with you. More, of everything, still to come.

And I am nervous since this private egg surrounding my work is closer to being cracked; and a gangly manuscript is readying itself to rear through the mottled, paper shell. I am nervous because once it gets to this stage I cannot make changes. The text is not in motion anymore, not engaged in a back and forth with me, the author.

It feels as if I am in a pine tree, tall as a jade spring, and I’ve just realised I need to push my young off the very top branch into the belly of green below—only, I’ve also just realised how high that is, and, if I do this, this bird will no longer be mine. I will have to watch with my breath held to see if those wings I raised stretch out against the wind for the very first time. Blue feathers ruffling as it veers north, albeit unelegantly, as a first flight often goes. It will not be mine to tend to anymore. All that will be left to me is the bittersweet act of witnessing a child become someone.

I’ve officially returned to Substack and Instagram, though I am still in the finishing stages of my next book.

As for the book, there is not much I can share right now while I am still in the process of finalisation. But between now and then I plan to write of my experience with my creative sabbatical, writing this book, and more. Plus, get a chance to reconnect with everyone.

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Burying oneself in the woods, as Mary Wollstonecraft wrote in the quote above, seems to be an apt way to explain what taking a two year sabbatical feels like. When I decided to step away from my online work, I was battered—having been online in a phase of perpetual creation for eight years at that time. Add this to a series of professional difficulties and failures, particularly the failure of publishing the book I wrote before this one, insomnia, health and housing problems, and general life hurdles, one finds a recipe for exhaustion. Atop this, layer a confusion in my profession as a writer—I had grown out of a mode of expression, but had not yet found the next iteration, which way was I to go? Who was I now? The result was a visceral flailing, as if I were a small spider, unattached from the corner bathroom by a human carrying me out towards a grey rock, and I, gripping tightly to a silvered string.

“What would happen if I shut it all down, took a year off to write the book?”, I asked Joel, my partner. Upkeep of online creation, while not harder than other jobs, is still a pressurised job in itself. One I seemed very close to giving up altogether, due to what we label as “burnout”. There was not enough sleep I could get (when I could get it), not enough planning to counteract the tiredness, not enough fresh ideas to rouse me—perhaps, I thought, these were my last, deteriorating legs.

Fortunately, I am lucky to have a supportive partner in Joel, who is as optimistic as he is determined, and replied “Do it.” So we arranged for my sabbatical, in which I would take 1-2 years to focus solely on writing my next book, without the pressure of public upkeep. He has expressed a few times that he would drag me, with great love, kicking and screaming over the line of finishing this second book if I needed, especially after the grief, betrayal and pain the previous manuscript brought into my life. It did not come to that, for I knew the only way to the other side was to write my way.

In short, I took a 2 year sabbatical because my wires were fried from modern life, failure, uncertainty, health issues, and years of growing difficulty building up as calcium does on shower heads. Without a metal scrub, a serious mode of cleaning, I would have become calcified.

And sure, I was worried. I had been creating online for many years, and on this profile for a decade this August—what would I miss out on? Not much, it seems. The better question in this instance is: what have I found? And there is a far greater answer than any one post could hold.

After just over two years, my creative sabbatical has officially come to a close, and I have many tales to share with you.

While there is still much to do to organise my brand new book for launch, over the coming months I’ll be sharing peaks, hints, and updates over on Instagram. And perhaps here, if you’d like?

Mark your calendars for the season of yawning greens. Hint: Season of yawning greens is a month.

Looking forward to sharing a very, very new chapter with you.

The pink marker outline of my body is only something I started to notice when the world around me brought it to my attention. When others pointed it out.

Deep in the grip of girlhood, right in the middle of summer, I sat on sun-warmed concrete eating watermelon with a girlhood friend. She had recently moved to our town and we'd quickly taken a liking to each other. I remember the buzz of her arrival. Her big blue eyes and fast air of city knowledge meant she fused into our tiny school breezily. On this particular day we'd been lounging in her backyard, eating melted hazelnut chocolate off our fingers, and talking with teenage passion about the boys we were crushing on. In the shade, she waved a chocolate finger at my midriff and sighed "I wish I had your waist". With watermelon in my mouth I giggled and mumbled. But I remember how jarring this new information was. A rip in the long, low heat. A fleshy revelation.

Up until that moment, I was unaware that this thing that seemed to live on me, or in me, or was me, was something to want. It was strange to come to an awareness of yourself through the sighs of your new girlhood friend. What you thought you knew adjusting into a new kind of self-understanding. Up until that day, I had a cluelessness about my body. An ignorance. Life for me had existed entirely within my mind, my imagination.

At 16, after my braces came off and my DD cup arrived – I became visible. And quickly. Like I was pushed onto a green velvet stage, squinting into a spotlight. The outside world had fed me information about my body, my desirability, and I pulled it into myself, I let it live there. On a weekday afternoon, my high school boyfriend confided in me that his older brother had told him that he 'liked my body just not my face'. Once again, my self-understanding was torn violently down my seams. I was not really desired. It was these hips, these tits. They wanted my body, which felt foreign to me, like it wasn't mine. To want my body felt like not wanting me at all. I felt envious of my own flesh. Over time I threaded myself back together with the belief that I would only ever be wanted as a figure. I felt like I was never an entire woman, never the complete picture, just a headless dream with hips.

On the night of my 21st birthday party, I wore tight, white Levi jeans I'd found at a thrift store. As the night rolled on, some kid drunkenly slurred that he needed to tell me I had a great ass. "Like, it's so good" he exclaimed. Eyes glazed over with beer. I laughed and brushed it off, but it made me feel like I was always late to myself. Like I was always a stranger to my skin. It was the first time I was ever told about my ass but it wasn't the last. I laughed in champagne eyes that night, wondering if I'd ever know myself before the world does.

Did I love it? I know I'm supposed to say no, but yes. It was sexy and exciting being told I had a great ass. Coming from any gender, any mouth. So it was fun, but did it take me towards a genuine relationship with my body? No. It didn't. While the relationship with my internal world is sacredly mine, the relationship with my flesh is spoken mostly in the voices of others. One was mine, one was not. It was never that I hated these things on my body and someone came along, pointed it out, and changed it into the soft eyes of love; most of the time I just didn't notice. I had no conviction in love or hate towards my body. In a way, it just didn't exist.

In my mid-twenties, I started sleeping with a man so hot I could barely fathom it. He told me that once, a girl in a bar called him a shrimp. I asked him what that meant and he gave a paraphrased definition from Urban Dictionary, which I googled the next day:

Urban Dictionary, Shrimp: Someone who has a sexy body but isn't beautiful. Came from the idea that when eating a shrimp, you only take the body then throw away the head.

I was so shocked I nearly spat my drink out. The concept enraged me. And he was unrealistically gorgeous. Mouth-watering hot. And unlike me, he was no stranger to himself. Outside opinions were mostly radio noise. When I showed a photo to my friend she said Jesus. On dates, women would trip over themselves to get in his eyesight. I couldn't blame them for melting and going a little floppy in his presence, I did too. He had been called a shrimp once, but clearly throngs of other women completely disagreed. To learn that he had lived the same story as me broke a sort of spell.

Either this woman in the bar and the rest of us had a different definition of beauty, or she was lying. What was strikingly beautiful to us, wasn't to her. Or she was out to sting. This realisation snapped my warped belief that the perception of others is a undeniable stone-hard truth and something to contort a self around. Rather, these perceptions are something pliable, changeable, built on breeze. While they can still sting or excite, while they can influence someone's sense of self, while they do feel truthful – they aren't. Not really. No-one knows what truth truly is. How could a drunk boy know? How could a brother know?

Thousands of people can agree on someones attractiveness, or not. But have you seen a woman who has cast it aside? Have you seen the shimmer?

I still don't know how really I feel about my body. These memories overlay my connection with it. I feel like other people got there first; like I was too slow to stake my claim. I still carry these opinions. Barbs of perception stuck into a body I have tried relentlessly to escape. Or keep. I have a culturally acceptable body, if I sculpt it even a desirable one. Although, maybe it's not. Maybe I just believe that because I've been told by girls in powdery bathrooms. The closest thing to a glimmer of truth is that it feels painfully alien to me. I feel most unseen when I'm looked at. Most unlike myself in my physical form.

I've been told I have a great ass and when it's said I won't deny that I blush a little. Cheeks flushed bedroom pink. Making me obvious. I know I'll probably always enjoy it. I've decided it's fine – I am not failing as a woman if I like it. Like red velvet cupcakes, it's a pleasure to enjoy. But just as red velvet cupcakes don't hold a universal truth on worth, neither does an ass compliment.

I remind myself that I can start again. I can scrub myself clean of their fingertips. Erase the tape. Find new definitions for my body. I can shut out the rest of the world, lay lax in the grass, trace a single daisy up my navel. Coaxing my internal life up and out of my skin. Into burning light. Into bright perception. We'll reacquaint ourselves. Meet each other the way we should have. My body, me, this new conversation.

P.S. If you're loving my works here on Substack, please feel free to forward it to a friend or share to social media – all works can be shared to any platform with credit! Thank you so much for reading my online publication, it forever warms me.

Brooke Solis x

I like women. Their lipstick mouths. Laundry day softness. Hidden sharp things. They smell so good, move like liquid, open at the hinges to let light in and dark out all at once. I'm not evolved in my desire for them – hips do to me what they do to teenage boys. Lips glaze my brain over. My memories of them are vignettes of soapy shampoo, jangled bracelets, liquid eyeliner and that unnameable mystery, beneath them.

Queerness is not something I feel I belong in. It feels like a party I've been invited to out of politeness. Invited, but not really. While lights glisten and sway in a warm wind, legs shimmer in glorious dresses and purple leather. Gender transforms and morphs into a big, summer sky of dazzling variations – and here I am, standing on the outside. Sipping a drink, next to the dark green shadow of some back corner bush. Hoping no-one will question my presence. Eyes on my feet, feeling not quite enough of whatever it is I need to be to slink into it.

After reading books and essays and posts on queerness, I feel much like a baby deer. Knobbly kneed and embarrassingly un-coordinated in this space. While my desire says I belong, the cultural demand to know the complicated nuance of such a layered, loaded world – has me stuttering. Like the big sister of a childhood best friend, I stare up, completely intimidated. I watch queerness lean in the mirror and smack its lips. Big, looming, confident and above all, dazzling in tones of complexity.

If I Google search the word queer, Oxford's definition tells me that 'queerness is the quality or characteristic of having a sexual or gender identity that does not correspond to established ideas of sexuality and gender, especially heterosexual norms'. According to that definition, I am by all intents and purposes, queer. But taking the first listing of Google's search at face value is like trusting ridiculously pretty men. Heartbreak exists in that kind of stupidity. So I'm Wikipedia queer, but that doesn’t mean much.

In my hand I have an invitation to a world I should belong it, but feel I don't. The muffled sounds of people riding the wind over my garden fence. The buzz of belonging warbled by distance, the complication of modern love and this highway fast culture. I know I belong, but do I really? If I am to be a woman, just a woman, will my invitation really be an invitation? Like the big sister metaphor, queerness is not rejecting me; I've just not figured out how to talk to it. How to reach out. Knock on its door. Ask it if I can sit on its floor.

Maybe, one cherry warm afternoon, I'll sit and watch queerness flick through pages of its favourite magazine. Maybe I'll cough. Work up the nerve. Ask it if I can love this man I love and still wear the word. Ask it if that's really my name written on the invitation. Ask it to look at me. Ask it if I belong. Ask it if I can wear it my own way. And maybe, like a dream girl fever film, I'll hear myself answer in the mirror.

Honey, yes.