On New Beginnings, a New Moon in Cancer, and Bastille Day — a writer’s diary entry, 14th of July

New moon tonight, which means no moon at all really, just a black coin where it usually hangs. I like the ones no one can see more than I like the full ones, if I’m honest. Everyone photographs the full moon. No one photographs this one, because there’s nothing there to catch, but I think that’s the point of it. Something is happening up there even though there’s nothing to show for it. I wanted to remember that today of all days.

Fireworks somewhere in the village already, hours early, some child clearly not able to wait for dark. Bastille Day. I’ve lived here long enough now to feel it properly, not just watch it from the outside the way I did the first few years. The storming of the Bastille, the end of one kind of France and the reluctant, bloody, unfinished start of another. Fête Nationale, though nobody here actually calls it that, they just call it le quatorze juillet, the fourteenth, the way you’d refer to a person by name. There’s something in that I love, a whole revolution folded into a date, no need to say what it means because everyone already knows.

In Cancer, this one, which I’ve been waiting for. Cancer is the sign of the house, of water, of the things you feed and the people you feed them to, and a new moon in Cancer asks you what home actually means to you now, not what it meant when you were younger and had less say in it. That’s a question I’ve been circling for years without quite sitting down in front of it. It’s a soft moon and a tidal one. It doesn’t push. It just keeps asking, and asking, until you answer.

I lit the candle and wrote down what I’m beginning. The rewrite, properly this time, from the first page rather than patching the old one and hoping nobody notices the seams. And the mornings by the vines, which I’ve only kept a few days but want to make permanent, want to make into the kind of thing I don’t negotiate with myself about at six in the morning when the bed is still cool. I put the paper under the candle and left it there. It’ll stay until the full moon on the twenty-ninth, and I’ll see by then whether I meant it.

I sat outside for a while afterwards with the sound of somebody else’s celebration going on past the trees. A new moon is for the things you start quietly, before anyone can see them well enough yet to have an opinion on them. The village was doing the opposite, beginning something at full volume with fire in the sky, and I loved that too. Both are true. Both are ways of marking that a thing has turned.

I wrote four hundred words on the new chapter and didn’t hate them, which on a day this loud felt like a small revolution of its own.

Should go in soon. The noise isn’t stopping any time soon, and this year I don’t especially want it to.