The Tape Measure - Sara Collie

I was rifling through the junk drawer in the kitchen, looking for a spare box of matches, when I found the tape measure I lost last year. I couldn’t believe I had shoved it in there so carelessly with all the odds and sods and detritus of our life, but I guess that’s just how I lived back then. Carelessly. Distance and diameter didn’t matter so much in the before time. These days I am struggling to get the measure of anything and, yet, precision has never mattered more.

The last time I used it was when I was cutting out a dress pattern. I wanted to check the seam allowance (5/8 of an inch) and mark it out on the back of the fabric. Such a small measurement, but it was important to get it just right, even if the space I measured would ultimately be invisible. There’s a reason we talk about everything falling apart at the seams, after all, and I wanted to make the dress as robust as possible. Since I found the tape measure, I’ve started to measure everything for the very same reason, as if knowing the dimensions of things and the distances between them can somehow stem the chaos that is threatening to undo the world.

It is easy enough to use. I pull the strip of yellow metal out to the required length and click the lurid orange button down to fix it in place. Metric on one edge, imperial on the other: two ways of seeing the world. Whatever the distance, as long as that button is pressed down the tape holds fast, no matter how quickly the world around me is shifting. But click the button back up the other way and the tape reels itself back in with a clatter and woosh and I am left to guess again about where I am in relation to things.

At its longest limit, the metal strip stretches to a full 2 metres which is the magic distance that we must all maintain around us now if we leave the house. We have been told that this measurement should be enough to keep us safe, though of course I know it is an arbitrary number and the best thing to do is go nowhere at all. On my rare forays outside I try to imagine this distance like a forcefield around me, crossing the road or walking down the middle of deserted streets when careless strangers flout the rules and ignore the invisible boundary line I have drawn around myself. I think about taking the tape measure out with me, wielding it like a weapon that might somehow protect me.

I come to know the dimensions of everything with my newly rediscovered tool. My phone measures exactly 16 x 7.5 x 0.8 centimetres. Small enough to fit inside my pocket and yet big enough, somehow, in this strange new world I find myself in, to contain all my connections to life as I knew it before. Everybody I know: friends, family, the students I teach, my therapist, they all live inside it now. They have been shrunk down to the size of mere pixels and yet, when their faces light up the screen, they seem bigger and brighter than ever. Is this how Alice felt when she fell down the rabbit hole? Larger and smaller all at once, never quite the right size for any given situation, too perturbed by all the stretching and shrinking to know quite what to do at any given moment.

Then there are the larger distances that the tape measure cannot stretch to. The miles and miles between me and my Mum who has started coughing in a way that terrifies me. Who strayed into her 2 metre forcefield and gave her those germs? I should have been there to protect her but it has been months since I saw her. I think of a poem that I read through with a student just a few long weeks ago.* The central metaphor involved a spool of thread that the narrator unwound as he measured up his new home, and became more independent from his mother. She was a constant presence at the other end of the umbilical-like thread, holding it fast like an anchor, a point of safety. My tape measure seems to have none of these magical powers: it simply does not stretch to the other side of the country. Besides, I let my end go, didn’t I? Put it in a drawer, carelessly, and left it there for months. Which doesn’t mean that I haven’t been thinking about it all this time, wondering where it went, looking for it in dreams, worrying about all the distance that has built up between me and Mum over the last few years with no easy click of a button to woosh me back into her arms. I sit in therapy once a week trying to retrace the steps I have taken away, trying to charter all the territory between us, getting to know the dimensions of it so that, one day, I might be able to find a way back to her. I have found the tape measure now, but I don’t care about how big the distance is anymore. I just want to get back to the zero point where I am sure she is still waiting for me. But a tape measure can’t help me with that, can it?

I take it outside to see if attending to more practical matters might help me fight the terror that is building up inside me. I measure out the space inside the newly dug out bed in the garden making a mental list of tasks: radishes should be sprinkled in rows 15 centimetres apart; broad beans need a little more space. The courgette seeds must be sown on their side, 1 centimetre deep, the earth pressed firmly over them just like Mum showed me when I was little. I tell myself it is a numbers game, fitting everything into the ground, but really I’m cramming as much as I can into that 10 x 3 metre space and hoping for the best. This may be what feeds us in the months to come. It may be all I have.

As I dig and measure, I notice that the various perennials that Mum gave me – crocosmia, yellow loosestrife – are sending up fresh shoots and turning green again, growing half a centimetre or more a day. We planted them together a few years ago, back in the days before everything started unravelling in my family. Here in the garden we are closer, she and I, as I shift the earth with my hands, feel the dirt working its way in under my fingernails. There is the shared language of plants that we have continued to speak to one another even when other forms of communication have broken down. When we talk about plants, all that is otherwise left unspoken can somehow be expressed as we tend our gardens in parallel, sharing cuttings, seeds, stories and advice. I dig things up and move them around, tug at the roots that grip the earth with a reassuring certainty and feel her drawing nearer, knowing that she is in her own garden doing the same things. 

When the digging is done, I sit in the garden and watch the tulips open. Colour creeps into the tight-lipped green buds a fraction of a millimetre at a time, at a rate too slow for me to keep track of. In an unseen instant they are transformed into vividly coloured flowers that fling themselves open with wide abandon the moment the sun hits them. I wonder how big the space is inside each open flower. A couple of centimetres at most. My tape measure could tell me, but I resist the urge for logic and measure, focus instead on the small glowing cocoons of yellow, orange, or nectarine light that are blooming all around me. I would like to shrink myself down and curl up inside one, tuck myself in under the antennae, let the petals close around me at nightfall and sleep until I feel safe again. I take photos of the tulips and send them to my Mum, one a day, as they open, until she has the whole rainbow collected on her phone. I don’t know the exact dimensions of her phone but I am sure it is small enough to fit neatly inside her pocket. I will be inside it too, a tiny, invisible thing just a couple of pixels tall, hidden in one of the tulips in the photos, sleeping safely, my tape measure clasped firmly in my hand. I will be more careful with it from now on.

*The poem is "Mother, Any Distance” by Simon Armitage

Originally published by CARE, Covid Art Resource, April 2020

Sara Collie is a writer based in Norwich, England. She has a PhD in French Literature and a lifelong fascination with the way that words and stories shape and define us. Her writing explores the wild, uncertain spaces of nature, the complexities of mental health, and the mysteries of the creative process. You can discover more of her writing at saracollie.wordpress.com/writing