No one to point the finger
It’s just you and me, and the rain.
As it once was, before our shared time spun away in toxic-beauty droplets. No more the red kites counted, the hikes through all weathers, our faces burned bronze with time spent alone and together and apart.
It was only one hour ago, it was all so different then. Five years and counting nothing, because that put it to a timeline, a calendar – an End Game. We were younger then, stupid with the world and lust and red wine. We found ourselves in the face of shared life, on and offline, down rail line, up streets fine; lost ourselves in over-priced shopping and London roads and rain-filled afternoons quietly asleep, dreaming of a time we’d be published and famous and aloof and awake and over the hill. Never married. Never childbirth. Never divergence, of thoughts and things that mattered … until they ceased to matter. Until I couldn’t hold your eye. Until you couldn’t keep my feet still.
I grieve for you. You live in me.
The future is a blue rose, full of mystery, the unobtainable and the longing, the shared ice and anecdotes and memories frozen in a place none can follow. We’ll be buried as best friends and confidantes, but my soul will wander, as ever it did in our waking dream of real life. No one would riot for less.
You kiss my mouth.
Hell is here.
You were my All, and thought and dream and time, until none of these seemed apart or a part of myself. Until this year broke us. Until our shared time faded out in mosquito bites of cash flow and supermarket runs and broken hearts and shattered trust. Did I dream this belief, or did I believe this dream?
Grieve for us both, world, and move on. That’s the way of things; when friends become lovers, and back again. We drank to ourselves then, as now, as ever.
Distance doesn’t count for anything, unless it’s in the heart. Our hills have been climbed, our storms outrun. The Beacon will always be there, waiting. The Downs will probably call us back someday. We’ll pass the barrows of your forefathers, and laugh at the times we fell down rabbit holes and mistook sanitation for cigars and fell asleep with our mouths catching flies. And recall those old-gold afternoons by the wretched train station, when I listened for the Mini’s whine, and the sounds of a weekend-life just beginning. No, distance meant nothing. We surpassed it.
But when together, we couldn’t overcome distance of the heart, the wandering mind. So it goes. Five years, to me, is a long time … a relationship’s lifetime. Not one memory regrettable; even the hard times were bittersweet pills. We learned ourselves in the face of the world, and each other; though we chose our own times to look away. Now it’s mine, and it’s for good, and somehow that’s OK. Friends part with tears and a smile, not mouths of hate.
I’ll send you North, you’ll keep me here.
I love without capacity. You love without remorse. Somehow, it worked; and through the nightmares and flashbacks and illness, the silent rage and writer’s block and doubts of fidelity, from that first daft kareoke night (when we cried together from laughing) to running for the train, to Evenstar and swords and bad emails and Love Will Tear Us Apart, in the pub that’s since burned to the ground and lies as an ashen stub of its former glory… we part as friends.
There’ll always be the Downs, the barrows and the red kites.
On an Atom (End of All Things)
So, traipsing around inside my head only recalls echoed footfalls. Trickle and trace, the dance comes around again, and I find myself with sweat-rimed skin and empty eyes. There’s only so long I can breathe.
I tried. I found. I spoke. Flailed and fought, and damnit where do things go when you lay them down for a moment? Around the Nick, I need to padlock my possessions down, as the guys have kleptomania for mugs and coffee. Chocolate doesn’t stand a chance.
I love them all. They drive me mad, like all the best ones do.
I can’t imagine life outside these city walls. I’m frittering with emails, trying to find somewhere new to live, old to exist in. These stones are my mind, ancient and antiquated like good wine, fine bones, knowing eyes. I’d jump off them all into the dark, if I didn’t think it’d land me in a cell down the road. They’d laugh with me, turn turn again.
The night is cold with feelings and air, and I’m at a loss in the face of blank space and time. Stuck inside a circumstance.
The editing went well though.
Sometimes I find my face in a window and forget my name in the absence of things to throw.
LOUD thoughts. Not gone yet, nope. Still there, itching my brain. Bastards with sticky fingers, daemons with claws, and a tightrope to walk. Normal, sane, what’s in a name? Mine’s printed on the back of someone’s hand. They’ll wipe it off in a moment, an ink smear, a loose connection.
Freefall always works best for me when cut to the tune of a diamond song.
Friend or foe? Under the bone-white light, who could say where that word lands.
****
I can always rely on the sky.
End of All Things
At the end of all things, as the sun
Flares brighter, eclipsing the night
While the stars scream death-songs, the light
Shall dwindle and fade in all eyes.
And in the shivering darkness
Your winter, the echoing sighs
Of battles fought and lost, and won,
Shall pale in the memory of time.
No longer the soil grows, to be scarred
With reason, with motive or sense
No longer the bellies shall echo, love
As the Horsemen dismount and relent.
Now watch as the tides draw back, the surf
A brilliant white, in which the sun drowns
Your hand everlasting, warm with regret
Shall find and take mine, as we wait.
The years and the days in passing, love
Have mocked me as only a clock face can
The silence and stillness now are friends
At the end of all things, as we stand.
Autumn Instinct, Homeward Flight
If this year has taught me anything, it’s that nothing is secure. Things unravel in a breathspace. One by one, the fragments of life I’ve carefully pieced together in the city, are falling away. Maybe it’s not such a bad thing. Maybe my time is done here.
I try not to expect too much of any one day, person or feeling now. With the year already starting to look old in more ways than one, my face is turning to the south, to my old hometown. I fled it three years ago, to escape ghosts of my past.
I’m starting to miss their pale touch. Especially when the geese thrum overhead. Instinct is pulling me to wherever I’ll feel at home.
Now when the light among the trees
Has frayed from summer’s gold, to brass
The geese make chevron smiles at me
And I shall wave, to see them pass
But now the hawk, his keening cry
Has sold my soul within the haze
I watch him leave and mourn the loss
Of diamond love, within his gaze
Your hand was warm inside the spring
A green-gold hope, a vagrant lust
I couldn’t hope to rein you in
And distance bides its time on trust
But here again, the road shall part
My breath is twisting with the wind
And melancholy rides the grass
Towards the winter chill within
My home, my time within the walls
Of ancient stone and modern face
Are dialling down towards the sun
Lost in the west, his empty grace
And soon the autumn, with his geese,
His brassy sun and fading light
Shall lift the hope and set me free
Where instinct points me home, in flight.
Well if I seem a little strange, that’s because I am
On a Smiths bent again. They are a band who, like Neil Young, should only really be played on vinyl. It’s all about the snap, crackle and pop.
Helpless in the face of my own happiness. I have the place to myself this (long) weekend, and am enjoying the extra space far too much for what is healthy of a five-year old relationship. We have had our problems lately, it’s true. I am … older. Not necessarily wiser, but certainly not the 23-year old chit he first encountered online, subsequently messaged and got a tarty reply from. Well, OK, I’d probably still do it 😉 But I don’t have the defensive jaw anymore, which – as he often points out these days – was my sword, ready to jab out anyone’s eye. I was still a very scared individual, truth be told; 2008 saw me re-entering the dating world, hesitant and still rawboned, not quite sure of my place in the world yet.
I know it now. If being with him has taught me anything, it’s that it is never too late to try again. Taking his cue, I picked up the writing-reins, gradually guiding myself back on course to where my true legacy lies. Nowadays, it’s me sat in front of the bureau, furiously belting out chapters, while he languishes in writers’ block. I feel heart-sore for my fella, truly I do. But I also feel – and it pains me to admit it – stifled.
For years, I lived alone. Well, under my mum’s roof, but her shift work kept her out at odd hours, to the point where we often went days without seeing one another. So I could at least pretend I had the small house to myself. This suited my solitary personality quite well; oh, and I had Kaiser, of course. The fluffy idiot, offering token editorials in my ear, grumbling whenever I dragged the ironing board out from under the stairs.
After the perils of re-entering A Level education, three years everyone’s senior (still, this would prove to be my advantage, since I’d had more experience of the world than they), I had attempted University and hated it. The course was a mess. Bailing out before I made too much of a dent in my purse, I returned to my hometown to meet my parent’s disappointment head-on. The illness was, of course, a major factor – I simply wasn’t ready for the influx of information, with little breaks, that University is all about. That and, the constant socializing was a drain – house parties, clubbing until 3am, cycling in the coastal wind and rain to the campus, all took their tolls on my limited reserves. That’s even before we get onto my perfectionist self-pressure to attain excellence. I made that midnight oil burn, oh yes.
So, on my arse again, I took up cleaning. Contract to start with, before finding employment with a professional, and I have her to thank for every job I’ve secured since in the business; she was a serious task-master. Between her and Dad’s military atmosphere in my childhood home, I make a straight line look crooked.
Cleaning in the daytime, also afforded me plentiful personal space. I kept my own hours, with no additional work following me home; ergo, the writing could flourish. But it didn’t begin to fully, until I met my fella. As a writer himself, he became my greatest confidante (apart from Kai) and harshest critic. Still remains so, to this day.
Of course, this comes with serious repercussions where our relationship is involved. After a particularly hard battering on either side, we may go a few hours without speaking to one another. Some might say that career and home life should never be mixed; I unfortunately don’t have that choice. Two writers under one roof, well, it seemed the perfect blend when we first got together. God knows, we’ve been through enough, have lived in tighter conditions than this (cramped in his bedroom under his parent’s roof, for one. A whole year of it.)
But now, I am older. And becoming vastly aware of it, of myself, in ways not experienced before. I always was a late starter. At 28, I’m going through the revelations and emotional revolutions that my peers experienced a decade ago. I feel more behind than ever. Most crushingly, I’m becoming aware of the fact that I have never had space. No home to call my own.
Oh I know, plenty of people are back living with their parents. I was on the Dole a year, I know what the recession has done. But right now, I’d honestly welcome a room in a house-share, as long as it was my own. Just like when I lived in the family home down South, around fifteen years ago (God, how that number rings hard in my head.) I feel as though I’ve missed out on things important to development; and the trouble is, while all my peers are settling down to marriage and children, mortgages and secure employment, I still feel (willingly) as rootless as ever. Their world was never to be mine. I have no more interest in procreation or wedlock, than I did aged eighteen, aged twelve.
But they’ve had their share of independence. They’ve got the drinking and fucking around and fucking up and flirtatious idiocy with the world, all out of their systems. And I am looked at askance by so many because, at my age, I should know better.
Well, I never was backward about coming forward.
I have little patience for the kind of people (and believe me, I oscillate among them daily) who believe I ought to grow up. I would like to tell them about the girl who I stopped slitting her wrists with a smashed jam jar on a psychiatric ward; about the sexuality I’ve forced into my scrawny body over the course of five years after release from said ward, in an attempt to keep up with the world, with relationships … but I can’t be arsed with arseholes.
Yes, my body is not attractive. I made it so. My family are genetically whiplash anyway, but I’ve taken it to steely new cords. Fighting out demons in the gym does this to a person. Beating out breath, forcing fire out of my head and into my muscles, stands in lieu of therapy. I’d probably have killed someone by now, if I didn’t 😉
The fella stands between me and being alone again. But somehow, the flames we once had, have languished under daily life’s extinguisher. We promised ourselves this wouldn’t happen. I still love him, in an abiding way, the way people who’ve met each other’s souls head on, tend to do. And I fear, if I lose him, I will never know love again.
But I’ve been alone before, know its perils and freedom. As a child, I hated group play, sharing toys and ideas. To this day, I can usually manage one-on-one’s for a day or so, before even that solo company becomes unbearable. Small wonder I’m always drawing the Hermit in my Tarot pack.
If I let him go, it won’t only be for my benefit. Isn’t letting someone go, the greatest act of love we can give?
Knowing my passive-aggressive self, I’ll withdraw. He’ll come back off holiday, and I will act as though nothing as happened. As though I haven’t actively reveled in my space, in my freedom. I will settle back into quietly languishing under the weight of my own lie.
And hate myself more every day, for doing so.
Enough depressing bollocks. I have the Bank Holiday evening, the sultry evening full of damp soil and sunlight smells. A new bottle of Morgans’ Spiced rum. And photos from the country walk of today … the trials and tribulations of your brutal narrator, in the wilds of suburban life.
I was bored before I even began.
Attempting to cross a field I use regularly, I was confronted by these chaps:
I wasn’t a coward. I outvibed them, running at the bastards and shouting. OK, actually I slunk past and took this photo behind the safety of the closed gate, which was the sweetest sound, that satisfying clunk-click. But I still managed it, despite Withnail and I flashbacks.
The haunted, frightened trees. On field research for the novel, I wove in and out of wild-barred sunlight in the woods, all black ‘n gold, treading on dog mercury (it stinks) and scaring kids walking by.
There are no happy endings, because nothing really ends.
celenagaia 