Archives for the month of: January, 2013

Varieties

January 29, 2013 //
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Jan 29th (Waiting)

Woke in a different reality.
Sat for a while, wrapped in parka, watching the lights play with raindrops on the screen, moving in swathes of colour, speckled shoals sparkling across the day, an absent cast of diamonds.

I stare out through air, through glass, through the collected water. The headlights spraying towards us, the fractured shapes breaking into the morning, the blurring trees, encased from elements, called to go back outside.

Stuffed at the moment, don’t know whether to run or stay, to walk or hide. The light from my screen makes everything else darker around me, I tap in the glow but want greyscale. I have jobs that need doing. But I’m comfortably slumped, huddled on the settee, the spell check says ‘seethe’ but I don’t. It’s not that sort of feeling, it’s flatter, thinner, heavy grey not red.

How long am I staying here? Want to sleep, want to move, want to drink, want to stay, want to go, want to stop.
Need to write, need to read, need to move, need to drink but I’m warm and tired, wrapped in coat and tissues.

The clock still ticks pointlessly, the heating churns for no-one, the jobs wait, the trees broken vein the sky.
Winter calls me out there, I can’t be bothered.

I can’t be.

Still here.
x

Jan 25th (Cages)

It’s mine, the lack of time, the sense of disbelief, the thudding head, the ache under ribs, the slight pain in chest, the ball curled empty comfort under covers. The sense of pushing at my outside edge, the permanent running tape, the tension between consume and reduce, a sense of wanting to get sucked in fully, deeply, feel the metal box around me and a paradoxed comfort of slate bashing, that I can’t escape and wanting to feel the sides of it’s walls.

And then it flys out and up and I know what I need to do and this is what I have, all I have and it’s mine and I can shape it, run with it, do what I can, when I can, for as long as I can, until.

And I see it and I feel it and I see myself tapping through it, looking out of myself, the whole time, looking out of myself and I don’t want to lose that that sense of being in something, in me, in this shell and that’s how it is.

The spaces and the pieces, the gaps and matter, the madness that belongs to me, that’s mine, right here, right now and I almost step out of it for a fragment of time, then snap back hard and flat.

This tension at the soul, this bizarre sense of almost being here.

Snow hasn’t quite melted, cold earth showing through now, be easier to walk on for a while.

x

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Categories Grief, Loss, parenting

White Materials

January 18, 2013 //
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It’s the first snow I think, don’t remember it last year, I know I took our son to town for the bright blue plastic but it came to nothing and I shoved it in the cupboard.

And the year before there must have been some but it’s very hazy, that winter just before, just before the last trip north, just before the meal with Nigel, just before the blues with Al. And now the blues are dark and not quite black, it’s early and school’s closed. I’ve told him to go back to sleep before another of those days of childhood, days of innocent whiteness, numbed red fingers, heavy crunched wool and a bite you don’t feel for hours because you’re out in it, laughing and the freeze tells you you’re alive. And I popped outside, not fully dressed, scrunched out my mark and stood in the pinpricking bitter. A dawn somewhere out there an expanse called to morning, not quite yet, beyond blue beyond white.

A black shape startles me, looking for food, a disappointed flash into the trees.
And I want to get out there, wrapped up in sealskin layers, huddled in arctic softness, a silky rub against the cracks of time, with tennis rackets on my feet and steaming huskies panting our way. And it takes me everywhere, to the last garden I remember, when you were tapping away upstairs, working from home while we constructed three snowmen. Out the back and we wrapped them warmly, one for each and I have the photo somewhere, our son on the edge and proud, an expression of an older face to come though we still had a year but didn’t know.
And our snow, squealing up the Jungfrau when my hiking boots were stiff and I beamed at the top of the world and we were new and cold and the air made us dizzy.
An under it I’m in Svalbard on a quest I’ve just begun, tapping my compass and watching the twitch, pointing a route to the lights. And I drift back to now, conscious of my elbow as it leans on a book, that book and the blue has faded grey. There should be Alps out there somewhere but this changing light brushes up a hint of green, a weak shade undercover and down the lane the little angled rooves shelter one small dot of orange, a tiny slit of warmth shining, someone else looking out.

It’s strangely familiar odd, dusty iced specks, a distant whiteout but no blizzard, not yet.
Think I’ll finish this in the garden, force my feet into fur, the pond will hold a mirror out there, in the quiet mist of dusted fields, the charcoal etch of trees, the endless sheet of sky and mountains beyond it that I can’t quite see.

Looking out through the frozen water to the aching backs of snowboulders caked in slimed leaves and twigs that we shaved sides off to shove through the gate and the early morning rushing when I got him up before the alarm, to cocoon ourselves out there, for a quick grab and roll, the wet gloves before school and you saw us from the window in the days of the old world when the snow blanked out a different place and I usually wore red, but not now.

7.59a.m – in it, forgot this noise, the soft burning pittering on my hood, the fired up hands, nose and eyes run in the cold soft fall of memory.

The first snow – I don’t know where I am.
X

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Categories Grief, Loss

Fermenting

January 15, 2013 //
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Stood here feeling the ache in my legs, the pressure of the floor under my boots, the sun increasing heat through the glass, warming up my neck, see the shadow I cast on the bed, my shape distorted, stretching out to the other side of the room near the wardrobe barricaded with time. Feel the coldness of my hand as I rub my cheek, a sense of looking out from within, of pushing at my edges, of being contained in something, like a fine wine, fermented over time, in rich old kegs, oak warmed flavours roasting the berries, rolling the fruits till they burst and pop from their shells, bleeding goodness into the black stained crimson.

And I’m bottled, held, contained for now, waiting to be poured and consumed, tipped into another place drenching the throat I don’t know and becoming part of a greater thirst. Moving and changing from bud to grape to bottle to mouth and I’m here in the sunlight, in my mass, in the photons, just waiting to be drunk.

Deep, warm, contained.
For a moment,
before the rush.

Ps I know why I wrote this today x

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Categories Grief, Loss, parenting

Duality

January 11, 2013 //
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I’m not sure where this is going, not sure what I’m trying to find. Taking a moment to think, to feel where I am, up away, out of the bookcase, where I’ve been looking carefully for something. Need a quote, something to anchor what I’m working on and it may be in there somewhere but I know what I need and I keep coming back to them, more and more frequently.

It’s all there, lined up and ordered in the corner of our room and it contains your thoughts, your processing, your ideas and beliefs and the new stuff I’ve taken over. But it doesn’t hold some of these new theories, some of the places I’m getting into, though you’d have skirted close to them.

I’m moving into new concepts and watching the edges blur, the osmosis between yours and mine and the unfolding landscape infront of me.
It’s still standing, just, weighted down with it’s accumulation (like me) and I was in it again rummaging recently, umpteenth look for the book that wasn’t there, but then, there it was, on a lower shelf, filed where it should have been filed, (of course) and I was focussed on the wrong part of the title, of course, and it was right where it belonged, where else?

And I’m looking out at greyness, feeling the thoughts swim around me, taking me back to our not so brief history and our time of understanding stars, in the universe that preceded this one. And my joke about you and the cat and how you quoted it in your battered old scrapbook, in the days when things were written down and paper curled and time coloured it’s elements and your thoughts raced and gathered energy, crackling overhead like a time in Svalbard. And I’m swirling with it all myself, my coloured particles dancing in a new position, velocity changing as it needs to and I’m darting in and out of things, familiar strangeness on the edge of something else and I sit next to words in the comfort of concepts, waiting for this to settle and I’m back on the phone in that other world on Mum’s dining room chair, the one that they’ve still got, that messes with my head when I look at it. And I’m sat there in my youngness and the phone is dark blue, push buttoned and new in it’s oldness from here, and it’s late but the words keep coming. All the things you bought that I didn’t understand, that I grew to love, that filtered through into this place, that I hold, that I explore, that give me a springboard now, sat there and here, late in the dark, on a timeline that moved towards now.

And it’s quite messy in here, in my head, in my life, still quite me, but there is ordering, there are cycles, there is filtering going on and I need to leave this really, need to get to the library, need to work on my references, need to stop thinking.
I’m taking it on, your words, your thoughts, but allowing the shift encouraging the process, sitting back and letting them shift into mine.

Just like our cat before we open the box. Just like then, with dust from a distant sun, like now, with colours refracting through the photons, spinning as we observe ourselves still moving through time.

Milky grey out there, heating clicking in here, hunger calling me downstairs. Should go and boil up the molecules.

In our place with those words, writing on my birthday.
Joy and pain.

A constant of the universe
Inching
Closer
x

Ps.
Out now, sat with sun on my back.
Something buzzing behind me, bird calls I don’t know, a fly bashing itself up the pane, can see a life it can’t reach. The back of my head heats up, I feel it’s warmth with my hand.
It’s peaceful.
I need to go back in, check my word count with a bibliography to do.
I’m here.

(I left the door ajar, the fly might get out.)

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Categories Grief, Loss

Wavelengths

January 1, 2013 //
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Watching it all, the white light, sun dot in a bead of condensation, the day shimmering on the winter branch outside, circles of diamonds left by my finger traces, a mist of micro spheres, packed together creating fog on my window, strings of world seeping through the drips, an invisible cage widening, thaw by thaw with the climbing brightness, the morning wet on everything.

I open the window to let the day in, the fresh winter cool waking up my skin, in the distance the flood of photons brush open new hills, the cottage down in the dip gets up steam, white washed, shaded blue from this angle. It’s boiler working deep inside, converting coal to energy, soft curled spits and twirls climb on the breeze, blurred pencil lines draw up and away from the roof under the gentle ebb and flow of our son’s dream filled breath.
 
Another year, another day, another moment.

Round we go again x

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Tags , , ,
Categories Loss, parenting