I stepped inside an old place recently, faces I knew from before I carried this and I was startled by their lines, their faces that had aged while I’d been away. And I looked out of myself at them and their uncomfortable smiles and we all did our dances, our little false phrases and retorts and they passed by on their way home, in their world, that I used to know when everything was safe and dependable.
And we carried on in ours, our son laughing, rolling down the bank with his friend, his new good friend who knows us now and I stay outside it all, watching with my face on. And in the places he didn’t see, I saw us all there, the last time, the only other time there, ambling around chatting to friends at car-boots and picking up that book for 60p, the book we took on that holiday, when you watched the world go by – and it did.
And I stood by the tight privet hedge where I’d smiled, last time at the bands and the music, before the women who annoyed me with her ways, flounced by, annoying me with her ways. But now everything annoys me, the view and the people, the little matchstick cliques parading around without this, this solid stone that I lug around me on these events, in-between their chiffon smiles. These lilting light and frilly sun drenched days when the laugh of our son lifts the weight a little and I sit inside my body feeling time and all its nonsense while I look out from within at the job I have to do.
Yesterday in pieces at Summer fair.
Later:
The wasp is outside today, motoring to get in, he sounds loud and insistent but he doesn’t bother me. I focus on the cool air on my foot, last year’s flip-flops hanging on to their form and the carefree gush of water, churning round the rubber, unleashing itself into my teeming pond.
In the sunlight, with layers of time echoed patterns, this symmetry, sitting on my shoulder.
x
The Tao of Grief 