Huginn and Muninn

I am at the foot of the mountain.

A young couple holding hands start up the path at the same time, and go ahead; the whole of the climb and the whole of their lives ahead of them, I think, somewhat ruefully.  I can’t help sizing them up, godlike surmising that it won’t last, though I suspect they’re almost as green as each other.  She will outgrow him, I divine.  But maybe, just maybe he’ll keep pace with the maturation of her mind, and they won’t be pulled apart; will see it through to their dying days.  I try to temper the cynicism of my initial reading by reminding myself that I was that green too, once, and that on any other day I might long to be as young again, though perhaps not quite as green.

There are no challenging scrambles up fragmented rock faces, but it is a long ascent, ever upwards, with one brow leading to another hidden beyond, in what comes close to being an endlessly dispiriting series.  I stop regularly to catch my breath, and to look back.  To the far distance, where there is a slither of blue sky under the sheet of cloud; and down into the mere, whose water reflects both the green-black of the opposing conifer-covered hillside and the white of the cloud above.  Patches of recent snow still ice and fill declivities in the hillside on which I stand.

Finally I make it to the broad upper back of the mountain.  Where there is turf rather than shale, it is springy and dry.  At the cloud-covered top, in the mist, are groups of hikers in what seems to be increasingly hi-tech gear; a fell assessor selling teas and coffees from a two-person tent; and a man smoking a celebratory cigar in the lee of the stone wall shelter.  My celebration is to think of you, to finger my phone’s alphabet and compose a text telling you where I am.  As I do so a raven – Huginn perhaps – soars overhead on the currents of air meeting the mountain side, patrolling what I am sure he sees as his domain.

I look down upon the more famous of the two ridges, and marvel at people’s mental ability to feel secure as they take the steep, single file descent down to it.  Were I to venture down, I would be fighting more than the traces of vertigo I have ignored to get to the top, to achieve these views; ignored so as to be able to pass them into your sight.

After a time I head a little way down from the summit and sit for a while upon the peace of a rock on the side of the mountain protected from the wind.  I look down into the emerald green at the bottom of the valley below, and away to the silver arms of distant lakes both right and left.  A second raven – which must be Muninn – flies across the landscape.  I watch as he lands on the next rock along from me, ready to hop onto my shoulder and report his intelligence.

I return to the path, concentrating on my footing as I descend.  I stop to rest about halfway down.  My head feels clear from the hopscotch exertion of mountain-goating down the steps of rock hewn from the hillside to form the path.  Completely, perfectly clear; as fresh and transparent as the water which gullies down the ravines.  And in that moment I know.  I just know, and the thought is the only movement in the stillness of my head, the stillness of the mountainside.

I think you know what I was thinking, don’t you?

Possessed

The woman who came into my life so much earlier than the woman I love says the words to me and I automatically repeat – parrot – them back to her, trying to make it seem that I do mean them.  But I no longer want to mean them.  I stopped wanting to mean them, wanting them to mean something, a long time ago.  Perhaps it’s in those moments of involuntary reply that I feel most guilty.  For she must have noticed that now I am never the one to initiate the saying of that universal yet most personal of prayers between two people, never the one who calls and awaits her response, never the celebrant, only ever the false-hearted worshipper.

And so it struck me that when instead I say the words to the woman I love, I may leave her no choice but to respond, because there is no prayer without an amen; because if she doesn’t, then a fracture opens up between us and one or other or both of us fall into it.  And yet I know it is nothing like that simple.  Sometimes she does not say them back immediately, perhaps searching for some new form of words to capture what we both know already anyway.  Other times it is she who says them to me.  Still others she feels she should not be saying them, should be holding them back for another, and I have to try not to feel crushed.  And then there are the times when they are the cleanest of the dirty words we whisper into our kisses.

In one of those kind of moments she once said, ‘You take me over somehow’.  She is possessed by me.  I am possessed by her.  I do not want to release her or be released myself.  Possessed.  What a word, with all those sibilant ‘s’s, and in that it can mean two quite contrary things.  Possessed, as by the devil, or a spirit or passion strong enough to be the devil’s; or possessed, as in self-possessed, gifted with a calm composure in the face of devilish or passionate intent.

I don’t want to know what Roland Barthes has to say about all this.  I don’t even want to begin to think what Roland Barthes has to say about all this. – Alright, I want to know what Roland Barthes has to say about all this.  I’ve got his book beside me (his book which was once her book, the woman who came into my life so much earlier than the woman I love’s book, her book which for a long time now has been our book), but I won’t read what he says about ‘Je-t’-aime’ until I have finished here.  After all, Roland hasn’t got my heart, and he hasn’t got hers, the woman I love’s heart.  Though I can see from the contents page that he has a fragment about that too, le cœur, and some 78 other ‘figures’ – absence, anxiety, fulfilment, contingencies, demons, jealousy, letters, magic, silence, night, ravishment, encounter, tenderness, will-to-possess, to name just a few – so many of which have also been covered here, as part of this, my lover’s discourse.

Yes, sometimes I feel I oppress her with the words; but that is the nature of love: it enslaves both the beloved and the lover.  At times the slavery is willing and essential; at others stifling, too much, despite everything.  On occasion it can even be not quite enough.

Because it contains the nub of all our problems, because it isn’t as simple as one loving the other and vice versa, because other people are involved, I often think I risk breaking that day’s spell if I say ‘I love you’.  But I go ahead and say it anyway.  I cannot not.

And if ever there comes a time when I don’t say it, when I bite it back, when for whatever reason I cannot say it – perhaps because my tongue has been cut out, and my fingers tremor too much to sign it – she will know that I am instead thinking it.  It seems to me that there is no escape for either of us from its sweet tyranny.

The horns

There could be no denying it now.  Two goatish protuberances on either side of the frontal bone, gnarled and beginning to spiral.  What’s more, they were pulsing.  During the course of a single day he had turned into a devil.  Though freshly emerged from his skull, the patina of the horn appeared to have been fired it the air of hell many millennia ago, and had ever since been slowly darkening.  He couldn’t help but feel the devil he was.  He imagined lowering his head so that an equally devilish woman could pleasure herself on one of the pair of horns.  He would feel her slip slowly and carefully onto the spiral, her wetness hot and liquid on his forehead, and he would exult in it.  And surely it could be so arranged that as she was finding the deepest satisfaction in the throb of the satyric growth, she would in turn be able to pleasure his third horn, the one which had once been his first and only.

The possibilities were endless.  His initial horror and anxiety quickly turned into a grim fascination and soon an inescapably addictive euphoria.  He was damned, but he no longer cared.

Boy

You imagined our child.  I hadn’t, until you told me you had.  It was a failure of imagination on my part.  But once you’d told me, then I could think of nothing else.

This time, for both of us, it would be a boy.  To start with, as a baby, he would look most like me, but in time his hair would turn the dominant colour of yours and increasingly I would see your face in his more than my own.  That is, until adolescence kicked in and the softness of his skin began to harden and he once again began to resemble me, only with your hair framing his features.

He would run rings round us, wouldn’t he, and that whirl of love would make us giddy.  We would always cope though, and be equal to any challenge he served us.  However mischievous he turned out to be, he would be the late summer sun we neither of us expected.  You would take him swimming and he would play ball with me and without pushing it we’d try and give him our thirst for walking, for hills, mountains and rivers, for constellations, planets and satellites; and of course, for birds and pictures and music and words and stories.  As time went on, we would tell him ours, continuing to do so long past the point when he would roll his eyes and finish our patina-worn sentences for us.  And then you would gently and sometimes not so gently rib him, and play up till you made his cheeks colour as yours do, and later he would remember this as fondly as we ourselves remember the embarrassments to which our mothers deliberately exposed us in order gently to stretch and undermine our self-consciousness.  And I would take his side and we would gang up on you, and that two-pronged attack would fill your heart even as you fought us back.  Because you don’t give in easily, and it’s one of the many things about you which I hope transfers to him.

And because we have imagined him, together and independently, our boy exists.  Somewhere, he is walking about, hand in hand with you, with me, with both of us, or striding about on his own.  In fact, I saw him today, skin that same easily pinked pale colour as your own, walking boldly along the street in a bright blue t-shirt, alert and open, in control of his own fate.  The slippery concept of happiness aside, that’s all we could possibly have wanted.

Unsent

This letter was found among the possessions of my late great-grandfather, folded between the pages of the manuscript of one of his unpublished novels.  It is recognisably in his hand.  It seems to concern the end of a secret love affair, and hints at a much larger correspondence which to date has not been found.  There was no salutation at the top of the letter, as if it were part of an ongoing conversation that perhaps only death would conclusively end.  Neither my mother nor my grandmother can throw any light on the story, my grandmother’s only word on the subject being that such an affair was quite impossible, and that the document must have come loose from one of his many other works of fiction.

There was some frustration in the last letter I wrote you, I know.  I wish I could handle it better; but if there were less of it, then I think there would be less of the love from which it is sourced too.  Love when it is thwarted, however it is thwarted, must turn to frustration and unhappiness.  But when I had vented those particular days of frustration, even as it was cooling, even as I was writing, all I could feel was, and is, gratitude, and the love replenishing itself.  I am deeply, widely, entirely grateful for all the gifts you have given me, for the love that has borne me in an endless loop between your heart and head.  I just needed to tell you that again.

We have both been burnt.  What we made was too hot, it scorched our fingers and frayed our nerves and made a constant inconstant out of hearts that would probably both be better off beating to a consistent rhythm.  But I never thought of our love as amour fou, though it was perhaps mad for us to begin in the first place.  We were neither of us intent on destroying ourselves, and the connection was rational as well as emotional; it had its roots in the lives we had independently lived, roots which were thirsting for nutrients not available in the soil around us.  It may have felt destructive at times as its magnitude made its impact on our day-to-day lives, but even if it had to end sometime, both of us needed this.  Our love was necessary.  It had to be.  It strove to be, and was, and will be, as we look back at it down the coming years.  And even now, at the point where we are admitting its end, I want to say it might be again, should circumstance allow.

But it’s impossible to know that now.  So mend, my love, mend without me there, without me hindering or helping; or rather, helping only in the sense of one who you know you can depend upon to be thinking of you, willing you to be as strong and as bright and as alive as he knows you can be.  Willing you to begin to see yourself in your place again, without reference to him.  To return to a wholeness you lost a long time ago.  Let all around you see you be fully with them – as fully at least as you can – and permit yourself to see how much they love you, how much they need and admire you, they who have never seen what I have seen but are as close to the core of you as I have been.  Remember they too see what emanates from that core, filtered through the quotidian.  And perhaps in the end what P sees is not so very different from what I have seen.  Only his love for you formed at a different time of your life, and so it has necessarily yellowed like The Times in the sun.  But turn the page, and perhaps it can come alive again.

There won’t be a day goes by when I don’t think of you.  Let that thought bear you up, when you need bearing up.  I know it will be so for you too, but don’t be sad if a day comes when you realise that I did not enter your head for the whole of the preceding one.  I would call that healing, and though today it tears at my heart to imagine it happening, I have to hope you get there, and I know that if you do, it won’t be because the love you felt for me has shrunk, but because your day-to-day life has grown back to how it could and should be, and has better hidden me from immediate sight.

Finally, never be sorry, because there is nothing to apologise to me for.  You might as well apologise for the stars and the planets and the moons.  For me yours was that kind of light, twinkling and golden and silvery, set in the darkness and travelling across what seemed like years, since it came from such a way away.  It was perhaps asking too much of each other to leave our respective orbits.  But I know how much I meant to you, don’t think I don’t.  It’s a fact, like those stars and planets and moons.  We created constellations together, and they will stay in the night skies of our minds forever, in the shape of birds and gods and hot air balloons and spoons and watches and garden shears and a hundred other ordinary everyday objects.  Brightest of all, containing our pole star, the pestle and mortar.

You’ve meant the world to me, lands and oceans and skies, and I’ll carry you with me always.

Yours,

Drawn

[‘A poem is never finished, only abandoned.’  I’ve put this one back under the bed for a while.  The last verse was a mess.]

Let it be

You can’t hold a virtual letter in your hands and let it fall from them as you take in its meaning.  But that’s how you should picture me now, the familiar handwriting lying blue and loopy and somewhat off the horizontal on white paper on the hessian flooring.  I won’t let it lie there forever; eventually I’ll pick it up, and find the consolation in it.  The love.

*

Sometime later I emerge from what appears to have been a trance.  In an effort to get oxygen to my brain, I walk unsteadily out of the house to breathe in the last of the day, hoping that my legs and lungs will lead me back towards being a halfway functioning human again.  Slowly I cover the short distance to the common, and as I do so, I look up into the early evening sky and see an aeroplane glinting silver in the sun, trailing the longest, straightest skywritten line I’ve ever seen.  The two parallel jets that the plane emits become one, as what little movement there is in the air up there sifts the two trails together.  I pass folk walking their dogs and parents carrying their tired-out young children home.  Dressed in black I am the spectre in their day but even in my bereaved state I manage greetings.  The skywritten line is eventually intersected by another almost as long, forming a giant kiss.  I rue not being able to take a picture – one I would have sent to her; one in fact of a kind that I did send to her, once before – but who lets a letter fall from one hand and thinks to pick up a camera with the other?

*

This morning I forgot to put her token in my pocket; since she sent it to me, the first and only day I have done so.

*

On the sandy paths of the common I stop and take in the gorse and heather and the blue of the sky as the sun sets behind me.  I listen to the birds’ chattering song.  But for them, the stillness of the day would be eerie.  They animate the world, give it meaning even as they refuse to reflect the meanings I hold within me.  I wish she could hear them too, standing next to me, our arms entwined, and us looking out upon a life together, a life that though it might have its moments of motionlessness would never be still.  But she can’t hear them and her arm isn’t looped through mine and without her, my life is stilled.  I have had to die suddenly so that she can live.  Because before now she was slowly dying so that I could live.

The same butterflies that I felt whenever we met now take flight from my stomach and chest, and as they depart, the motion of their wings softly hollows out my heart.  Today is the last day of my life, but the birds, well, they are trying to tell me that I should let tomorrow be the first of the rest of it.

In the morning

The days before they met were jittery with nerves, with the what ifs of their meeting and the sense that the care and fortune that went into the plan they had laid could be sunk by any one of a number of expected or unexpected factors.  During those days she sent him pictures of where she was, totemic signs of the life they fantasised about having together – a room with a view, a merry-go-round, a yacht dancing on a perfectly circular sea set in formal gardens.  He tried to keep her buoyed when she seemed in danger of slipping under, and, in order to keep himself afloat, he searched for a magic formula of words, an incantatory phrase that would defend them against every danger, mishap or sorrow.  But it was hard to find a precept that was exactly, alchemically right.  Unbidden came Lady Macbeth screwing her courage and her husband’s to the sticking place; he pushed her away immediately.  He flicked through a random succession of lyrics from songs stacked like vinyl in the racks of his mind, but none were quite right, none had the necessary context, none struck the right note.

He found himself falling back on a Christian mystic – ‘all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well’ – but despite the forgiveness of sin implicit in those words, he knew in his heart that they were as inappropriately borrowed as the murderer’s would have been.  In the end he realised that he would have to depend on his own ability to shield himself, to explain how this had come to be, how it was necessary to live a second life alongside the first.  They both knew it would not be understood by the people in their first lives, not without long, long periods of searing, painful argument, wearyingly cyclical discussion; and even then possibly not.  But whichever it was on their part, need or greed, it was greater than the risk, and in the end, they would contain the jitters, and meet.

He was halfway to the station when he realised he would have to turn back.  His daughter’s comforter.  Jesus.  He had it here with him in the car that would not be coming home until long after dark.  Really she was too old for it now, but she would miss it later.  So he drove back along the familiar stretch of road ten, twenty miles an hour faster than he usually would.  Returning once more in the right direction, he found himself stuck behind a slow-moving lorry.  Then for some unaccountable reason in the queue for traffic lights he let out a car in front of him, and too late saw that the driver was elderly, and destined to crawl at ten, twenty miles an hour slower than whichever speed limit applied.  So it was, all the way to the station.  Yet still he made it with minutes to spare.  All the parking ticket machines were out of order.  He bought the right parking and the wrong journey from the self-service machine, sprinted back to the car, placed his entitlement to park in the windscreen, and ran for the train which he could see was now approaching the platform.  A flight of stairs up, a flight down, and he was on board, with a window seat and only seconds to spare.  He could sort the ticket error out with the guard.

When he was finally able to catch his breath, when he had cooled down, glad of the deodorant he had applied that hot summer’s morning, he allowed himself to think that having made the train, this train and not another, might just augur well for the rest of the day.

In the afternoon

In the evening

The wireless age #46: Parallel worlds

As he got older it seemed that chances to tell his story, his life story, had diminished.  Not that he preferred speaking above listening or particularly liked the sound of his own voice; but if someone was genuinely interested, if he felt that in his bones, or better still in his heart, then he would happily talk for hours and hours.  Unexpectedly he had been given a chance to tell it all in the greatest detail to someone who was infinitely interested in how he had arrived at the point in time at which they met.  And so it had been for her too.  It was a gift that neither of them would ever be less than deeply grateful for.

But now it felt like his story was on hold again, or even that it had gone back on itself.  He couldn’t help wishing that he could go on telling the story to the woman who had become part of it, could go on filling in the gaps and creating new chapters; chapters bursting with the life that somehow seemed to have slipped away from his.

It was chance that took him in the direction of her ghost.  He was attending a day of seminars at the university where she had once been a student.  Typically he had decided to turn chance into a kind of pilgrimage.  He would rather see the house in which she had once lived than the blue-plaqued or unmarked residence of any of his favourite writers.  Besides, she was his favourite writer, and this city a part of the story of her life.  She told him once the name of the street on which she had lived, but it was at the overgrown fringes of his memory now and he couldn’t pluck it from its hiding place.  He would just have to hope that he bumped into it and underwent a sudden jolt of recognition.

Late arriving, he had to run from the car park to the building in which the seminars were taking place in order to pick up a parking permit, then run back to place it on view.  So he was breathless as he twice crossed the campus, much changed since her time, he guessed.  But there would still be buildings here she had been in, and around them streets which she had walked down.  He wanted to breathe the same air as her for a while, albeit displaced by time.

In the lobby of the building he was visiting he spotted a colleague and knew that for a time he would have to put all thoughts of pilgrimage aside.  The seminar was delivered against the background hum of ventilators.  He fought to let neither the hum nor the dryness of the lecturers’ content send him to sleep; went further by making sufficient salient points to underline his presence, his engagement even.  As the other attendees – the majority of whom were women – voiced their opinions, he gave them the once over, took in their characters.  None even came close to what she was, to having what she had.  None of the people in any of the rooms in which he habitually found himself had it.  As so often he wondered how he had ended up in this world.  He felt miscast, misplaced.  If only he could step from one reality into another, he would do so.  But they had decided not to merge their parallel worlds.  He was stuck in his and she in hers.  Watching rain fall silver in the white light of the sun outside the window, all he could do was take his mind to her.  He imagined himself into the past, into her world.  Imagined the two of them as fresh and new and unburdened.  Imagined their paths crossing, and making a friendship or a love in bars or halls or a seminar room such as this.  She would have set lecture hall, refectory and bar ablaze, he knew it.  They would rarely if ever have seen her like.  But he also knew that if he really had met her then, he may not have had the visible force of personality to have engaged her attention.  Instead he would have admired her from afar, always debating with himself whether to attempt to bridge the space between them.  It was age which gave him the confidence to do what he had done, to make eyes across the celebratory table at which he first saw her.

He emerged from his bubble and looked at his watch.  Not even half way through.  He was longing for lunch and the afternoon session to be over, so that he could for a time follow her traces and walk around what he thought of as her streets.

At last he was free to go.  He wandered out into the air, breathed in its moisture to replace the dryness in his lungs, and set off walking.  Soon he found himself faced with a path across a common and knowing that at some point she would have walked this way, he walked it too.  Now they had a common in common.  The path was signed Lover’s walk.  It might have been for lovers a long, long time ago, but today – and he imagined it was so in her time too – it was creepily enclosed and disconcerting.  He soon diverted off into a grassy space on whose turf he was sure she would once have sat and stretched out.  And drank and kissed, in a life he could never be a part of.  Seeing a pair of magpies, he thought to himself, I’m confused; she and I have attached so many terms and conditions to the sight of one that I don’t know what two means any more.

He headed back into the streets around the university.  Past redbrick houses with gabled fronts and a redbrick hall of residence, past a yellow brick pub in which he felt sure she would have drunk.  Down a hill and back up, passing a church on the corner, looking off to left and right at the name of each street, searching for that stab of recognition, but though some seemed achingly familiar, none came.  As the rain began to fall again, he gave up, turning back into the campus.  Soon he found himself in front of an old, foursquare redbrick building: the Union.  He knew for sure then that if he trod the steps of its entrance he would cross over with her in space if not time.  A student, a woman, was standing in the doorway.  She took in his approach, as anyone does while waiting and on seeing someone coming towards them.  For a moment he allowed himself to imagine that it was her, that this was where they had arranged to meet; that here was his portal to the parallel world he wished to enter.  But if he kept up this pretence he knew he risked unnerving the waiting woman.  In any case it was going to be perturbing if he walked up the steps and turned about in her face.  But he felt impelled by his pilgrimage to do it; he couldn’t not.  So as he came up one side of the steps he comically made as if he had forgotten something, and came back down the other.  She gave him a look, but that was all.  Just some hare-brained, harmless maths lecturer, she might have thought.

Not far from the union building was a little rectangular pool in which a geometric figure had been set.  Blue-green with copper patina, it looked to be by some contemporary of Henry Moore.  Dawdling on summer days, she must have stood here and gazed upon it.  He watched the rain patter on the viscous-seeming surface of the water and on the lily pads which part-covered the pool.  Perhaps if he span a coin into the air, a piece of silver to break the water’s skin, he could make a wish and that would be his portal.  He flipped ten pence skywards and watched it arc and puncture the water.  Through the settling ripples he saw its resting place, and closed his eyes.  He stretched out his right hand and wished.  He felt her hand brush his, but when he opened his eyes she was gone.

It was only when he got home and dug out a map that he spotted and remembered the street name, and realised with one more pang in his heart that he had driven along her road and had parked just off it.  Had crossed and recrossed it on foot.  Had walked in her steps without knowing that he was.

Mars and Mercury, Tuesday and Wednesday, grace and woe

She had boxed up her love and parried his.  She would no longer cede to his desire, or her own.  With superhuman effort she ignored his endearments when it seemed that mere moments before she had gathered them as posies of flowers smelt and smiled upon.  And the flower she was had closed its petals; would not, could not let him come buzzing at her pollen any longer.

Everything went against him, or so it seemed.  The innocent questions asked which sparked a hailstorm of guilt, the weather itself, the old lover ringing when he did.  Finite time to finish a redecorating job and a sanctimonious neighbour waging a war of attrition being the weights which stretched the main and all the other burdens an ounce, a pound, a stone too far.  Then a television programme about a man living a secret life; its uneasy parallels.  Weights too far.

He sighed.  He knew her reasoning was sound.  But his heart refused to listen to his head, or to the silent screaming in hers.  His alleged grace, her undoubted woe, they had become one.  Intermingled and indivisible.  A transference of substance approximate to the soul or life force or very subtle mind had taken place, an each-way transference.  Together they were something other than what they were apart.  Something both celestial and earthy.  Without her he was neither.  He couldn’t help longing to be stretched out once again upon the rack of their love.

All the old familiar songs began to circle menacingly, their bittersweet threat now intensified beyond his pain barrier – ‘Let me down easy’, ‘Ne me quitte pas’, ‘I want you’, ‘Black cherry’, ‘Love letter’, ‘Take care’, a hundred others, the really desperate ones.  And he knew that whenever he heard them in future, he would be right back in the moments where the angles became pleading and the begging became panic and the thickness in his throat became gasping, tearing sobs.

He was not ready for this.  He didn’t think he would ever be ready for it.  He could only hope that she found that she wasn’t either.  It was the fitful, flickering element of hope which kept him going.  And if that light died, he didn’t know what he would do.  He wished he could replay time from a certain point, make it go differently.  But there were so many things outside his control.  He felt powerless, or at least that his powers were limited.  He couldn’t McCartney a ‘Yesterday’ out of the ether, but there he was still trying to.  And even in the unlikely event that he succeeded, as likely as not it would still do no good.

As much as anything, perhaps more than anything (save for the kisses and the touch of their bodies, save for the words that passed between them then) he would miss the sharing of all the ordinary little everyday things.  But that was exactly the problem – the ordinary little everyday things were hidden inside a bubble of secrecy, and each of the thousands of pieces of knowledge the one held about the other, because they were wrapped in love, might as well have been a splinter threatening to pop it.

Bringing it all back home

Night

When I go to sleep it is with images of you, images of us as we were together.  Naked flames dancing, ashes smouldering, turn and turn the fuel again.  From within the fire I feel you scorch my skin, and watch you flare and burn.

Sometimes too I imagine what we never had the chance to do.  Just one of those things; a summer breeze through a high sash window, your head on my shoulder, mine on yours, our faces upside-down to each other’s as we lie length to length diagonally across the bed listening to Bringing it all back home.  From time to time, lips puzzling with their upside-down conundrum.

To reach sleep I kid myself that there is nothing to worry about, that you’re there.  Sometimes it works.  But when I wake in the night, the first stricken thought I think is that you’re not.  The realisation crushes me and I long to be back under, to be un-conscious.  And when I wake in the morning, you are my first thought then too; you and the not unrelated awareness of my morning glory.  To ease the absence, I take myself in hand, and have you ride me, and say to you the words I know you still long to hear.

Day

The silence is deafening.  It roars and bays and there is no escape from it.  When I put my hands over my ears or try to block out sound through keeping busy, it only shouts all the louder.

I could feel you disappearing again, shrinking from me, from the poison ivy of my words, my company.  The hold we have on each other is strong; it will last till the days we die.  You have had to wrench yourself away, and our flesh is torn where we were joined.  I doubt the wound will ever fully heal.  We will, I think, carry it always.

In the car I ignore the periodic flashing of the engine warning light.  Instead I focus my attention on Blood on the tracks.  Jesus, Bob.  Through the windscreen I see two geese flying high over the harbour, rising with each wing beat as ‘If you see her, say hello’ unfurls.  Stuck in traffic, I watch until they vanish into a pall of cloud, always within kissing distance of each other.  Even as I re-focus on the music, my thoughts wander, in a constant cycle of concentration and drift.  Inevitably I see you both inside the songs, and outside of them, listening along with me.

Somehow I make it through work, alternating immersion in its beige tones with the red raw memory of us.  The day can’t help but die with the drive home, and the requirement to put on another head.

Pall

Mask

The dissembler pretends to be someone he is not. His role requires constant improvisation, a steady forward progress across shifting sands. Every moment he must remake, re-create, modify the personage he is playing, until at last the moment arrives when reality and appearance, the lie and the truth, are one. At first the pretence is only a fabric of inventions intended to baffle our neighbours, but eventually it becomes a superior – because more artistic – form of reality. Our lies reflect both what we lack and what we desire, both what we are not and what we would like to be.’

‘The Mexican… becomes mere Appearance because of his fear of appearances. He seems to be something other than what he is, and he even prefers to appear dead or nonexistent rather than to change, to open up his privacy.’

– Octavio Paz, The labyrinth of solitude

I remember the night I first wore the mask.  My brother threw a party, between Hallowe’en and Bonfire Night.  He said it was fancy dress.  I assumed that meant Hallowe’en fancy dress.  I turned up as a creature of the underworld; or at least one dressed in black and wearing the mask of a monster.  It was lizard green, with pointed ears, and a wolverine’s muzzle and yellowing teeth set in a blood red maw which resembled the torn flesh of prey.

My brother on the other hand wore a suit, with a thin black tie; until he told me, I didn’t know he was supposed to be James Bond.  You could have come as anything, you doughnut, he said, rolling his eyes.  Thanks for making that clear, 007, I said.  But I was happy as I was, a masked fiend or ghoul; I felt freer, less self-conscious, plus I could see through the eyeholes that I was freaking people out.  I couldn’t keep it on for long, of course – it was airless in there – so periodically I reverted back to human form.

He had emptied out his garden shed, made it into a bar, fairy lit.  It wasn’t apparent where he had put all the stuff that was usually stored inside it.  Midway through the evening I stepped in to top up my glass.  Without the mask on.  Just my brother’s wife and a friend of hers in there.  I was introduced.  From words spoken and looks issued, I could tell the friend was a hunter, a predator even.  Enough had been drunk there in the shed to loosen lips and intimations.  Stone-cold sober, I felt unsettled.  But that wasn’t all I felt.  Confusion; an element of attraction coupled with a greater degree of a feeling it isn’t over-dramatising to describe as repulsion.  I wasn’t used to being deliberately and visibly eaten up like that.  And yet if you’d asked me about my innermost workings and I could have told you in confidence, I would have said that I longed to be eaten up, to be taken in mouth and claw by just such a predator.  But in that pretend-bar, in the presence of my brother’s wife, it seemed misplaced.  There was something odd about it.  I couldn’t put my finger on what.  As soon as I was able, I backed out of the shed.  Put the mask back on, and distance between myself and other people.  Listened to my monstrous breathing rasp through the holes cut in the blood red maw.  When at last I felt sufficiently undead, I took the mask off again.  Craned my neck skyward to watch the fireworks.  Breathed in the cold night air, before exploded gunpowder spread its pall.

It was only much later, remembering back, that I realised the woman standing with my brother’s wife in their fairy-lit garden shed-bar that night was – it transpired – the one with whom 007 had been having an affair.  I was a decoy.  A decoy way too close to the bone.

In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni *

It started as the loneliest journey.

If only I had reached out my hand and said wait, lie here just a little while longer.  Then she wouldn’t have seen us, then you wouldn’t have turned your face away, then I wouldn’t be feeling this way.  Hollowed out.  Cored.  And then marooned on a motorway.  Following a track I didn’t want to be on.

In an attempt to distract myself from the acid burn of heartache, I played some music, but the sound was dry, deprived of any sweetness, failing to console.  I turned to the radio, to try to enter lives beyond my own, but I couldn’t engage with any of it, with any of them.  So I fell back on listening to the engine, its pitch somewhere between a hum and a roar.  It was all I needed to hear.

On the way up, I had marked the signs, as usual, though on a different route.  A mobile home – let’s call it a caravan – on a flatbed lorry; the gift of all travel, of course.  A pale and fading wash of rainbow.  A Dreamland balloon, though I suppose its shape determines that really I should call it a zeppelin.  A handsome water tower.  The once smart, many windowed chalet-style pub fallen on hard times.  The owners didn’t even think it worth boarding up all those windows.  We could have broken in, you and I, and found a room that would have been ours for however long we needed it.

A final sign, perhaps, once I was with you: the body of a peppered moth, resting its mottled wings in lamp-lit glow on polished wood.  I meant to draw your attention to it, but I did not.  I meant to do and say so many things while I was with you but time and circumstance were against us and we had to keep looking over our shoulders.

On the way back down, I spotted the message you had left.  I couldn’t hear half of it above the engine, above the reflection of its noise from the soundboard of tarmac, but I got the gist.  It was remorse, and it was enough; in any case, I would forgive you anything, just as I believe you would me.  And I already understood how that fear of being found out could trump the fragile state of love.  If I am hollowed out, you are split in two.  There was a break in your recorded voice, a catch in your throat, the whisper of your love.  Tears, I could hear, in your eyes.  Perhaps things would be ok, I thought, perhaps we would get past this latest snake.

My mind was speeding and I was driving fast enough to be pulled over by the police.  I hogged the outside lane, nosed atypically and arrogantly into the back of errant users of my private track until they stood aside.  No-one could compete with me, no-one was foolish enough to try me on the inside.  I was above the law but beneath contempt.  Your no longer quite so secret lover, speeding home, throwing double sixes in his head, climbing ladders, all the way to 100, all the way to a heaven that still he could not give up on.

Those signs – caravan, rainbow, balloon, tower, a place in full view in which to hide from the world – they could signify either way.  All except the moth, which it would be healthier – though possibly not wiser – to see as an insect rather than a sign.  Of course I took them all as for me rather than against me.  For us, not against us.  On the way back, in the dark, the moon occulted, there was nothing to see.  There were no visible signs to determine what the future would bring.

One thing was certain.  It wasn’t the way either of us wanted it to end.

* We go wandering at night and are consumed by fire.

I see you

in the moon
in a moth
in an office desk
in a typewriter and in typos
in specs
in a French pleat
in geometric blackberry earrings and a black polo neck
in vintage cameras and careworn toy monkeys
in a sculpture in the Louvre
in padlocks
in a grain of sand
in – I confess – the heroine of a TV drama, whose leading man is me
in all the books I read, somehow or other
in cake stands
in cricket balls
in five bar gates
in a board game
in the touchpad of a laptop
in the point on a compass that would take me to you
in the name of your county, whenever it is mentioned, whatever the context
in a painting of a landscape through which I know you’ve passed
in heather, bracken and gorse
in mother of pearl
in too many species of bird to mention
in eggs and eggcups and cacti
in blackboards and breadboards
in bowls full of fruit or salad or car keys, screws, coins and sunglasses
in tea
in apples and oranges
in gherkins and piccalilli
in noodles, fine or medium
in mushrooms, darning or otherwise
in fairy rings and votive candles
in tweed jackets and leopardskin coats
in knickers and stockings
in any clock showing ten o’clock at night
in ‘I will survive’ leaking from a car dealership’s speakers
in every love song voluntarily listened to
in a woman with hair as vivid as yours walking her dog
in the car in front of mine
in a bed.

I see you in all of these things, and countless more.
You are the form and function of my mind,
its dynamic and discipline,
acoustics and architecture.
Its supporting structure.
And even when you are no longer there
you will still keep me upright.

Third person omniscient

The omniscient narrator allowed his character’s limited mind to speculate on how all of this had come to pass, letting it wander from the book he was reading into a consideration of whether at points in his life he could have chosen different paths, or whether the paths always chose him, with each step along the way influencing and effectively determining the subsequent choices he thought he was making.  For example, did his wife’s unwillingness to hear a confession of his at the outset of their relationship really make him so unable to speak now, when the need to tell was so much greater?

He had reached a junction, and there before him were as many roads as he cared to imagine, including the volte-face.  He recognised he had failed to achieve the most personal of his ambitions, and he also saw himself as a failure in the career which was visible to other people.  Pricked by the first intimations of morbidity and mortality, he had finally acknowledged both failures to himself and when he looked around at the rest of his life, he realised more forcefully than ever that his remaining vitality was swirling remorselessly down a plughole.  This was an emergency situation.  What did he most want then, in the limited time left to him?  The answer called to him like the Sirens: he wanted to feel again the headiness of falling in love, the total immersion of being in love, and – looking self-critically at a third failure in his life –  he wanted to try preserving the new love better, to make it last, and last gloriously rather than comfortably.  He wanted love to turn his insides out and simultaneously sting and kiss both his skin and his mind until the very end.  He needed to use the organs with which he had been born to their full; needed to live out loud, even if only one other human being saw and heard him doing so.

He looked back at the book and his eyes came to rest on the last words he had read before his mind wandered – words which were in fact the reason his mind had wandered:

‘If you can love someone with your whole heart, even one person, then there’s salvation in life.  Even if you can’t get together with that person.’

He tested the truth of this in his mind.  It seemed a little trite, from at least a couple of angles.  It was uttered by someone who did not know or had not taken the trouble to imagine what it was to be a parent; someone who also appeared not to have had the experience of being denied the chance to get together with their lover.  Whereas he knew something about it, for he had found someone he loved like that, with his whole heart.  Loving her was both the easiest thing in the world and at times, the hardest, for three strong reasons that the omniscient narrator would not let his character’s wandering mind detail here.  But he could not stop himself from loving her and together they had mostly risen above those obstacles, though each seemed powerless to remove them.  One would have been relatively unproblematic; two might have been workable; three had them tied in inescapable mental knots.

So now he was both where he wanted to be, and not where he wanted to be.  But his vitality and a reason for living had been returned to him and to his wandering mind that was worth any amount of accompanying pain and heartache.  She had indeed been his salvation.

The omniscient narrator, he knew how this was going to end.  But the character who was currently the focus of his narration, he still had no clue at all, and that crafty all-knowing trickster was not letting on.

The actress and the bishop‏

– Hold out your hand.

He did not need to ask which she meant.  Her eyes were on the ring, the episcopal ring, the one which showed that he was wedded to the church.  How quickly she had turned command of the conversation.  His hand was in hers now.  She lowered her lips to kiss the ring.  He felt them burning hot on his cold fingers at the edge of the gold, and as well as the flames which engulfed him he felt the charge of an electric shock throughout his body, a charge that seemed to explode and rearrange every electron and positron of his being.  The look in her eyes as she raised them to his rearranged them all over again.

He was a bishop while she was an actress whose mixture of ballsiness and diplomatic tact meant that she preferred but didn’t insist on being called ac-tor as opposed to ac-tress.  His position gave him a certain immunity from gossip, while she swam in its waters.  As far as society was concerned he was a worldly clergyman and she was an actor with spiritual leanings preparing for her next role as the wife of a bishop.  When she came to take tea at the Palace that first time, the flow of his answers to her theological questions never faltered even as he found himself gazing across the array of cakes at the near-godly perfection of her face.  She noticed his fiddling from the first; the way he couldn’t help availing himself of the deep pockets in his trousers.  Despite his high office, he was, after all, merely a man, and she was all woman.  She could have had her pick of leading men but they conformed to type and soon left her bored and restless.  This holy man wasn’t afraid of the violence of her emotions, had in fact she thought an understanding of it not solely confined to observation.  And – though at the outset he had found this hard to believe – he came to understand that the attraction was two-way.  Closeted in his study one day after tea taken in the public part of the Palace, she got down on her knees before him.  The look on her face as she unhooked and unzipped his trousers and watched his rising cock split the tails of his purple shirt; the reverence with which she sucked him made him feel that he had not striven for earthly status in vain.  He put his hands into the ringlets of her hair and tried to shut out all thoughts of God and sin.  He found it was not hard to do so, for here surely was a heaven on earth to challenge the most ardent believer’s notion of the paradisiacal nature of the afterlife.

And later when he administered the discipline which she subsequently came to expect of him – evangelically administered it as the shapely arch of her body bent over the episcopal desk – he gained a pastoral satisfaction well beyond the righteous glow acquired through ministering to the poor and the needy of the diocese.

In those moments, in the times she teased him to his theological limits, whenever he subsequently remembered their ecstasies and dwelt on the perfect understanding which had grown up between them, he swore that he would give up his see to tend and be tended so, if only she would let him.  But though they discussed it over and over, in the end she always concluded that it was better he stayed with the people who needed him.  She wasn’t going to disappear.  She would commit some quid pro quo time to his ecclesiastical good causes and under its cover they could continue to see each other regularly, though it might never be quite enough for either of them.  Such a realisation sometimes saddened them but love and sex chased the blues and the purple away and afterwards he would remind her of what she had said the very first time she knelt before him.

– Brings a whole new meaning to the word bishopric, doesn’t it?

Lifeline

Today the crack ran.

A silvery crack in the centre of the screen.  At first I thought it was a strand of tinsel somehow come to be stuck in the wiper.  But it wasn’t fluttering in the wind.  It was still.  I remembered the stone in the dark the night before, the suddensharp bang of flinthead against toughened glass.  A crack then, snaking from the point of impact.

As I drove I swear I could see the crack moving.  By journey’s end there could be no doubt.

On successive days I watched it grow, shaken by the car’s vibration, sensing its movement much as you do the minute hand of a clock, or the movement of a ghost just beyond your angle of sight.

I thought I should get something done about it, but I was inert, passive, a passenger in the driver’s seat.  A liver of a life lived through screens.  Let the crack lengthen, I said to myself, and the screen cave in.  Let me have to smash through shattered glass to see again.

And so over days the crack zig-zagged laboriously across my vision, occasionally emitting an audible snap, like the splintering of the ice which tops a frozen lake.  It was alright to leave it.  I was beginning to like it.

But today as I drove the crack ran, today the crack scared me.  It ran like paper tearing.  It is a tear, a tear in time and space.  A wormhole, a hole for worms.  Or – it’s hard to tell from this side – a black hole.  So now there is the temptation.  To put my hand through in the hope of a hand on the other side grasping mine and pulling me through, pulling me free.  A strong hand pulling me into welcoming arms.

Only I might just as easily disappear.

Belles-lettres

‘ – ’
Yes, it could begin this way, with a sigh,
an expiration and a meeting of mouths.
Outwards from her lips I would pen
her portrait, Flaubert or Apollinaire
flare of nose, soft bloom of cheek.
Her beauty lies at the intersection
between fragile and palpable.
A face whose lines shift to shape
a woman loose and fast and slow,
open but coiled, and never ever still.

She is particular, she is plural.
Her hair falls in calligraphic curls
which frame the story of her face.
Beneath brows cross-hatched in verse
her eyes, ‘a blue million miles’,
both fathomable and fathomless.
How they gaze into mine, and how
at times they stare off, over my shoulder,
out of the window, searching the street for
a solution which never presents itself.

I know the outlines of her life; every time
she lifts a pen, another tale shaded in.
But it’s not merely how she stages
words the way she does, and how
she punctuates tales and pinpoints fancy;
it’s the sudden way they flare, a focus
in the darkness, like struck matches,
just as smiling, her face lights in a flash.
The words are hers, no-one else’s,
hers, and she has gifted a million to me.

I can plot course and detail of her days
to the minute, almost, as she can mine.
She made me wonder had I accepted
age before my time; I found I wanted time
undone. Would I rewind now, leave behind
the swooping highs and curving lows?
No. There is no going back, only forward.
And though a last letter has been penned
still either has yet to be written. The key
being, the story’s never over till it’s over.

Two kinds of faithless

St. David’s bones are mixed up with Justinian’s and Caradog’s.  However much I want to, and even with dragon’s blood in me, sosban fach, I can’t touch the casket and make a wish, for I am two kinds of faithless.

A votive candle is ‘a prayer, a parable, a symbol’, says a notice nearby them.  I can’t light one, for I have no god to whom I pray.  I can’t make of it any kind of parable, because I would be on its receiving end.  And I cannot see it as a symbol because I cannot be seen to set a symbol aflame.

Queen of the savages

My girl is the queen of the savages.

She wears a 1940s leopardskin coat and at her neck, a tiger’s claw.  I was exploring when we met.  I had looked far and wide for her and now that I’ve found her it would be madness to give her up, though of course since she is a queen, it’s hardly my choice.

She is a jungle of possibility, a tangle of dark and black magic and the brilliant light of unexpected clearings and glades and waterfalls and pools.  We have coupled like leopards or tigers in all these places.  I lacerated my back as she rode me on the rough-cut ledge behind the waterfall.  By the pool into which it falls she bade me make her as majestic as possible; for her ankles and wrists I made bracelets of kisses, and around her waist, a belt of them.  I teased and licked her from foothills to peaks and lost myself in her vinery.  Later in a nearby clearing I took back the belt, tied her to a tree at the clearing’s perimeter and tanned her hide till it was as sore as mine was from the waterfall’s ledge.  Even rulers need to be subjected from time to time.

With my help she rigged up a generator for her tribe, who live on the ground beneath and around her kapok tree, defending it as necessary.  By the electric light in our treetop dome we play chess among the night butterflies, thinking as many moves ahead as each other until distracted, one of us capitulates.

At the end of one such long day I laid my head against her queenly breasts and the palm of my hand finds her mound.  I whorled curls of hair with my fingertips and then slipped my hand between the tops of her opened thighs even as we fell asleep.  I was woken at first light by the raucous screech of a maelstrom of hyacinth macaws, but long used to the sound, she slept on.  I started to stroke her with a gentleness unparalleled in her experience; I wanted her to feel as if she was being lightly touched in her dreams, knowing that she had always wanted to know what a young potentate’s wet delerium might feel like.

Each night then we sit on over the chess board, over the pieces she taught me how to carve.  Sometimes there is a stalemate, and we’re not quite sure how to resolve it.  But we’re both chess-playing savages now, and there is always the next game, the endless promise of a new move and an unexpected strategy.

I don’t think I’ll go back to New York.

The book of Saint Albans #2

A trip of dotterel, that’s what this has been
and to court and be courted by you, a pleasure.
But the kettle of hawks are speeding after us now
and their ruthlessness is breathtaking;
no bazaar of guillemot or mutation of thrush
could withstand their decapitating attack.

Oh but the days when we were a parcel of linnet
a flutter of greenfinch, hedgerow-darting;
a giddy knob of pintail singing lustily;
the chestnut patches and bright red bills
of a dodding of shelduck dipping and
a wisp of whispering springtime snipe.

Part-lamentation, part-ballet of swan, necks entwined,
sinuous lovers loving sensuously with a skein
of goosey kisses down belly and spine.  How
I loved to fan my tail for you, ostentatious as a peacock.
Peahen, you charm me like a goldfinch from the trees;
heart of bowerbirds, I will make you mosaic and arch.

One day I know we may sit before a parliament of owl
and law will be applied to us, judgment handed down,
having endured a siege of heron and all the attentions
that a musket of lyrebird could throw at us,
not to mention the beaks and claws of a convocation
of golden eagle, beady, deadly, brooking no excuse.

Then comes our darkest hour. Jackdaws will clatter,
rooks will build at dawn and dusk; and we will be subject
to an unkindness of raven, a murder of crow.  But
like a precipice of choughs on updraughts we will rise
and live to be a spring of teal, fall of woodcock,
murmuration of starling, exaltation of lark.

* * * *

(Collective names for birds sourced with help from the Baltimore Bird Club, British Bird Lovers, Dame Juliana Berners’ The book of Saint Albans, G.W. Lemon’s English Etymology, Rory McGrath’s Bearded tit, and the Palomar Audubon Society.  Plus three of my own devising.)

The book of Saint Albans #1

Tor

This is the West Country.  Sheeting persistent rain.  The hill and meadow and trees are green with it.  Heads bowed under raincoats, a couple are heading up to the top of the Tor from what was once a fenland lake and might very well be again by the time they come down.  They are wet through, puffed out and laughing.  This is not the first time they have been alone together and it won’t be the last; but it is the most significant.  When they gain the part-shelter of the ruined tower they both throw back their hoods, like druids revealing themselves to each other at the most sacred moment of a long-forgotten pagan rite; but despite its solemnity, they smile at each other.  Words have dropped away; they know most if not all of what they need to know about each other.  She knows, for example, that he has recently half-given up, half-lost a girl; he knows that while she lives with someone, theirs is an open relationship.  The two of them have orbited each other for three years in pubs and clubs, and now here, finally, is the moment of truth; the moment when one or other of them might make an advance which takes them into a different realm, a new sphere.  Avalon.

Because of the weather, they have St. Michael’s Tower to themselves.  She is on one side of the doorway, he is on the other.  It’s a narrow entrance and the wind is veering in as they look out.  Raindrops freshen a face that he has always thought a shade weary, for all the brightness of her smile.  Too many long days and late nights and the bad food that goes with those, he guesses.  She may be appraising him in much the same way, setting her attraction against the faults or limitations of his personality.  She shakes her hair a little with a characteristic lean of her head, and gazes off above his shoulder, smiling a half-smile, her mouth a shade open.  Coquettish almost.  He gets that feeling in his gut, of urgent butterflies signalling to the heart and the head that this is the moment.  It would be so easy to kiss her, to sway wetly into her and land his lips on hers.  She’d not stop him; she’d either respond how he thinks he would like, or she’d let him kiss and then gently say, d’you think it’s wise?  But she would let him kiss her.  So why doesn’t he?  The air is damp and tingling and the moment seems to last forever, certainly long enough for him to wonder if she will take the initiative and sway wetly over to his mouth.  But she doesn’t and he doesn’t.  To try to reset time he stares up at the square view of cloud the roofless tower affords them, but when he looks back and into her eyes, still something stays that step forward, that drop of his shoulders.  Is it that he is not sure of the future he might have with her?  It troubles him both in itself and as the lily-livered reason for his not leaning across, for not allowing himself to tumble into something because it would not quite be perfect, judged against a standard he has no right to impose.

They stay like that for the longest time, suspended in a place which suspends time for those who seek to stop clocks.  Why doesn’t he bite the apple that’s in his grasp?  Do it!  Do it now!  He doesn’t do it.  Neither does she.  When they head out of the doorway and into the rain and down the hill, the sense of cowardice and disappointment is crushing.

If he had his time over, he would lean across the two feet separating the pair of them and kiss her soft and long, and hang the consequences.  For now he knows that very few of us are quite what we seem to be on the surface.  The perfect are less than perfect, and those who are willing to put themselves in a place of magic, regardless of their imperfections, they often have so much more to offer, so much more to give.  And now he knows that he will never know what he would have discovered about her, about himself, about life, if he had leant across an open doorway and tried to turn a friend into a lover.

Mending Pinocchio, breaking hearts

While she was away he set about mending Pinocchio but in doing so he splintered the red plastic of her heart-shaped pack of sewing needles.  He tried piecing the fragments back together with the superglue he was using to fix the puppet but the cracks were still visible.  He asked himself why anyone would design needles to be kept in a fragile plastic heart shape that was so difficult to open it risked being broken every time you needed one.  There was no good answer.

The very moment she arrived home, just before he came alongside the car and opened its door for her, she discovered that she had lost the heart from the necklace she had been given when she was seven years old.  He never knew until that moment of loss that she had been its keeper for so long; or if he had asked or been told, he had forgotten.  His own heart did not leap to see her.  Hers was distracted by the loss of its symbol.  There was no good answer to any of these things.

Knowingly and unknowingly, the heart inside each of them was being slowly broken.

All

I give her my all but my all will never be enough, it can never situate itself as enough.  We set ourselves up for perpetual heartbreak.  It’s not as if she didn’t warn me that it would be this way, she did, and not just once, but over and over.  It was crazy to begin, crazy to carry on, and now it’s crazy to stop and crazy to carry on.  But you cannot take the love away from us.  There is no operation that can be performed to extract it.  The love goes on, oblivious to and undaunted by the situation.  Our hearts are breaking even as they affirm that the other is kept safe there.  We keep on imagining what we cannot have.  I will, she will.  What we imagine is a vision which covers all of life.  You can call it a fantasy if you like, but I never will.  It counters the heartbreak, seals each crack as it opens, makes the heart whole.  Between us we have written this parallel world into reality.  We will always be able to slip inside it together, but independently too.  We won’t stop longing for what we cannot have.  We will love each other in secret till my marbles scatter or the pump in her heart fails.  And even then something of us will go on existing afterwards.  For somewhere there is a record of our words, and some day some or all of it may be uncovered.  Just a small scrap of text – a scrap of us – will be enough for a researcher of the heart to re-imagine it all.  A world from a grain of sand, the magnificent vision of a world that we deliberately condensed to a grain of sand, to keep it hidden.