Moving on.

Thankyou to all you lovely people who have left kind messages in my absence. I have not fallen off the face of the real world, just the virtual one. For a time there I just couldn't find any words. And then when I did, the thought of putting them here made me shrink away.

The thing is when I started this blog I was a very different person to who I am now. It may seem contrite and hollywood-esque to suggest I could change so dramatically in less than twelve months, but it's true. So, to keep this blog just doesn't feel right. I need a clean page. But thats not to say the pages that came before didn't exist, just that I want, need to move on.

I hope you all will join me in this new chapter at:

http://itsinthesmallthings.wordpress.com

Everest

The deadline looms and I can't decide if I lack motivation or am simply just predisposed to laziness.


Each and every time the same roller coaster of emotions, thoughts and ideas. Initial indifference morphs into enthusiasm that is in turn dulled by realisation that what I thought was Primrose Hill is actually Everest.


And so the slow ascent begins. Papers and books clutter desk and words crash and meld indiscriminately in my mind. Confusion sets in, dizzying in the height of knowledge, not knowing up from down, right from left, cause from effect. But slowly the mounds of theories and piles of propositions condense and fall away like the mountain snow to water, trickling away and allowing me to pass, eventually.

After the fact

eliot saw it
those who lived after the fact
who died in their minds
and breathed in their memories

for those who saw colour in the past
and vividness in the future,
the monochrome of the present
only brought a sense of loss

to be in the now
to taste the infinitely tiny
particles of air at the moment
they touched aveoli

to have skin shock electric
with the gentle touch
of wind in flight
and after no memory

eliot saw it
though they could only
reminisce and ponder
on it, after the fact

Lady in Red

She sat in the red doorway waiting as her grandaughter sifted through trinkets and treasures, old watches and glittery brooches, occasionally holding up a particularly well-kept piece to show her. She nodded and smiled, lost in the flow of memories seventy-six years in the making. How she had passed so many days to be in that red doorway she could not fathom.

As vivid as the crimson hue that framed her, she could remember herself Tessa's age, blindly feeling her way through marriage, finding a happy existence between intellectual engagement and domestic life, and then, having it all snatched away long before the years had a chance to dampen the love.

The cancer stole his joy quickly but toyed mercilessly with his life, cutting each thread with cruel tardiness, letting him and his family linger ever longer in the shade of death. She helped him sever the last thread, her hand lingering on his knee as she kissed him goodbye and closed the door.

Necessity made no space for loitering grief. Her boys needed a mother and a future. She set to work at both. Her sons grew with stifling speed. The eldest morphing into his father's son, with a handsome face and a swimmers body. When they finally left to start their own lives she started to etch out a new one for herself.

She shared a house with the youngest and went back to university. First a Bachelor's then a Master's. Sociology took her to remote islands in the pacific, sleeping on grass mats and eating rice with her hands. She observed and noted, concluded and recommended. It was satisfying but could not fill the gaping hole in her life.

So she remarried. She compromised with herself that one life-changing love was enough, she could settle for companionship and compassion. A year later she realised she could find neither in this new man, so in the middle of a winters night, she left.

As it was, she learnt to fill her life up with the family she did have. Sons, daughters-in-law and grandchildren. In the midst of warm contentment, as she watched her grandchildren play and grow, she would occasionally still be stung by his absence.

But where she sat now, as she looked on at her dark-haired grandaughter, she refused to be stung. Her life, she thought, may have pieces missing like the jewels from the brooches her grandaughter sifted through, but it was enough for her.

Her knees creaked as she stood from the stoop and walked across to the stall of glittering trinkets and treasures.

The grass is always..

The footpaths are on fire with smatterings of autumn leaves. Even the trees are too lethargic to do more than just hold their branches up. And now, now the light is fading earlier and faster and all I hear from that island far away is of endless sunshine and days that are stretching the distance between us.

But there is beauty in these last dying breaths of summer. The warmth of the seldom sun on my face. The crunch of cracking fibres stomping through the park. And the afternoon light seeping through the growing gaps in trees' tangled arms.

Soon enough I will be back in the melting heat of summer, fanning my sweaty face with a crunched up magazine and brushing sand from my legs, longing for an icey autumn breeze and some crunchy orange leaves.

The morning of her making

The clock glows green 4:45 as she lies diagonally across the small double bed. Street glow seeps in through the gaps in the blinds and the air is prickled with an early morning chill. The bathroom lights blind as she steps into the ceramic boat, still bemused by the British love of the bath even in the non-fuss era of the shower.

Steaming water cascades over her shoulders, rushing over and between her breasts and down the soft curve of her stomach. She catches herself in the mirror, youthful but no longer young, soft but no longer new. How will he see her, she wonders. How did he see her the day he slid that ring on her finger. Did he notice the tiny spider veins crawling around her lower thighs or her rough, calloused feet from years of ill-fitting shoes? Will he see the small wrinkles forming round her hazel eyes or the deepening furrow between her brows, a symptom of a frowning thinker?

She dresses in silence. Carefully slipping each moisturised leg into a thick black stocking, she pulls the neatly arranged navy dress over her head. The hair dryer buzzes and blows her brown hair and she is briefly thankful for the noise to muffle the internal dialogue. One, two, three strokes and she puts the brush down. 5:15

A half-read novel sits by the bed as she pulls the white covers up, straightens and pats, surveys from afar and readjusts again. She briefly observes the parallels between the her life and the narrative that tells of a young Jamaican woman who gives up everything to live in London with her new husband, a man she hardly knows. Except that she isn't giving up anything, he is. And they aren't married, not yet. 5:20

The time, it's time she thinks. The cab will be waiting. She surveys herself once more in the mirror, straighten her dress, hitches her bag and walks out the door.

Coated in an ethereal pre-dawn texture, the street is empty but for her cab. The driver looks quizzically at her lack of luggage but he is too tired to muster a question. She settles into the back seat, blowing circles of vapour on the window, wondering how an action so simple can produce such a perfect result. They speed through the near-empty streets, past the green expanses she has so come to love and to think of as her own backyard. She wonders if he will feel the same. If they will run through these parks, as they had talked of, and lie in the sunshine reading the paper, as she had dreamed. She understood her expectations of the city, her love of its vastness and possibilities, but she knew nothing of his. He was coming for her, that was all she knew.

The car pushed on out through the outskirts of the city, the buildings morphing from residential to commercial as the sky lightened to a familiar shade of dark grey. 5:50 He should be landing by now. Wheels touching tarmac. Sighs of relief from uneasy flyers. Would he be excited now? Limbs twitching with the knowledge she was just beyond that runway, just within that building. Her stomach fought with itself. Excitement battling fear, shattered nerves the innocent victim. Would he be feeling the same? She new he was nervous about leaving so much behind, risking so much to be here, but did he share her uncertainty about their future? Did he doubt for just one second?

5:54 the car stops outside the terminal. She pays and steps out into the familiar buzz of the international airport. Childhood memories of dawn journies to Dubai international airport jolt through her mind, she can taste the adventure on her tongue and feel the anticipation tingling through her legs. And as she waits for him by the gate she wonders why she shouldn't feel the same about him, about their future. That when he walks through that gap in the wall, mingled between weary backpackers and grumpy mothers, searching the crowd for her face, she shouldn't be equally excited about all the possibilities that stretch on from that moment.

6:02 he walks out. For a moment, before he see her, she surveys him from afar. And while her stomach still churns with fear and cartwheels with excitement she decides then that she will stop wondering.

There have been better weeks than this.

Living out of a suitcase, staying in a decrepit hotel run like Fawlty Towers with a South London twist. Eating pre-made salads with plastic forks and drinking too much. Considering suicide by jamming my head between the covers of my Powerbook when the fifth day of house hunting proves finally that when renting the word "student" is a form of tenancy menangitis. Sharing the room with my one-week married best friend amidst a Bold and the Beautiful worthy relationship meltdown. Finding great joy in the weeks only triumph of "free" internet garnered from a neighbouring flat yet to discover how to protect their network.

Oh, but I almost forgot, at least there was sunshine. Lots of sunshine.