October 23, 2015 by The Tao of Grief

Deconstruction

What if I walked and walked and kept on walking.

Could I move so far that my skin would leave my form, that it would crumble from this shape into the soil? Would that be possible do you imagine? It would be so helpful if it did. If the Earth, this molten ball I stand on, would take my feet from under me with a steady grating rub, so hard that the gnawing pressure would eat up my legs to my knees. And I would scrub along the ground, like a broken toy. The birds would call out to me, the sky would lighten but I would shrink. And from my stumps I’d shuffle forwards not because there was forward momentum of any sort but because it served a purpose, it erased the mass I lived in and from my hips I would waddle.
I would look a strange sight tilting to and fro, unsteady in the morning, pivoting on synovial joints with the light peeping over my shoulders as I rocked along the ground.

And further on, the corners of my ribcage would chip and break but I’d keep moving as the morning sun climbed in the sky. Heat would arrive for the others and people would fling wide their windows, breathe deep and fill their lungs with the chemicals from the fields. They would throw on their lightest rhinestone clothes and guzzle their freshly squeezed orange juice, succulent bits making their way around their pallet and down their throats. These people, lifted by the day I can’t take part in. And as they smile at strangers glinting in the rays I would have worn down my ribs to my armpits. And now with an approaching balm I’d be reduced to arms and a head shoving myself down the lane. My shoulders heaving the weight of my brain, its mind seeping into the soil.

I see it all now from my lowered point of view, the dust and the bugs in my eyes. I see roots of grasses, tiny creatures crawling, foraging for food and the breeze cuts through my hair. My neck rubs along the ground as my arms wear away and the sun, so warm, shining amber lights into distant windows, bounces off the keratin in my hair. It casts a softening glow to my cheeks as my head spins to a stop, to look up at the rainless painless sky;

I roll, at last, to nothing.

October 14, 2015 by The Tao of Grief

Still

The heating would have come on by now, creaking its way under floor. She would have been sat propped up, her head to one side. And she would be tired. It was a tiredness she’d never known before, it was something deeper than her muscles, than her blood. It was a solid mass of weight beyond her core and she pushed hard against it.
The wound across her belly throbbed, an alien ache that spread through her form. She would have fingered it with care, fearful of the change, a gentle pressure on the gauze as she breathed out.

His breaths were small, smaller than his form and she would have heard them beside her. They would drift up to her ear and she would hold each one close, a balm to soothe her gash. She would study his contours while he slept, the folds of skin behind his ears, the creases under his eyes.

And she was age and he was new. She would look beyond the old stereo from the first house, reminded of the way she used to dance and she was fragile, brittle. A calcified clump of herself.
She would have heard relatives downstairs, filling flasks, their time to leave and it was autumn, it was colours through her window out of reach.

And while he slept doors would have closed, the echo of aftershave lingering in the quiet of the house. Quiet apart from his breathing next to her and the soft scuff of fabric against her ankle. She would have rubbed one foot across the other, an attempt to warm up her feet and she was still.

Static.

And if she timed it right she would have made it to the bathroom and back before he woke. She would have taken all her weight, hand pressing down on her dressing table, all along the banisters and in the bathroom the vanity unit was cold and her legs were weak.

And manoeuvring herself back onto the bed she would have propped herself up by the pillow. He would have been warm in his fug and she would have had no sense of him with a back pack, no concept of him in the mist, in the autumn bronze with his blazer morphing into others behind the gate.

All she would have known was the home, empty for the first time in weeks, her limbs that resisted her movements. And the resolve, the saturating need to breathe and hold him.

To not think but hold tight and hold on.

The house would be warm by now. The road outside a clutter of noise as people fell into their day. And he would be stirring and she would be watching.

Her primal surge against the scars.

October 8, 2015 by The Tao of Grief

Voyage

She was so excited, you know. The morning air waking her eyes, the chill with a promise of sun. She went to work that day, just for the morning then she left. Her colleagues wished her well and all through the hours that she worked she thought. She went over the folded clothes she’d packed away. She ticked through the documents in her bag. It sat waiting for her on the bed in the light that moved across the duvet, to noon, to the closing of doors.

Her friend was coming to pick her up, to take her and drop her with bags and she was ready. Changed and brushed, bristling with expectation with the possibilities in front of her.
And she stood, she could see it all from where she sat now, where she had stood and the bluster of the docks caught her scarf, it spiralled up around her face, out of control in the gust. Everything was new, strange, bearings to find, sea legs to attach and she thought of her friend who had worked there. He was clear and vivid in his absence and she imagined him grinning – and his laugh.

She was there, you know. She could see her, hair burbling upwards, a thin top because that’s all she would need and she was light. She felt herself sparkle at the edges, like a fraying blanket that comforted in its age. The ends of her pulsed and danced, waves of photons twirled around her and she was free. My God, she was so free.

And in that place, high up over the water shine she was wrapped. She was swaddled in the things she needed and the people who formed her life.
There had never been a moment like it, not that she could recall, where every cell in her form crackled and sparked and she was at the start of something. Her laugh was lifted up by the eddies, carried high in gushing thermals, through the gulls until it it broke. Sound waves scattering fragments of her into the day, into the swell of her world.

And she was there. And she stood. And she could feel every throb in her body as she sits now, cold, looking out towards the window. Wrapped in a parka to shield her from the day. The condensation moving sluggish down the pane, her view blurring through the droplets. And in each burst of water she sees herself, reflected, smiling back. Caught in time, in motion. in that place – when she was who she used to be.

Back there. She stood – she was alive.