And the feeling of meconium, pushing through, the filling of my fragile wings until they’re strong.
Until they carry me up and out and over and away, watching the flowers beneath me, the breeze, lifting me. Sunlight turning up my colours till they sing.
And on the leaves below, the photons warm through the residue of who I used to be.
And if you look up, you can see me, can hear the soft beating of my wings.
See me, hear me.
There is no shame.
The sound of Tom Cruise in my living room when I called down from the top of the stairs. He flew planes while I held my tummy. (13)
Helen, the military nurse, compared notes with me on back injuries. I watched ceilings unable to move. 36 hours awake and the third ceiling came into view. (14)
The nurse with short hair or maybe a pony tail brought the rubber mask. While she explored, my laugh fractured around the room, spiralling over my head.
How funny that today I spoke with someone about roller skating as a child, fearless freedom of movement unlike this moment when I couldn’t even walk. (15)
The clock up on the left, the little window to the right, the beige walls. The toilet door at the end of the bed about 5 miles away. And the toilet itself, so low down, too low down, as though it existed on a plane outside my reality, designed for some other species who could bend, who could bear weight, who could stand unsupported. I leaned up the wall near the bathroom window. The frosted glass obscured everything, just like the pain. (16)
I often wonder about Delize, her head round the door at 2am, her arm around my body, her hand holding mine.
Today’s slab of cloud fits the heaviness of then. Spaced out, waiting, needing. One day I’ll sleep again. Surgeons don’t work on Sundays, they told me. (17)
{Poured tea over myself at 9pm. Diazapam took me out, eased me into tomorrow.}
Five hours of drugged up sleep and feeling heroic, they wheeled me into a brand new room. It seemed bigger than it was. Johnny V messed about, washed his hands by the sink. New faces, new machines, a different clock to stare at.
It would be a long day, they advised me. They didn’t lie.
The woman with no face got me onto my side and after the ice cube test I faded back into the room and watched the patterns of pain, without the feelings.
Hours bled around nameless hands till teatime.
A radio to my right.
6pm became 8pm, 8pm became 8:20. At 8:30 with the theatre calling, the kind one apologised to me to the sound of my tears.
A grey ceiling rolled in, or was it white, green fabric everywhere, steel and tinkering. Curtained off from myself while they burrowed, until they showed me, until they lifted him up and out in pink and red perfection. Lilies bloomed where my abdomen used to be.
The gash of joy, the bloodied relief of our out-breath. The scent of him, the taste of his skin. (18)
It doesn’t matter that the sun has slipped behind my view for a while or that the amber hyacinth glass has lost its bright light. And then returns, irrepressible as though it never went away.
How could it, how could the life force that keeps me here, have disappeared? The taste of my fingernails, just for a second and the bole of my May tree is hidden by the cacophony of daffs, just look at them. They don’t care. They know how to do this, singing out wild and abandoned, accepting the wilt to come. I suppose I do the same.
I pack boxes, I run fingers over ornaments, I caress the dust and breathe it in, greet it, welcome in its stories.
Sometimes just for a second, it’s as though I understand. I feel the ecstasy and terror simultaneously, as though looking at the sun bringing gold to my amber glass, as though, in this moment I am everyone.
I want to hold them. All of them and tell each of them it will be ok. It will get better. I know it will and my daffs dance on the windowsill and my hyacinth reaches up to the light.
Everything is golden. like honey. And a hive for the honeybees.
It’s early, from my window I can tell it snowed over night. I have no curtains up now, nothing to block out the sun when it comes.
Outside there are fresh ice crystals, six cornered stars and a thick layer that coats the streets, that demands to be looked at but not right now.
Underneath it, is the névé from a four year storm. Some of it has melted and reformed but it lies there, foundational, quiet and underpinning this new whiteout.
Deeper still, the firn, compacted, dense and undeniable. I know it’s there of course, the core of my landscape. I have learned to walk on it by now, my boots are rugged, my legs are strong and when I fall, which I do, I grasp onto trees trunks and heave myself back up. I bleed and bruise but blood dries up and bruises fade.
Through the easy aperture, the room floods with light but I try not to rise from my bed, though I will. I don’t want to look out of my window, I want to pull the duvet over my head and push myself down into the mattress and hide away.
I won’t look from my window, not yet. The brightness floods in regardless, memories of carrots and coal, laughter, spiralled breath on the air. Transient and magical, like something to cherish, to hold. Then just cold. It disperses back to the atmosphere, to be inhaled, to go around again.
Under the fresh snow the névé blurs over firn. The firn, almost glacial ice now. Years bleed into each-other, crystals creating new shapes and forms. If I pause, stop. I can feel the ice emerge, hear the minutes growing into time.
Time, when this firn was fresh snow, when my bewildered eyes couldn’t look at it. When tears turned to icicles and stalactites on my face.
Now it’s solid firn, deep underneath. Sometimes I go out, sometimes I can even skate, I cut patterns with my blades, decorate the landscape, spin and swirl. I dance.
But not today.
Today the fresh snow lies heavy over it all. Every flake, every crystal demanding to be known.
I nestle down under the duvet for now. It’s treacherous out there. Drifts upon drifts, ice upon ice. Dangerous. But it is mine.
In time I’ll build snowmen again.
xxx
In my warm mug of hot lemon and honey, the specks of cinnamon and cayenne pepper float about, they collide with the chunk of ginger and bounce off to the sides. I watch them try to make sense of the swirling forces, giving themselves up to the motion and the heat.
I think about the woman I brushed past at the hospital, the hug I couldn’t give her despite her need and my mind spins to the other woman who budged up so I could sit down, who changed seats to make room for me at the funeral directors and she held on tightly to her mug, the tea they’d made for her, the heat pushing through the ceramic, trying to reach her fingertips, trying to tell her she’ll be ok.
I hold my mug now, I can feel the pressure where its smoothness meets mine. I watch myself watching it, feeling it.
We lock eyes, the woman on the end of their sofa, and both take a deep breath together. I pass her a weak smile and say ‘out breath’ out loud and we nod, we understand. I’ll never see her again.
I wonder if she’s thinking of me this morning. Or if the woman in the hospital remembers rushing past me, remembers the paleness of my face and how my eyes caught hers for a split second.
I wonder what these women are doing now and if they’re sitting quiet in the still sparkle of the lounge, if they’re holding their mug close to them, watching the moments spin.
I’d better shower, better seep into the day, note the sensations as they move through me and feel the connections I can’t see.
The heat disperses into the morning, the kick of ginger wakes me.
I am here.
This is now.
I drink up and go round again.
I made my bed yesterday. I’ll make it again today. I’ll fold the weight of white bamboo sheets across the bottom of the bed and smooth it out. I need to smooth things out. And I wonder about the woman who’s preparing for the service on Tuesday.
I’ve decided it’s a woman, though it might be a man, might be both, might be many I suppose. But for my purpose, she’s a woman and I imagine she makes her bed too, though maybe it’s a shared bed and someone else has made it today. But I won’t go there, not right now.
Is she counting days like me and will the sound of fireworks forever tie her to the day she’s yet to have? Will she, like me, years from now watch the fizz and sparkle in the sky? Will she jump a little from the bangs and will she hold the scattered colours on her retina, aching not to let them go but then they fade?
I don’t know her but I want to hold her close, want to feel her warmth, the blood charging round her veins. I want to hold her tight as she sobs it out into my arms and maybe in a week from now when it’s my turn, then maybe she’ll come round here and do the same for me?
I should make my bed. I wonder if the woman who’ll be at the service on the 5th is up? I wonder if she slept ok, or if she had nightmares again?
I’ll think of her on the 6th of course in that chasm on the other side. She’ll still makes her bed, I’m sure. Well, you have to don’t you?
I think about this woman I don’t know, someone else going through the same. Makes me feel less alone, you know?
Better make the bed. I like the feel of bamboo sheets, I like the way they calm me.
Beetle in a box
Box on an island
Island in the ocean
Ocean at my core
I suppose it was me and the clock, me and the concerned faces, me breathing and counting and getting nowhere. I suppose I don’t like being told that I can’t do something, so I try even harder for a while. A sense that to give up would be to fail.
Now I can feel it’s me talking from exhaustion (much like this morning, in this world now.) A sense of the pressure I put on myself, but then as now, sooner or later, I gave in, gave myself up to it all.
I remember the nurse or maybe he was a consultant? (It wasn’t Johnny V, we never saw him again, with his slicked back black hair and pristine striped shirt) but someone apologised to me and my determination broke free from my eyes, rolled in spheres down my hot flushed cheeks.
I guess the rest of the evening was spent in the theatre, but no aisle seat for me that time. I was centre stage, I was the whole ensemble, I was the diva under their lights and clamps and curtains. My abdomen sang wide, glorious and while they hurried, tinkered and sewed the gash, I loved him in my bloodied arms.
Home.
I seem stuck, a little laden down, a little numb. And while today’s radiator warms my back to the sound of clocks and snoring, my younger hands lose their grip and tea comes tumbling, scalding, soaking into their hospital robe and I crumple.
Soon, cursor flashing, clock ticking. Tomorrow, younger, stronger.
Still stuck.
Worried the words will find me in a heap on their sterile floor but I keep going, like then, like now. Keep going and I slept half on diazepam, half on exhaustion like a dribbling drunk in their faux leather chair.
With prayer around me.
This familiarity in sitting, waiting, a sense that I can’t give up. And if it were a Saturday I’d have cried at the woman between my legs, at her optimism for the day but not later. Later, no change and I sank back into the endless bed. Her trundled trolley of glinting things tidied away hope and wheeled it out the door.
Only the armchair held me, knew me, when I called out for help. I do wonder how her life worked out, the woman with the strange name who took my weight over the toilet. I still think about her, even now and the meds they locked away from me till morning.
Janey L Foster 