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.
All I really need is the approaching night turning to undried ink in my rain. I need the splinters of headlights, tail lights dancing in the puddles and nestling down in red fleece I’ll rush. I won’t be long.
And I’m not.
And next door to the pharmacy I blur around under fluorescence for a while, conscious of my pocket once again. It rubs up against my thigh, reminding me and later all I really need are the wooden stairs, the rustling and even later still, all I really need is to sit quiet and sparkle.
And I did and I do and I will.
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.
Morning started in the thin pink ethnic t-shirt that took me under the tree I’ll pass by later. I’m sure the bole of it remembers me, it showed me how to bend into the nature. I said I’d do whatever it takes and I did.
Now I come to think of it, it was the pale green embroidered t-shirt, did I change in the morning, now I’m not sure? Either way trees came and went. They wheeled me inside.
Later. Round about now a new ceiling watched me sleep despite the spasms.
Pillows subsumed me.
If I could say anything to her, I’d tell her to still wear the Mary-Jane’s, they suited her. Their implied sweetness that belied her strength. In any case she’d never believe the steps she’d take beyond the pub in Wooten Wawen even if I told her.
And yes, the bells jingled on her skirt, noting how their sound hangs in the air, looping around, even now and what is it about the black and white Indian cotton that always comes to mind? Is it the waft against her legs, is it the foreshadowing of the woman in the making? Yes probably.
And if I could take her hand and tell her to choose a different skirt, one with less sense of contrast, would she? I doubt it. Did she buy that skirt and wear it because she had to, because she would think about it now, now when the black and white contrasts had become her life?
She would always choose that skirt and in an August car park it would billow out in the scented summer night. Billow out, like the curve of a balloon in a hot Summer sky. But then, you knew that didn’t you?
If I could say anything to her, I’d say don’t worry. Just wear the shoes, you’ll be alright. Believe me. And she does.
Find her by the canal in her black and white skirt with bells. Find her navigating it all as she jingled, as she smiled.
And there under the August sky, find her leaning up the old Orion, in her black Mary Jane’s and her silk waistcoat.
Later, after chicken salad, no doubt, find her by her candlewick bedspread, chartreuse and tattered but perfect. The only way to end the day.
And in the morning, in the same skirt, find her smile at the bedroom door and make plans to carry her home.
Just find her. Over and over and over again. Always in August, to keep her safe.
Look it’s fine, I just need sleep that’s all. It’s hot and I must stop dancing but part of me doesn’t care. Part of me gave up years ago and now there seems to be a final peeling, a revealing of what lies underneath, like scraping back the layers of muck on an old canvas to find the artist’s original intention.
And here it is, the painting in me now, bare foot and tired, swirling in imaginary skirts, beaming into the eyes I cannot see, shaking the memory of long hair towards my kitchen splash-back.
And through the old tiles he grins back, watches me dance as though we were born to be in this place, through the years of separated moments until this one. These seconds in a decaying universe where we come together and I spin like my cells depend on it, and they do.
The music spirals around me, I mirror the beat with my incessant rhythm, capricious, unleashed and released in my kitchen, in the tiles where he smiles back. And he watches. And I dance.
It’s so still out there, so waiting. That sense of shh, don’t worry, it will come. It’s there in the way the sunlight holds the branches, in the faint call of a hidden bird.
And I pause, breathe, that’s all. And it passes by my window, up to the left with the sparrow wings and he watches me, watching him, watching them all. We slow down, the birds and I, pause to think of sunlight.
And there they are, my creatures in the trees, pecking and singing, ruffling new feathers in this spring. And I wonder do they sense their descendants, the ones I knew, the ones who gave me feathers years ago.
And while they sang outside that window from back there, in that house then, the hem of the dress caught the light as it lay out on the bed, as if to say look at me, look at me, lift me up into your arms. And later, a little later it would be held up as I clambered inside, as I manoeuvred into my new form, like a butterfly losing meconium, drying out its fresh wet wings.
Until its weight draped round my feet and I breathed out. Birds sang unseen as the hem brushed the dust down the wooden staircase and over new mown grass to rest and pause, where cameras winked and moments froze.
Sparrows darted to the neighbour’s tree, head on one side and down the path the hem of the dress shuffled leaves until it was bundled up into the car. It sat quiet, being, folded in upon itself, cushioned on the plush carpet of the foot-well until blackbirds cut the air, overarching the church gate.
And there with the creak of old hinges, with the warmth of a palm, with the click of heels on old stone, the hem of the dress made its way home. Home, on the short path to the archway, home to the hush of the slate and it dragged feathers and fronds as it swayed, as it made its way past pews to the front.
And there it rested for a while, settled in ivory, calm where it belonged. The hem of the dress over champagne silk boots, near to sharp creases in suits and it paused, waited, just to the left of polished shoes.
And then sunlight came back to stroke it, came to throw light at the door. The hem swept and rippled, caught the coloured flecks, scattered rainbows all around, then hands scooped it back up into soft contours in the car.
Trees moved above it unseen, voices chattered and laughed while it lay crumpled up and then the grass came back, daffodils nodded and bobbed as it moved around. Photons bounced up from the duck pond, white spots and sparkles, before it coated steps and carpet-brushed itself along.
And it swooned, the hem of the dress with the tiny remnants from the day and it danced over polished floors, glided as though it would always flow, would always sway, as though in its moment there was release.
And later it lay, much later it was still, smoothed out again and silent on the protective bag at the bedside, soon to be tucked far away.
And now hydrogen coalesces into helium, firing light and heat, like it did, like it does. How reassuring as it warms up the blackbird’s wings, as it listens to the soil.
And in a different wardrobe now the hem of the the dress sleeps its sleep, cradled and swaddled in plastic, over unused things and bits and bobs. But in its weft and weave it holds the moments when it danced, when it was free, when it could shimmer and it was home.
Janey L Foster 