Tag Archives: release

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Maverick

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)

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Monochromes

She faced herself in the mirror and asked.

‘Will you let me wear this black and white skirt, will you let me feel its coolness round my ankles?’

And she smiled. She asked again.

‘Will you let me wear my white cotton blouse, the one with Pre-Raphaelite sleeves and if you let me wear it, will you let me walk by the canal?’

‘Will you let me use my small feet to make imprints in warm grass?’

And she smiled into the mirror. She supposed she came here to say yes.  

And yes, she would let me wear the black waistcoat too and she nodded into the mirror.

Yes, I will let you wear those clothes and navigate by the waters.

The mirror held her and as she walked from room to room, she peeled, ages came and went. She felt giddy in the potential before the wave function collapsed and a path was taken.

She liked the Will You game. It appealed to her mischievousness.

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Lake Water Lapping

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.

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Womb Shaped

If you study the shellac on your nails and lose yourself in its luminous magical lights, in the rainbow shot silver sparkle, it will take you back. 

Take you back to just before, in the hours, in the safety, in the warmth before the sense of separation came.

And there in the shimmerings is your father, walking home in the dark, your mother in the care of the midwives and the waiting. And he slept but she didn’t and later, hours later when the phone rang in the early light, the timeless spaces on your nails flash you to his side, to him sat on the edge of the bed with your grandparents who’d come to help. 

And his words spilled out in the chill January morning, we’ve got a little girl and they cried.

They hugged and they cried and your father fought his legs into his trousers and blurred across pavements to your mother’s side. She slept and you slept although you didn’t know it.

And the sparkles on your fingertips now are the snowflaked halos around the street lamps then and the warmth of the first cup of tea when your mother woke up. And your father said she was a king to how she was before, rested yet weak, strong in the release of primal blood. 

And the lights shine off your nails like sparks of magic bringing hope, like your eyes opening in the dark, your tiny newborn body still curled and warm, womb shaped.

Your father looked at the rows of incubators, directed towards yours. They all look the same, his tired voice drifting up, his breath on glass in the dim light. But yours was the face he came to know, yours was the life that filled up theirs.

Decades ago, and the shellac on your nails now seems to dance and sing, liberated, joyful like their arms, arms that held you tight, fluttering and glistening, arms that set you free. 

The brightness of your snowflakes, the moonlight in your eyes. And if you look into the shellac of your nails now you see and feel the wintering, the gratitude of the place and time where you came in.

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Time Dilation #5

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.

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Time Dilation #4

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. 

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Time Dilation #3

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.

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Time Dilation #1

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.

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True North

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.

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Shimmerings

Right now I feel I am hiding from the blossom as it holds onto the branch but I know it’s out there, I feel it waving, bobbing, whispering to me from outside my window. It won’t be long before I look it in the face and I can hear it calling out to me, look up, look up, look up again and I know I will.

My trees know just what to do just like my clouds and I am gentle white and pink and sometime rippling rose. I hear them just beyond the glass, framing the trees, throwing their colours to sky and I breathe out. I breathe out as if for the first time, I breathe out like the morning when I woke and squealed and rushed and laughed.

And women fussed around me, hair was curled in ringlets and my feet secured in ivory silk. They would hold me up and they did, as they do now and I breathed out. And I was bound up in taffeta as I always would be, strapped in and laced with ribbons at the back. And at the front, encasing my heart, I was held in rich wine velvet, the deepest red because I could never wear anything else, soft and strong, the unconditional love around my tiny form.

And it’s ok I tell myself, and it is. I can smell the fabric, hear its rustle, taste the rose pink lipstick on my mouth and I am there.

Ready to be wrapped in blossom, petals on me, decorating my features, tickling my neck like confetti dropping down. And I shuffled, I clicked heels down our pathway and nestled my boots in the footwell of the car and later, not much later, they moved over ancient stone, disturbing the dust of centuries, the remnants of other women who had walked and stopped and spoke and loved.

And in the echo of those before me I stood, silken and shimmering like something waiting to emerge and I did. I raised my bouquet to the sky and petals fell around us, photons warmed us, like they do and sunlight lit red velvet, lit my face and the scent of blossom filled us up, as if to saturate the day in certainty and it did and it does.

I’ve been hiding from the blossom for a while now but today I peered back outside my window, took the deepest breath to drink it in. It’s all ok, it whispered to me and I heard it. It reached me, saved me yet again. The wisdom fluttering down through years, curled and chaotic just like me, but it will settle, rest itself soon and nourish the soil beneath my trees. I’m drenched in petals and confetti yet again. Thank God my flowers know just what to do.