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.
Lilies grew out of the scar on my tummy, daring, irreverent and girlish. They flung their arms wide; they didn’t care. Lisianthus burst up and out, willowy, confident, pretty and they knew it. They waved at the lilies who nodded in respect. Painted ladies and red admirals fluttered from the same places where the flesh had bled, their damp tissue paper wings felt cool against the air. Meconium pumped out, squirted across the scar as if to say, I love you, I remember. As if to say, all the pain, the hours of spasms, the empty walls I looked at, waiting hoping, are all tucked away and understood.
The nights spaced out, the ceilings passing over me, all locked away with care and when my language broke, when halos caressed each word that left my mouth, when every breath was forged from armour, when the weight of the shields tore my muscles to shreds, I kept on holding. When every cell pulsed with one cause, when no one could help me but the tiger claws that grew, claws of steel against the battle that consumed me.
Then.
Then my scar erupted, then it exploded out in trees, oaks towering from my tiny form, their roots soaked in my blood, fed from my placenta and willows softened out the gash, they wept over the chasm where my abdomen had been, they wrapped their tendrils around the scalpels and the knives, they paved the way, they saved me. They dropped leaves into my hollow and from the mulch, from the deep rich earth inside me, petrichor filled the theatre, soil sodden with my tears and surgeons took a step back, as I expanded, I roared life into the room.
Eagles flew out of me, feathers caked in green and red, they soared around the room, under their spotlights, singing loud. I remember the golden flash of their beaks, they winked at me with eyes that saw more than I could and, in the crater, where my abdomen used to be, a forest thrived, birds cheered, creatures danced, insects giggled in the sunshine.
I watched the ceiling smile down on me as I stroked the wound, hand bloodied and joyous. We Made This the corpuscles seemed to say. And my body rejoiced. My body was perfect, my scar came to show me the way.
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.
I wonder if the tree is still there in the churchyard where I took the pine needles in my hand while we walked? I wonder about the soft threads in my velvet leggings and whether they’re still on the planet somewhere or if they’ve biodegraded by now. And 7 Seconds played on the car radio, in a car that by now will have turned to nuts and bolts.
I think about the bench in Bruton Park and if it still exists or has it been chopped up and turned to firewood and the metal smelted down. I wonder what happened to the the cages in the nature reserve where we wandered, how even now I can taste the still air and hear the leaves under our feet, in the strangeness, in the almost stagnant places from where the birds had flown.
And what happened to the white ceramic bowl with the first of the chicken salads, did it break years ago, is it fragmented in soil, mixed with mulch, feeding roses somewhere I’ll never know? And what about the settee with its soft green Fleur De Lys pattern, with the nap I felt under my hands when my eyes closed, have those fibres disintegrated by now?
I still hear the reliable tick of my parent’s mantle piece clock, marking time, stroking the moments as though they never ended and though that mechanism has long since been deconstructed, the echo of it fills my ears now.
Of course, I wore red socks and my silk waistcoat was shimmering black. I wonder if its small buttons are sewn onto something else now or if they sit in someone’s sewing box, someone unaware of the role that they played in my life.
I wonder about the birds that had flown, whether they had chicks, and whether generations of them later, they fly over me in a different town, dropping feathers onto the new pathways that I make now.
I look out for them. It’s March 26th, I’m not bothered, it’s only time.
Let me feel your bristles, firm against my form. Insistent, purposeful as though they’d never lived a day without motion.
Brush me from my hiding place, my quiet soft decay. Gather me up into your arms and lift me from my chill. Smother me in your hands and then release me.
But first stop. Pause.
Bring me to your face, your nose and mouth and breath me in. Long cool limitless breaths which remember me with calm, with the intricate scents of my form, with my rich bracken twisted broken core.
And inhale me deep, fill your gaps and crevices with my wisdom, my stench of a year gone by.
And then look up. Turn your face into the softened dusk, up to where the night moves in.
And then hurl.
Scatter me to the soil, to the dark places under the shrubs where the robin picks and pecks. And leave me warm, leave me replete with the hours, with the moments which slip away.
Like your hands as you release me.
And I sigh and rest my form, feel my edges crumble where your fingers traced. Feel the gladness of the earth and I will rostle and rustle into place and wait for the cold to take me home. Into my welcoming loam, mulched down soothings till the spring returns.
And it will.
And your fingers will find me once more as I dare to go around again, as I summon my courage and strength to raise my form up from the soil.
And you’ll be waiting.
Standing stoic, through the cutting winter until the light comes, until the hope will lead me back into your hands.
I have been avoiding myself for a while, she thought, but the leaves rushed in and said don’t worry. Watch us dither on the bluster, see how we don’t care.
And she strained her head to the sky, to the spaces where she used to be and watched. They maundered like old thoughts which caught her out in the night, like missed moments, like the regrets which crumbled at her door, twisted and fragile, the haphazard seconds of her life.
But the leaves taught her well. They cried out as they tumbled into her, thither-zither, helter-skelter to her palms. And for those which remained on the trees, she poured her love up to them. They were weary, clumped and battered on the undressed branch. They knew not to resist.
Clouds moved in, cumulus caressed her mind and she didn’t care, not really. Not now. Somehow the day was still gentle.
Listen to the leaves, she said. It’s only spacetime. It’s only 9,192,631,770 periods in the hyperfine transitions of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom. One second after another falling to her soil.
It didn’t matter to her that she pushed English pavements under her feet, or that the maple leaves which cluttered round her boots were from local trees – she was not there.
And it didn’t matter that the spire which she was drawn towards, or the parapet which pulled her eyes up to the sky, belonged to Saint Peter’s Church or that the gentle whisps of white which framed it, came from her Hampshire sky – she was not there.
And because she wasn’t there it didn’t matter that her English streets were busy with people wrapped and warm. And because she wasn’t there, her form cast no shadow as she passed Saint Peter’s Church because her boots were in Barcelona and her autumn coat was a waterfall top. It billowed around her hips like the soft white fluff above the spires which framed the baby sweetcorn. And it was irrelevant that her eyes looked up to a Hampshire sky because they were not there. They looked out across the park and studied Gaudi’s glory which left an imprint in her mind.
It didn’t matter where her boots wandered in an English town because she wasn’t there. She was striding out across the Carrer de Sardenya as though her small feet belonged on Spanish soil.
I was never one to recognise events as they were unfolding and every time they came to a breach, to a gash, they surprised me, they gave themselves a shape, a moment in time rather than a seamless continuation.
And this morning I was taken to one side by the day and told to stop and look. But before I was forced to pause, I opened the day, in my usual way, with my identity intact, my sense of where I fit into the world and I sat.
The garden was doing its thing, as it did, as it does, growing and decaying despite me while I watched and let the heat of my mug wake my hands. Two, or maybe three mint leaves pushed against the surface tension of my tea. And I sipped. I sat and I sipped in my quiet certainty and watched the surface of my drink.
And now I take hold of my thoughts and pull them apart, now I question why it’s taken me so long to reach this place. This need to draw attention to the quality of my drink. It could be fear. It’s often fear. And now it’s marching up the path towards me, through the weeds and places where the stones are loose and broken, where small things live without my intervention. And it’s here and it smacks up against my door. I let it in of course, I have no option. Not that I can recall.
Life and death belonged. And was I monstrous? The words rolled around my head, poking and prickling, nagging me into a place where I could form the thoughts and they are these.
I sipped. I sat. And then a tiny flower floated over the surface of my drink. I was prompted to remember lotus flowers, delicate edges, beauty in their fragility as they bloomed despite the mud. Or water lilies, fragrant and glorious, spread out petals, preening over algae on my pond.
And this smallness, this clump of petals moved towards me. I studied it for a second, held it in my mind and then it changed. Its image became clear. There were no flowers in my mug, just a fly. A dead fly. Its fine filigree wings reaching out as though it wished to be remembered for the way that it could move, as though in death it was captured, it was held, as a testament to its life.
And I sat back. I placed the mug down, my favourite mug that held the shell of the insect, scalded with my boiling water, the water I boiled to bring me peace and calm had killed, in a second, the living thing in my mug. I wondered how it held onto the mint as I plucked it from the plant, as I rinsed it under the tap. But it clung on until I scalded it.
And I had drunk for while before it appeared, what if I had swallowed it, but I would not have known. And worse, as it drifted loose from beneath the leaf, in its first silent moments, when its body had ceased its purpose, what if I drank from its form, if some escaping essence of the fly had been consumed? And I, responsible for its death, or at the very least, a co-creator, now held, now owned a part of the fly in my mouth.
And I swallowed and I hoped. I hoped that death was in an instant, that there was a split second when its identity was whole and then the water came, the heat appeared like a thought, it drenched and saturated its tiny form before he could react. And that is all.
But then my drink changed, no longer warm ceramic to settle nerves but now it was a resting place, an in-between place and the weight of responsibility came. I left the mug and walked away to contemplate my options.
My friend Jenny jumped into my mind, Jenny with her backpack and packed up tent and her wheels spinning, biking and hiking to Wales. And I wondered how many insects her tyres had taken down, how many smears on concrete she’d created and as her hiking boots stomped and trampled the dirt down did creatures search for shelter from her feet?
But nothing helped the thoughts because Jenny wasn’t still and contemplating, Jenny was full of pumping blood, of sweat and motion, Jenny could never be pinned down. But I could. I was used to being calcified and my reward was the remains of a fly.
And so I needed to be exempt from myself, to make the best of decisions. And if I think the thoughts with the sound turned down I can admit I considered drinking up, to paying tribute to the fly with the act of consuming, to complete the job I had started and allow its carcass to rest deep within my own.
And hope maybe in death, it could step out of the shadows and see that it had lived. And I would know and I would make its essence subsume into my form.
And I yet I couldn’t and I didn’t, I couldn’t cross the line. Although I studied it floating for some time, I wondered would I taste it at all, as it slid down. But it wasn’t the tasting that prevented my mouth from its work, it was the need to honour, to live by a code that would bring structure to my chaos. And so I let the tea cool down. I left it for hours alone and silent, the mint leaves disintegrated around my fly and I noticed that he had become mine. Not an it anymore, not now. Now he belonged to me and I must do him proud.
And later when the chattering of children in the park has seeped away and the garden has regained a sense of ease, I will go out.
I will take my mug, my favourite mug and the body of my fly and I will tip out tea. I will find a quiet corner and a plant it may have liked and I will pour. My morning tea will soak the soil and if I focus I may just see the body of the fly fall into the ground.
But if he’d left the mint leaf before I plucked it from the plant, then we wouldn’t be in this place now and my eyes would not have seen the things they did not want to. But the fly hung onto the mint leaf and I scalded it into the void. Everything is relational.
Still, the sun will set over the plants soon, over what remains of my drink and my fly upturned in the soil. And as it sets there will appear a prayer in the photons, in the dust and the muck in the air.
It’s been a long day. I apologised to the fly and at the edges where our lives merged, we took responsibility, we impacted each other’s lives. It was a difficult joy.
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.
And I will brush up the leaves from the garden, so delicate and fragile in my hands. I will place them in small piles on my outstretched skirts and stroke each one in turn. And they will be so glad of the sunlight and of my cotton layered skirts on which they rest.
These leaves, these moments from my trees, my overarching glades that kept me safe. How gentle they sit in the folds of my clothes, how grateful they are for my care.
The trees are bare now but their silhouettes echo out my life, the shapes that formed me, the branches that held me close and I will dance in their shadows, I will blossom again.
I stroke the leaves in my lap, they appreciate my warmth, my hands that soothe them as the photons lift the last of moisture from their form.
I watch them, crumble into the weft and weave, fragments of leaves in my skirts. I kiss each one. I thank each one, each particle, each atom of my leaves then stand to go.
As I pull myself to standing, full of warmth despite the cold, they scatter to soil. They drift and drop, replete from the day, ready to take on the earth.
And I spin, I twirl round and around, my skirts billowing out, floating up like a balloon in a hot summer’s sky. Dancing under the canopy where I grew, sewing seeds on the breeze of the trees yet to come.
And we are whole and we are rested, where noon’s a purple glow. My leaves and I, together and we are safe and we are one.
Janey L Foster 