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)
Her thoughts moved to hands. She saw them cutting stems and tying, and tying turned into fingertips around the silk of cravats and fiddling with tie pins and buttons.
But she couldn’t stay there long, lying, looking at her nails, gloss mirroring the sky. She observed her nails, now ruby, resonating with the velvet from her day.
And more hands came, tousled up and pinned her hair while at her feet, fingers fiddled with long laces and ivory silk caught the morning sun.
Hands on a steering wheel, taking the corner she knows well, while another hand took hers and later helped her from the car. Taffeta cascaded, pooling over the old stone path, flooding around the smallness of her feet.
Footsteps clicked in unison till the hands eased hers to others, to the ones waiting in the hush with dust particles held in light.
And later her hands gripped the bouquet and thrust it up into the sky, small hands, fingers glinting like they always would and she held it up, triumphant, high.
Hands tweaking dials on a box of light, freezing moments by the trees, marking time and pressing pause.
{Time Passes.}
And her thoughts stayed with hands, moving hands that held hers for a while, through the years and hours and today, hands around the clock.
Hands ticking time in trigonometric waves around a circle. And the once-upon-a-time hands, new hands now that ease the way.
Her nails shimmering, then and now, her fingers still small like they were. She made a fist, tiny, strong and punched the air. Her hands knew just what to do.
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
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.
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.
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 