Some evenings, now that it’s getting dark earlier, Edward drives two-and-a-half hours out of town to a place where he can be alone with the sky. He unfolds a camping chair on the gravel by the side of the road, the wide yawn of canola fields beside him, and just listens with his whole self.
— Claire Battershill, “The Collective Name for Ninjas”
Tonight it began raining softly and I stood on my small sliver of balcony in the cold air. The sky is almost dark, but there's a grey-pink slab of cloud stretched out from the end of the tennis court to just past the big tree outside my window, and the air smells faintly of fish, and the leaves are rustling in waves of sound.
I've discovered Miss Marple on youtube, which brings me back to watching Miss Marple in the lounge back home. This morning I had the stunning realization that by the time I get back, I will have been away from home for 9 months, enough time to conceive and birth a baby, enough time to change me. But I am not yet completely different. I suppose I always go back to what Toby wrote in his letter when I left - what is different? what stays the same? I think of this constantly, but, like most self-reflection, changes and constancy is a muddy blurry business, most accurately understood by vague sense.
I can't shake off this dream I had on Saturday while I was at Grandma's. In my dream, I was trying to help a man find his lost son. I opened cupboards and looked through laundry piles and walked down country lanes. But the heart rending and horrifying thing was that I could see his son. His son was always just before me, a ghost-child, dead. His son was so happy, just like the three-ish year old he had been when he died, talking and laughing and playing as he moved through the air in a strange grey silhouette, but he was dead. And I couldn't bring myself to tell the man, and so I just kept looking.
Song of the Week: Romeo and Juliet by Dire Straits
No comments:
Post a Comment