How to Stay

"Despite the years he has lost, sometimes a memory flies back. It can be very small, the detail that sparks a piece of his past. Glancing at it, another person might not look twice. And yet an insignificant detail can zoom out of its ordinary setting and induce such sorrow he feels twisted inside."
from "Perfect" by Rachel Joyce

I choose them carefully, the little pieces of my life that I take to show her in a quiet room with a softly ticking clock. They are fragments of something bigger, something scattered that I can never gather and hold together all at once. My counsellor is patient and kind. It's like archeology - this piecing together of parts with no sense of the whole. Someone suggests a timeline might help - my life in linear going from A to B. My life has never felt linear - sometimes my past is in front of me, my future behind and the present nowhere to be found. I try to pin it down on paper. It takes many days of flicking backwards and forwards through pages using different coloured pens to differentiate between the years, the places, the people, the events and experiences that make up who I am right here, right now.

I spread the decades of my life out on the table between us and see them for first time through someone else's eyes. She is struck by how much loss there has been and wonders, with so many endings and leavings, how does a person learn how to stay?

Between the snow and the huge roses

"The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was
Spawning snow and pink roses against it
Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:
World is suddener than we fancy it.

World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural, I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.

And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world
Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes - 
On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palm of one's hands - 
There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses."

"Snow" by Louis Macneice


Over sixteen years ago now, I was up a ladder painting walls in Cambridge Blue and Ivory Lace - the colours of summer skies and vanilla ice-cream - when I realised.  Just a moment between heartbeats when I knew there was life unfurling inside me. The room was suddenly rich.

Several weeks later in a room suddenly dark they showed me her tiny frame wriggling in a halo of light on a flickering screen and another smaller body, wrapped in shadow, frozen in time. Twins. World is crazier and more of it than we think. Viable and non-viable. I weighed the words but couldn't stop the world from tilting. The drunkenness of things being various.

And I have lived that way since - holding joy in one hand and sorrow in the other. We light candles to celebrate and grief wells up from an underground spring. The fire flames with a bubbling sound.

This is me in midsummer - more than glass. I walk among bright pink roses and simultaneously leave my tracks out there in the snow.

The Hollow Moon

"We saw the last embers of daylight die,
And in the trembling blue-green of the sky
A moon, worn as if it had been a shell
Washed by times waters as they rose and fell
About the stars and broke in days and years..."

From "Adam's Curse" by W. B. Yeats

Winter blinds me to blue sky by day.
I tilt my head at night instead.
My eyes search out constellations,
reading Braille by stars:
Orion the Hunter,
Taurus the Bull,
Canis Minor...
It steadies me somehow to feel the stars in place.
Not so the waxing, waning moon.
She's a bright sharp sickle tonight.
Like Yeats I have a thought for no-one's but your ears:
That I have been too quiet in love.
We wound ourselves on the sharp edges of each other,
And I'm weary-hearted and hollow,
Breaking stones until the moon is full again.

Joy

Halfway across the Millennium Bridge she stops and asks me to take her photo. The day is fading fast  and she wants evidence that she was here in this moment, as night falls over the city, smiling from ear to ear. She has been promised this trip for weeks - a belated birthday present is a night out in the West End to see a musical. She doesn't even try to contain her excitement. She fizzes and sparks like a Catherine Wheel.

As the old year faded and this new one began, I chose the word Joy to carry me forward. I needed more of it in my life and wondered where to find it. There on that bridge, trying to frame her bright little face in the dark window of my phone, I realise its been right in front of me all this time. Even her name affirms it, a name we chose for her because of the joy she brought us at the end of a year foreshadowed with pain. As I take her picture, I see how perfectly positioned she is between the dark shilouette of Tower Bridge in the distance and the brilliantly illuminated Shard in the foreground. She stands like a link between the old and the new, the dark shadows of the past and the bright promise of the future.

Picture taken, we move on. She never stands still for more than a minute. She's unimpressed by the installations in Tate Modern, every moment of her life is art to her and she needs to be living it. We leave and walk along the Thames and back across Blackfriars Bridge, pointing out landmarks as we go; St. Paul's, Big Ben, the OXO tower, the London Eye. Her eyes are wide open, not wanting to miss anything. We eat in a busy Italian restaurant close to the theatre and she asks us the time every few minutes. She eats quickly, declaring it to be the best food she's ever tasted when in truth it's a mediocre plate of sausage and chips. Joy makes even the ordinary seem extraordinary.

Finally we're at the theatre and she tells the lady who checks our tickets that she is soooo excited. The show is everything she hoped it would be. We give her the aisle seat because we know her feet will be dancing, every part of her straining towards the stage, itching to be up there singing her heart out too. As we walk back to the station afterwards, she asks me how she might go about auditioning!

The trains are packed with people heading home and we sway as we stand, her arms wrapped tight around me. She tells me she loves me and I ask her if she's tired and she shakes her head vehemently although it's nearly midnight and she's been up since the first hint of day. She politely refuses the kindness of strangers who offer up their seats. She holds on to me to keep us both upright. I see that now - how beautiful a gift she has been to me, joy for a heart bent towards melancholy. I remember once when she was very little, how she looked hard at me for a moment and then asked me why my smile was upside down. She sows seeds of happiness wherever she goes. Even there late at night on the underground when January couldn't be more joyless, she hears a young couple talking in Mandarin and gives them her widest smile as she tries out the little Mandarin she knows. They turn to her in surprise and can't help but smile back and ask her her name. She tells them and it echoes down the train like a bell pealing...