A Marriage

"You are holding up a ceiling
with both arms. It is very heavy,
but you must hold it up, or else
it will fall down on you. Your arms 
are tired, terribly tired,
and, as the day goes on, it feels
as if either your arms or the ceiling
will soon collapse.

But then,
unexpectedly,
something wonderful happens:
Someone,
a man or a woman,
walks into the room
and holds their arms up
to the ceiling beside you.

So you finally get
to take down your arms.
You feel the relief of respite,
the blood flowing back
to your fingers and arms.
And when your partner's arms tire,
you hold up your own
to relieve him again.

And it can go on like this
for many years
without the house falling.

MICHAEL BLUMENTHAL

The wait can be long,
much longer than you think you can bear.
Doubt and despair creep in to stand either side of you.
They weaken your resolve, question your strength
and soon your arms are trembling and you're wondering
if the house falling wouldn't be such a bad thing.

But then,
not so unexpectedly,
something wonderful happens:
Those who love you both,
who stood with you on that day all those years ago
when you promised each other forever,
walk into the room
and hold their arms up
to the ceiling beside you.

And it can go on like this
for as long as it takes.

Dear R
I said I had nothing to give you but words. They are all I have and I'm afraid they're not enough.

When I was little I would sit in my nanna's kitchen and watch the rain pour down outside through the high window above the sink. It wasn't set low enough to see anything but the sky. She would tell us to look for a patch of blue - enough to make a sailor a pair of trousers because then we would know that the rain would soon stop and the rest of the day would be fine. We could go out to play and she could hang her washing on the line. The old twin tub would be swishing away in the corner, that warm soapy smell filling the room and she'd tell us about how back in her day if you didn't get your washing on the line by 10am, the neighbours would think you slatternly and tittle-tattle about your tardiness. You always pegged your smalls beneath a sheet because you didn't want all and sundry seeing those - not when you had to look them in the eye at church on Sunday morning and say "Peace be with you."

I slip into the past again to escape the present.

I watched the sky then, I watch it now.  I'm starting to doubt that the blue will ever come. These are the darkest clouds I have ever seen. You called it the perfect storm. You left and I didn't know where you'd gone. I'm so afraid that one day you won't come home.

Over twenty years I have watched this thing chase you. You are tired of running. Maybe it's time to turn and face it, to finally name what it is that hunts you down. I promised to stand side by side with you - for better and for worse, in sickness and in health. It's the one promise I have always believed in, the one I will keep.

Lx

I have a restless heart.
Like a kite on a string,
always tugging in the wind.

There are days like today
when I forget where I am.
I fill a saucepan with water,
place it on the stove,
then can't remember why.

I'm half a world away
flying sky high
in another time and place.

The fickle wind drops
and I'm hurtling to the ground
bracing myself for impact...

I wish I could remember
how much it hurts to fall.

What makes you come alive

Dear R

You wake early again this morning and are up and at it before the birds have started singing. I can hear the click-click of the keyboard from the warmth of our bed as you prepare another case. Every day you bind your life up in court bundles and pink ribbon and carry the weight of so much broken and too many wrongs to make a convincing right. It's either late to bed or early to rise and more often than not, both. Burning the day away at both ends doesn't leave enough to live in the middle. I ask you if you're ok and you say you're tired but I know sleep won't fix this.
You didn't know this was what you wanted to do when we married. In those first years you were alive  in the freedom of following wherever a whim took you and I was the one who slept-walked through the days. Now it's you falling asleep in the shadows. I wish we could figure out a way for us both to be fully alive together right now.
You see me print out an application form for a job I don't really want and you tell me to lay it aside. I thought it might help, ease the burden somehow, but you say you would rather see me happy. That makes me cry - that you count my happiness above your own. You would keep the flame alive in me, bending low to cup your hands around it, breathing life into the embers until I'm singing gold.
You are all ash and I long to see your Phoenix rise. I have nothing to give you but words. You won't believe them but they will tell you what I see, what I've known all these years  - what it is that makes you come alive...

Lx

Once upon a time

Dear R

In this wildest of Winters, the rain just keeps pouring down. Nothing feels certain on all this water-logged ground. You were late back last night and I was more restless than the wind until I heard your key turn in the lock and knew you were home. I don't know where this season will take us. You worry about how it will end, disillusioned with how it is now. I keep looking back to see how far we've come.

Once upon a time...
Do you remember? You made the long journey to see me in that place by the sea that should have been called Far it took forever and a day to get to. I met you at the station on a night as wild as this one. You stood on the platform clutching a broken cactus in one hand and hope in the other. I was so very glad to see you. You stilled the storm in me. I took you back to that little first floor flat tucked into the hillside just below the National Library where I lived - the first place that had ever felt like home to me. That's where it all began, where you first kissed me and we dared to believe in the uncertain promise of tomorrow.

This Winter's storms have hit that town hard these past few weeks. Pictures on the news show the damage done: parts of the sea wall pounded away, the collapsed pavilion, the promenade littered with debris and the water flooding in. It's hard to keep faith on days like these, to believe in permanence when everything is being washed away.

I believe in us. We've weathered enough storms to know the foundations are solid. It doesn't matter how hard the wind blows or how high the flood waters rise. We'll hold tight and mark the tide-line on the wall so when we look back we can say even then, even then not just once upon a time, the promise proved true.

I love you,
Lx

A Room Called Remember

“The time is ripe for looking back...and trying to figure out where we have come from and where we are going to, for sifting through the things we have done and the things we have left undone for a clue to who we are and who, for better or worse, we are becoming. But again and again we avoid the long thoughts….We cling to the present out of wariness of the past. And why not, after all? We get confused. We need such escape as we can find. But there is a deeper need yet, I think, and that is the need—not all the time, surely, but from time to time—to enter that still room within us all where the past lives on as a part of the present, where the dead are alive again, where we are most alive ourselves to turnings and to where our journeys have brought us. The name of the room is Remember—the room where with patience, with charity, with quietness of heart, we remember consciously to remember the lives we have lived.” 
― Frederick Buechner, A Room Called Remember: Uncollected Pieces

I'm quiet here. Afraid of saying too much. I feel the weight of all that's left unsaid. I know you know. We always heard each other best in the silence. I don't make this place my home - I want you to know that. There are other rooms filled with light and sound called Here and Now and Present where I'm busy, happy and content most of the time. Most of the time. This room called Remember - it's where I used to live, we used to live, in another life. I see your shadow on the wall sometimes - a ghost drifting through. You write your name in the dust on the hearth - one that makes my heart sing: friend.

Believing in the promise

It was long ago. The wind rattled the windows and the rain spat against the panes of  glass of a little chapel by the sea. It was wild out but it was quiet within. I wasn't sure what I was doing there except he'd asked me to go with him so I had. He was looking for answers, trying to find some peace in his heart about the future and where he was headed. Mine was broken. I wasn't looking for anything except a way out and in more ways than one. Someone was singing and it was haunting and beautiful and I understood it more than I ever could the preaching and the prayers. Deep called to deep in the roar of the waterfall where it all turned to water and I ducked my head to hide the tears. When I looked up again there was a man standing right in front of me. I didn't know who he was, he was a complete stranger but he had a kind face and when he spoke his voice was gentle. He said that Heaven had a plan for me but he couldn't tell me what it was because I would say it wasn't for me, that I would run from it. Instead he told me about a pair of old balance scales he'd seen in a dream. They were blackened and disused but before his eyes they were polished up and made like new.
Over twenty years have come and gone since then and I still don't know if his words were true, if his vision has come to pass. I'm still waiting on my Daniel. I've tried interpreting it myself many times but maybe it's not about me understanding the promise but believing it.
The friend I was with that night, the moments of his life were swiftly running out although neither of us knew it then. A few days later we took a walk along an old railway track and decided to untangle our lives from each other's. It was a relief to both of us. The sun was setting behind and the whole sky above was aflame. He stopped to take a picture and I took one in my mind's eye- his dark silhouette against the bright falling day. When I turned to walk on, I sensed his journey was almost done and he would not follow. A few years later he called just before my wedding to wish me well and to say he was sorry he couldn't be there but a bone marrow transplant was a little more pressing. I promised I'd visit him soon. On return from my honeymoon I got the news that he'd died.
He had so many dreams and aspirations and was just four months married himself when death came. I don't understand why and I sometimes get lost in that. He had an unshakeable faith in promise and was forever trying to dispel my unbelief. There was a song by Marc Cohn he would play me again and again as if he knew I would need to carry it down through the years...

Let's go down to the sound tonight
Tide is low and we can walk on water
Reel me in under that starry light
Just like a fisherman's daughter

Baby when the bands and the barkers go home
They say that Venus she rises from out of the foam
She dances on air and laughs at the moon
And watches young lovers in fiery dunes

So are you willing to wait for the miracle
Willing to wait it through
Are you willing to wait for the miracle
Or don't you believe they're true?

There's an old man sitting by the side of the pier
He's got his cross and his camera and his bottle of beer
He just sits all day and all through the night
Praying for a vision or a Heavenly light

'Cause he's willing to wait for the miracle
Willing to wait it through
He's willing to wait for the miracle
What else is he gonna do?
What else is he gonna do yeah?
Now me I don't need no Heavenly sign

'Cause I got the water and the wine

But baby please let your love light shine
'Cause we're all gonna meet our maker sometime

That's why I'm willing to wait for the miracles
Willing to wait them through
I'm willing to wait for the miracles
But I just can't wait for you

Just can't wait for you
Let's go on down to the sound tonight
And walk on water, walk on water
Walk on water, walk on water, walk on water