Letters

I will always send you letters,
folding and refolding in a million different ways,
trying to make a snowflake that won't melt in your hand.
Maybe one breezeless day I will word the question right
and your answer will find a way back against the current.

The Art of Paper-Folding

Once upon a time there was a girl shut away in a big old house in the middle of nowhere. For its many rooms and sprawling grounds it was a stifling place. She was never without company but felt lonely and empty in a way she couldn't explain. Until one day a letter came that changed everything.

Released from the envelope it unfolded itself into a boy who laughed at her surprise. "It appears we're to be friends," he said, "but appearances can be deceiving so I thought maybe you should see for yourself!" They became the best of friends after that and were together often as he showed her how to fold to fit into an envelope too and send herself wherever she wanted to go.

Many, many years passed with them folding and unfolding themselves along well-worn creases and familiar lines until the passage of time granted them other more magical ways to be together. But for all their ease, she missed her name in his hand. The art of paper-folding never lost its charm for her and one day soon she will cross an ocean and hope their paperless selves know which way to bend.

(Dear S, for thirty years of friendship - thank you x)

Letter to my Muse

"The union of the mathematician with the poet, fervor with measure, passion with correctness, this surely is the ideal."
William James

You are nothing like how I imagined my Muse. I thought I'd squashed her flat when I picked this place up off the dry cracked prairie and set it down here. I thought I saw the pointed toes of her silver slippers sticking out from under the planks. Instead I find you standing on the front porch looking very much like an accountant in a crisp blue shirt and polished shoes.
You have followed me here and I'm glad. The place was lonely without you. I didn't realise what was missing until you showed up. I'm even more glad that you are not a cranky witch with a broomstick to poke me in the ribs with. Measure and correctness is much more my thing. Seven words is all it takes, right?

Inside My Head

"I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)"

   from "Mad Girl's Love Song" by Sylvia Plath

A blink of an eye and the scene changes.
I leave one world behind and enter another.
I tried living in the Real
but I have fairytale running through my veins.
So here I am starting again in a place that feels like home.
Deeper in the woods, far from the madding crowd.

Summer's End

Dear S

It's the last weekend of Summer here - the boys have gone to trap it in their sails and I'm stitching it into the hem of a Winter skirt.

Do you remember our first Summer's end?
I remember the letter you pushed beneath my door, how it slipped through the silence and began that Summer's song. I hear it playing and I think of you as the sun slides low and shadows lengthen.

 "May I?" you asked holding out your hand for mine. They were the only two words I ever needed and the ones I held on to as the days fell like dominoes.

They're falling again now - I graduate tomorrow and the day after that... I guess your own dominoes are falling too.

When you need a hand to hold,

Always x

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.