Artist and writer currently living in Aberystwyth.
A TV story unwittingly prompts a revisiting of old pain. We rake through the remains, he and I. It never does any good. I cry in bed, just before sleep, which doesn’t come. Not until later. Then I wake and wake and dream and dream. Having her in your life wouldn’t have made you happy, he says. She would have always let you down. Possibly, he is right. But I know and he knows that it’s not as simple as that. I must accept it as it is. That’s all I can do. She leaves, offers me no other choice.
There is a kind of grace in acceptance. That letting be what is, rather than fighting against it. I like the peace of it. My back seems a little better, but it is never enough. I have eschewed painkillers this morning. Let it be as it is. Hot water bottles. Three of them will do better. Let it be as it is.
I’m sore again. I don’t know what I did to bring it back. It’s my back naturally. And it’s stiff as a board. Rigid. Like iron. I think of Frida Kahlo and the drawings she made of her pain. It must’ve been constant. Mine is nothing in comparison. A blip. An inconvenience. But my potential for self-pity hovers. Always. Breathe into it, she said. Relax, she said. I will try. Mind over matter.
I remember what trouble she used to go to with the table. Out they came, all those little yolk-yellow chicks and tiny foil-covered chocolate eggs, a gathering of which was placed by each setting on the table. I loved all that. I loved the care and the detail and the marking of tradition. I now know where it all came from. It was her heritage. I’ve seen it on other tables since in those Northern climes. I have no need to do it, no family or gathering that requires it, though I sometimes wish I did. The memories still spark. And sometimes that is enough.
He spoke of his outrage about it at breakfast. A man, wrongly deported to El Salvador prison, who, found innocent by the US judiciary, still remains there, apparently never to return. What can be done? My heart calls out to him and all those incarcerated for crimes they did not commit. Let them find kindess, mercy and compassion from those who hold them.
It was excruciating. Don’t fight it, she said, as she pressed her finger further into my buttock muscle. You’ll be bruised tomorrow, she said afterwards, adding, but a bruise is less painful, isn’t it? Yes, it is. She has helped. She is a wonder, if at all brusque. She doesn’t flinch in digging deeper into the source of pain, even as her victim, (in this case, me) is gripping the massage couch in agony. I yield to it all. I have to. I want to be healed.
He says that I am good and kind. He writes it too. Is that enough? Is his saying such things about me enough to make it true?
I’m reading Susan Sontag’s book ‘On Photography’. In it she writes about the seminal moment, when, at the age of twelve, she came across a book of photographs in a second-hand book shop. They were of the Holocaust. She writes that from then on her life was split into two parts. The before she saw the photographs, and the after.
We were talking at breakfast and he was telling me about a girl that he knows in the 24hr SPAR. He’d asked her if she had any siblings. “Yes,” she said, “and they’re all in prison.” Apparently she’d laughed at this admission.
There is talk of that poor beleagured country being divided up. A line drawn through it. Just like Berlin, they say. Can it be stopped? Can this madness end? My heart is full for them. Can the meek inherit the world? Really?