Artist and writer currently living in Aberystwyth.
It’s a nothing in the whole scheme of things. A little inconvenience. You handled it well, he said. Did I? I’m glad he thought so. Am I getting calmer, more peaceful? I am shamed by my sometime outburts. I have her in me. But then she was immensely practical, her outbursts were from another source. That well. Of unhappiness.
I forget them. I think of them, grieve for them, and then they are gone from my mind. How can this be so? Those who have lost so much in Ukraine, in Afghanistan, and in Myanmar. I forget them. I forget their loss and losing. I want to hold them inside of me. To bear witness to what life has brought them. Help me to do this. And not forget.
The distress of it woke me. She was a chef, Japanese, and she’d laid out on the ground the food she’d prepared for herself to eat on a black cloth. Everything was white and raised up on little plinths. There were shapes and foodstuff I didn’t recognise. Alien. One of these culinary objects was still alive. A bird. Denuded of all plumage, it too was white. It’s breast had been slit. No blood, just a line. And at its throat was a hole. And it was singing. The sound came throught the hole. I was devastated by the cruelty of it. The bird was dying but it kept singing. And she was going to consume it. I woke with the pain of it. Was I too culpable?
He weighs himself before his shower and then comes upstairs to the kitchen to tell me the latest ‘score’. It is slowing but it is still less than it was last time. There’s a part of me that wishes he wouldn’t keep doing it and keep telling me. That’s selfish. He needs reassurance. And all I can say is that you are looking well. Which is true. He says he’s lost his arse, which is also true. Am I losing him? Of course. As he is losing me. Though possibly he will go first. Today is all we have. No other promises can be made.
I thought of her much over the weekend. I remember her crying down the phone. Incoherent sobbing. No words, just tears. It wrenched at my heart. I’m coming, I’d said. I’m coming soon. She went before I got there. Minutes before. I would not have forsaken you, I wanted to say. Never. I would’ve cared for you. Taken you home. I would.
It was a small thing. A text sent to him to be read out to me. I don’t know her well. We are not intimate. She is hard to know, a closed-off being, gentle but difficult to read. But she wrote it. Acknowledged my claim to be a part of the day. She remembered. And wrote it. I am touched.
I cannot conceive of its impact on the people it has taken and the buildings it has destroyed. I want to. I want to feel with them and for them, but it is too much. Let there be succour, aid, food and care soon for all who need it. And let those precious homes that have been lost be rebuilt.
He is still losing weight. Not a lot, but some. He asks if I think it is alright that he is doing so. Yes, I say. It’s the new drug, he says. Yes, I say.
It is nothing compared to what some have to endure. I know this, even as I am enduring mine. My pain. I want to know it. To take it on. Not, I might add, in a war-like, combatitive manner, but to embrace it all. To know its ins and outs, mostly so that I might know when it is passing. I am made crochety by it. And I am sorry for it. I must try harder.
I know that others have worse, far worse. But this is your pain, he says at breakfast. Yes, it is. And I walk every step with it, knowing it and yet trying to detach myself from it, as it did when I gave birth to her. I listen to birdsong as I walk and am temporarily distracted from the sharp, rigidness of the aching. And then I remember and cannot believe that I forgot.