Saying 'Forever'

We don’t say ‘I love you’, and it’s a hot twist of pleasure inside me, perverse. When those feelings press up inside, wet and close and urgent at my throat, what I fling out is a string of syllables that would have been nonsense to me six months ago, hard and soft, Celtic.

This divorce from my past is a healing amputation. It’s a tiny cut that might drop heartbreak’s deadweight. It means I might be able to believe.

Touch wood.

Always Being Okay (It Means This)

The walls were the colour of the arctic, the paper curtain turquoise and not fully closed, so beyond we saw people in mint coloured scrubs come and go. The bed was a plinth in the middle of the room, and under its cold blanket Leigh was like a doll somebody’d put down and forgotten. I drew up two chairs beside him and put my feet up in defiance of the nurse (she’d already caught me while hamming up his ECG). He held out a hand, palm up, and I threaded my fingers through his (his knuckles callused, fingers thick).

“We should get some sleep, babe,” he said, eyes on me to the side, having to press his cheek to the pillow just to look. “We won’t be out of here soon.”

When we settled down, I curled awkward across my chairs. For a blanket, his jacket on top of me leather and scuffed, heavy as a living thing. A woman down the corridor crying out: a rhythmic kind of moan, half words, almost like sex noises – it would rise unpredictably to a wail then shimmer down again, whimpery. When Leigh mentioned it, I said to try to imagine it as a lullaby.

Finding Out What They Knew Already

I’m learning, at last, not to like hospitals. This one’s proprietory grip is sick: comforting and suffocating. Even smoking outside in London’s winter’s freeze I stand under its glass eaves.

Every nurse passing the cubicles is a threat. They could tell me anything – get out, get away, he’s hurt, he’s dead, he’s not coming back.

Studying Old Photographs

There’s a photo on my wall, whitetacked there. The grass is golden green and touched by gentle treeshadows that darken it to oilpaint vert. Downy soft, short. The trees offer stippled heads and arms of frothy foliage. Glossy dark leaves like hands climb the odd trunk, here, there. Even now I remember when I took the picture I could hardly breathe; looking on it was like an icepick to the sternum.

Staring Across The Pond

November, and the world’s made anew. At the heart of it all, disbelief. We keep his title in our mouths, hefting the weight of it on the tips of our tongues like stones to throw should they try to take it from us: President-elect Barack Obama, every unfamiliar syllable spelling the advent of change.

Passing Cities on Bonfire Night

From the alleys and the gardens, from the fields and the gunneys, and from countless points on the horizon – shooting lights, red green gold, falling sparkles and soaring rockets; each with their own unique point of conception, each with their own hand that lit the fuse.