The Circle of Stuff

So I went to London, to help my friend move house.  It seemed like such a good idea – I would help her but also lose myself in cleaning and packing, in lugging stuff around and then reversing the process at the other end. Pass the parcel. Pack, unpack. A circle of stuff.

I even took my running kit, thinking I’d jog round the streets and parks of North London. But instead I sort of came undone. I unravelled.  I became more and more unreal.  And, as if to compensate, in a vain desperate attempt to pull me back to the here and now, my body started to hurt…badly. 

I hadn’t quite realized where she was moving to, hadn’t clocked it was nearly back where I used to live, twenty years ago or more. And past and present collided and left me winded. Neither here nor there.  A nobody person lost in nowhen nowhere.

And I was reading this amazing book, by Sandie Dent (don’t bother Googling it – the few agents she tried couldn’t see the gemstone glittering in their darkness), and that just compounded the schism somehow. A woman, around middle-age, goes back to her teenage home and clashes into old friendships, past loves and remembers/dismembers the past.  Dis – the Roman god of the underworld, of course, fell Hades.  And I, such a wan Persephone, always in love with darkness.

‘Do you like pomegranates?’ said my friend as she flung stuff into a trolley at Waitrose.

‘Not any more,’ I replied. Maybe I never did. 

Nothing makes any sense.  Maybe it never did.  Ain't life funny?  

I thought I’d go out, once the boxes were unpacked, once things were transferred to corners, in piles, trying to adjust to their new spaces.  I thought I’d wander down Church Street, maybe have a drink in a café, bob in and out of a few shops, trace my fingers over the gravestones in the cemetery.  But I felt too alien. It would all have felt fake. I walked past my old house, past the places where I lived and loved and laughed and cried.  And none of it felt like it belonged to me.  Now even my memories have turned tail and run run away. You gotta laugh, right?  

So I walked back, to the place that wasn't the place I loved, across the wide space of the park and came across an enclosure of deer.  My memory has no deer.  Were they always there and I didn’t know?  Or maybe I didn’t notice. Maybe their entrapment didn’t bother me then, when I had no fences around me.  Back then, when I thought I wanted to be encircled.

And there was a goat too.  It looked at me incuriously. ‘Wouldn’t you rather have a cliff or a mountain or even a tree on a beach to climb?’ I said.  It turned away.  Either it didn’t care or it knew that it didn't make any difference. Wherever you go, there you are.   

I limped back to the new place.  Worked on through the pain.  Because every muscle and joint in my body was/is hurting.  It feels like I’m being pulled apart at the seams, bone by bone, cell by cell.  I think I would like to crawl away now, into that hole in the forest where hurt animals go to lick their wounds.  It would be…peaceful. Piece fall? 

Hades' bride

I intended to be productive today. I was going to sort out my admin and then crack on with my rewrite of Samael while the boys were at rugby. But my overzealous PC clean-up had deleted the wrong cookies so I couldn’t pay my bills and, while I was hunting through my desk for the codes, I kept crashing up against the past, time and again.


Letters from Therese, who died last year. A booklet on ‘handling grief’ given to me by the hospital when Mum had just died. And then an envelope full of bits and pieces of hers – her scratchy writing, little notes, bills, a signed blank cheque. And I just started sobbing all over again. Thankful that I could, that there was no-one to hear my sobs turn into howls, apart from the dogs.

I have been thinking about my parents a lot lately. Since I became ill, to be precise. My chest infection came seemingly out of nowhere. I had no cold, no sore throat to presage it. As usual it worried me. I have had weak lungs since childhood; bronchitis and I have been on first name terms; I’ve been hospitalised for pneumonia.

It runs in the family. My father died of lung cancer; my mother of pleural empyema. I tried to write about it the other night but could only come up with disjointed words (hence most certainly not a poem).

Both my parents died
betrayed by breath.
Father courted cancer,
inhaled the Cell Shifter,
hugged it close;
permitted the past to eat his future
Consumed by sadness,
rejection locked deep within

Mother hoarded secrets:
a dragon’s lair of loss
Betrayal and sick seduction,
passion bruised,
shame locked tight to ice.
No movement.
Nothing moves in winter’s hold.
No breath.
Lungs harden,
a carapace
too weak, heart broken, to break out.
Flesh turned shell, then stone.

My sad (inhe)rit(anc)e
(b)eaten black and blue.
Blue of ice,
black of decay.
(Dis)inte(g)r(ation).
Stagnation.
Legacy of fear.

Can we change our patterning? Researchers into PNI (psychoneurimmunology) think so. But what if we’ve made a deal? If we’re already signed the pact? Can we renegotiate? Can we renege? That’s what I’ve been worrying at this last week. Because, see, I think I accepted the pact a long, long time ago. I nodded and took the hand of the Dark Lord, sad lost Persephone in a sea of poppies, feeling life was over anyhow so nothing of value was lost.

Now I take a deep breath and lift a knight.