On Separation

Essay 28

I am not sure how to live in the absence of some people, I have never been convinced that some limbs grow back. There’s a concaveness to life now, much free space to take hold of, you work, you want to work it off why you left.

Staying up one night in London, room-pacing and thought-tracing, I went looking for my most important past-stamp. At sunrise at last I found, in the blue fog of the late eighties, a small girl in pyjamas in her grandfather’s arms. I know I woke up when he lifted me but pretended that I didn’t in that greediest of blurs so he wouldn’t put me down. A memory of your gravity as a person.

Now those people are long gone, and their homes have all been sold off, maybe another’s elders walk them with a sleep-feigning child. And we, we came to be put down, and ran and never looked back, and we jumped across all the things that slow one down, and stopped speaking of anything that matters.

There’s a task for an adult to state herself not based on what she doesn’t have, the swiped shelves of household gods at the back of the mind. For you can in fact allow for free space, that oxygen will grow things, to the war scars under your new shirt there is a might, and all our stories will sound heroic at first.

I’m the one to watch what is awake now, and I walk, I don’t need to run; I’ll lift things and let them not be put down, the sway of weights I’ve learnt to embrace as light.