Writing by Lara Slyce. Illustration by Polly Burnay.
The morning after the accident I’m sitting in my
windowsill.
Cross legged,
robed in just my underwear
Your t-shirt
Her coat.
Hair akimbo
Chapped, distracted lips.
I’m playing the song dad showed me in
the car,
sometime in my first decade,
That I showed you
This Thursday,
In your bedroom,
Here in the morning of your second.
You cried, picturing your fifth.
A drunk lonely man
As he is
And he was
When you’re married with children of your
own.
The shock of my kitchen,
There, in all its contingency.
A cold wind,
Some weighted head, that happens to be mine.
At the end of the track,
The final chord,
And then
A woman’s voice.
She is childlike
Gleeful,
Abstracted
She doesn’t fit.
We didn’t notice her in your bachelor
Bedroom.
I don’t remember her part
In my paternal car-built Childhood
Memories.
Maybe dad changed the track before her
- to give me a lecture on The Significance of
His song.
Or another aural piece of my essence
Maybe we spoke over her – thinking the song done.
Or kissed,
Blinking.
Missing her.
Why was she?
I wondered about her rich inner life.
Who?
A ghost?
A somnambulist?
A hope?
What did he call her?
What was her relation to the sad drunk man?
What space does consciousness occupy as relatedness?
Nothingness.
I’m reading this book now.
To remember the catharsis, the calm I felt
Finishing it this summer.
Around mothers and babies,
When I rediscovered it
Whole.
Tears streaming down my cheek
Throwing myself into the ocean
Where is she?
Last night was the red threat
A familiar cavernous sadness,
Acrid,
Breathless.
The threat of hospitals
My inexplicable violent rage
But you change your tone and hug me
And then I make dinner and reorganise
the books on my new shelf
And stopped crying.
My body regressed back to the mean.
I read something short and went to sleep.
And in the morning,
Stretches and pills,
A cold shower to remember my mythology –
And my bodies resilience to threat and
Discomfort.
I will drag my bike out of the cupboard,
cycle in today.
To remember you flying down that Roman
Lane and wish you well.
To allow you to live in my memories as happy
As well as hateful.
Because I can choose to,
but
oh, how your great smile
glides.
And I will take Emma’s coat to be dry cleaned with money I earned from working on his mother’s farm.
And I will drink up vitamin C
This is all I have
But it’s not nothing.