The Celebrant

My mind is not pristine.

He writes the words into his notebook. The manic spring with summer's voice and winter's talons whips up the foliage outside the window. And he thinks of haunted spirits dwelling in the trees. Their window is slightly ajar. Cars creep down the street, and rain drops tumble from the Heavens up high.

Soon all of night congregates upon them. Black ink. She wears her little shorts and one of his plaid shirts, barely buttoned. She slumbers so perfectly, as though from some great and heroic exertion... St George sleeping soundly after slaying the dragon. Though her soft features are turned from him, and her wild blonde hair is docile in the dark mist of 01:15, the presence of her heart is enough to re-assure him.

---

He'd never tell her this, but he has spent a lifetime at a typewriter trying to manufacture something akin to her... trying to build up something so precious and perfect. Each attempt yielded failure: a new deficiency, a new flaw.

He spent moments thinking of supine, submissive brunettes who were but an echo of himself, an appeasement. He imagined fiery redheads of frightening vigour, living out of whiskey bottles, troubled backgrounds. People who could be liberated, cajoled, bent to fit into some script.

I guess that's the trouble with writers. It's always about the f*****g narrative.

He writes this in his notebook.

---

They met at a funeral. Ominous. He didn't dare to speak to her, at first. She was the celebrant of the deceased. And he became very aware of his lust at the most inopportune of moments, as the body of a relative - casket clad, of course - was paraded into the sober little hall, before it would be conveyer-ed off into the incinerator. How could this lovely little thing be here in this morbid death factory?

---

His own diagnosis came two years after they married, and they married almost as soon as they met. And now he longs to get up and calm his nerves with a drink. The writer's terror at the final piece of punctuation - imagination ceasing to fathom the finality that lay ahead. He feels like the drinking is a betrayal... of the warmth, the caring, the love that they share. So his binges take place far away from the family home. Though he has a cavernous appetite for flesh, he has not once capitulated, not even in the most drunken stupor.

---

It is a day in the depths of summer. She waits in a pretty, floral dress by the lake. The sweltering heat is temporarily paused by divine breezes. He is staggering towards her, propelled by laughter and glee.

Two ice cream cones, one in each hand, but only one is carrying its precious cargo, a scoop of vanilla... her eyes survey him and soon she is giving him that motherish stare, equal parts condescension and affection, as she sees the vanilla snail trail trickling down his pants.

His uproarious laughter ignites a laughter in her, and that day they talk, for the first time, of her aspiration to be a psychiatrist. She already knows all about his hopes to publish an anthology of poems. His fondness for words drew her in. Gibbering and gabbering are his forte.

---

In the winter she sits with tea, as he was fond of doing. No longer a celebrant, she has set up a practice in the city of her birth. The grief counselling is so f*****g hard, because she will see his smile striving resiliently in stark contrast to his pain, and the frailty of his hand as it reached to cup her cheek.

And she will know of his affection for her. She hopes he clings to it in the afterlife, if there is one. She will watch the waiting eyes of the widowed, the fire of life all burnt out. The pupils draw her in, blackhole, abyss. An escape hatch out of this cosmos which has lost joy and meaning.

Then she remembers that this is not what he would want, remembers her professional obligations, and tries to call back the person in front of her to this realm. Ringing sacred bells in the hope that the lost are called in from the mists. She remembers him writing something like that once.

---

"Dearest,

I have lived a life in words. In many ways I have lived a solemn and lonely life, anticipating perfection and meeting sorrow, longing for great, unfathomable happenings, wild evenings, lavish luxuries, parties, dances, dreams, desires.

My mind always tended to conjure more than the Earth could give. My heart seemed to crave something always beyond reach, as though I were chasing an ever sinking sun, dropping ever over the horizon, never to see the beauty of its light swimming in shimmering pure water.

* editor's note, TC to continue, pausing @ 21:15, Sunday 31st of March