March

Here.

It’s always grey weather when your girlfriends’ parents drive you back to the airport. Dry dead palm leaves spilling through the broken roof of the car park. Waterfall of vines breaking on the stacks of chairs. I lift my sunglasses onto my head, to see the world clearer. Melbourne the city of spiny trees, market stalls, and shade. Pass quickly by some worn graffiti that invites me to experience consciousness. Twist my necklace and straighten my knife and fork on the plate. Elvis is in the sky though he is not singing Rock ‘n’ Roll like on my uncle’s DVD’s.

 

That was two months ago, it is March now. England is drab weather. Single digits and raining. In my country it rains for so long you forget the sun can ever find you through the clouds.

Here comes the tarmac.

Here comes the bus.

Here comes my mother and father, fresh from the canaries asking for photos. Here comes the heron to tap at my window. Joel texts me asking if I remember our teens, and swimming in the limestone quarry. I wonder if that place is still flooded. My country is always flooded.

 

At my first ever birthday party, I plan nothing and two people bring me cakes. I have made the decision to break the ring of past and move on in my life. To be delivered like a parcel into the future. Dave at work has a heart attack, we talk about how he will never get better while we rake leaves. I am only half listening. The outdoor seating area of the Dog & Bull is dry. I relax under the infrared lamp. For once feeling content, and not like I’m floundering though brackish quarry water. At the Sunday night Toby carvery, you come toward me in a straight line, my little sight for sore eyes.

 

We go to see a flat, ask about the laundry and the neighbours, smile at the beauty of this couple who invited us in. The poster on the wall is me, in my teens, swimming, all arms and legs, through scree. It doesn’t matter how well I learn to play Cherry Wine, or slice my thumb with the serrated knife. It doesn’t matter if I stay up until morning, watching for the bitter moon, the long day of night. We talk about Dave in the hospital and it starts to rain, turning our boots thick as clay.  It doesn’t matter if I write something I’m proud of, you cannot hear it from Devon. Twist my body asleep, all arms and legs and no lean figure. I’m shy about my new ideas.

 

Here are all the important things, piled up on the chair in the corner of the room. The guitar strings smell like rust and my mum’s first dead boyfriend. I want to leave a small part of me everywhere I go, for my footsteps to sink a stamp into the flagstone. Pull free my bare foot from the quarry mud, Joel calls down to me from the sun-blind perch. I am so scared he will fall that I forget to pull my other foot free. At my first ever birthday party I feel the eyes of so many on me. I’m shy about the way I walk when I’m in a good mood. I think about loss, and habits. I think about Dave and text him to feel better, though he will not. Here are all the things you have decided are important, piled up on the desk. Rust, a fine layer of my particles left here. Venerable skin. Dave replies but my phone has slipped behind the mirror. I imagine the couple who live there, moving out, and I listen to the Tropic Morning News. Bitter rain, and random sun filled days. I wonder if I am suffering more than I let on?

 

My grief is what I am leaving behind, in a box under the stairs for my old flatmate to ignore. Here comes Eric the Water Bomber all the way around the world, singing ‘Lovers at Last.’ Here I come in my safe little space, asking politely if you can

 

put me down somewhere.