thisisallonewordpress

Off
Into the hanging garden I was sent
To ask a question.

The oracles mark unsteady time
Toes brush the tips of black grasses
Skin drips slow as glass down swaying fingertips
Forming soft stalactites.

Sunshine refused entry past the stone walls
So I come at night
This place is built of shadows
And dust.

And I ask.

Oh, what do they know?
All there’s left for them;
Memories of memories of memories,
Ideas of ideas of ideas.

The very moment the beat your heart skipped
That time the lights all died at once
Pulled out into full endless infinity
Its width lost, collapsed into
The great big O.

And they answer.

The sound of small bells
Peeling in tritones
The creak of the leafless tree
The wind playing that old familiar tune
The future found lacking nourishment
Nothing grows, nothing grows.

I return dumb
Bleary eyed
Nonsensical
And yet, though I do not yet realise this
Refreshed, reborn once more.

I’ve never told anyone this before, and I know it’s a cliché but who would believe me? I wouldn’t believe me. I would be worried that I’d lost my marbles. I would shake my head and say to friends ‘Oh it’s so sad, John truly never got over Dora did he”, or something like that.

She isn’t Dora, I know that. And I know that I didn’t ever get over losing Dora, that’s perfectly true. But she isn’t Dora, she’s someone else – I don’t know who – but she lost someone too and she can’t let go and I think I have to help her.

After the funeral I lasted nearly a week in the old place, I kept busy by organising and writing to people that she had told me to write to. She did not have the strength to write in those last few weeks and she told me that I not to contact these people until afterwards. She didn’t want a fuss. She didn’t want people spending vast amounts of money on flowers and travelling and so on. It was wasteful is what she kept saying. Of course those of us who knew; the people from her work and her brother and a few close friends from the town still ended up spending too much money on flowers and I went and spent twice what we agreed on the day. I think she knew I would anyway.

After a week at the old place, the only house we’d lived in married, I couldn’t take it any longer. I could only drink myself to sleep which was a painful process and left me destroyed in the mornings. I couldn’t stay in the bedroom any longer than a few minutes at a time. Time, give it time. No one said that to me but it was a mantra repeating in my head sometimes in a monotonous accent-less text, like the scrolling newsflashes on the news channel – but sometimes it was a sing song voice, taunting, like a small child mocking a school friend.

After a week, I moved from the North of town to the south, the other side of the river to the suburb which used to be called New Town when I was a child but became swallowed up by main town after they opened the two factories. People moved in to this neighbourhood and then out again after one of those factories was shut two years after its grand opening. Nowadays it was quiet, every second house here was unoccupied, the old shopping area was uprooted and either resettled nearer the centre of just lost to the late 1990’s.

The new place was what the girl (she couldn’t have been more than mid-twenties) from the real estate office called fix-up-able. Something, some series of events had broken this house but with patience and hard work you could make a real go of things, apparently. I was not going to make a go of things. I do not know what I am going to do but one thing I will not be doing is trying to make a new home. It’s only just habitable but that’s just fine for me.

Two weeks into living there I realised that I had not been alone. For two weeks I thought I must have been mad, delusional, creating some sort of presence to cover up for all the losses. I would hear sounds from the kitchen, always the kitchen, at first faint creaks – which could have been under-floor piping or just the wind or the mice in the walls – then the noises became footsteps and hushed words and after those two weeks I knew I had been hearing someone slowly moving around the kitchen all that time.

I am not religious, nor am I one of those weak people who open themselves up to vibrating crystals, auras, healing hands and all that nonsense. I do not think that my wife has come back to me to tell me to move on or some such closure. She is not Dora; I know my wife, and this is not her I hear. I have not seen her but I know she is there, moving slowly, methodically around the kitchen searching for someone in that small space, unable to leave that room. I hear her pause sometimes when I am outside the door, in the hall, as I strain to hear the almost inaudible patterns of her pacing I think she does the same for me. We live quite separately and yet are aware of each others presence in the house.

I sometimes open the kitchen door slowly, sometimes I burst in, but she is never there to be seen. If I am in the hall and I speak to her she will not answer back and so I just listen, quiet as I can. Sometimes I knock upon the door, not rap with the knuckles of a fist but brush with the tips of two fingers. The door pushes inwards slightly because it is slightly loose in its frame. Some days you can feel it pushed back.