the loving of you
Life got in the way of us. Somehow it just did.
I was going to write our story, part the second, for our 10th anniversary and somehow, I didn’t. That was life, I guess. Do you remember part the first? I wrote it in a bright little café at the end of your road. In a tiny book. In my tiny writing. When you'd left for work, and I had time. I had so much time then. And the thing I thought to do with it was to write our story. In a tiny book. While I drank excellent coffee and didn’t eat much. We didn’t eat much during that phase. Do you remember? We had lost our appetites and found each other. Full of wonder. Now that we’re over I realise that I feel like eating all the time. I’m either chewing my fingers and making a bloody mess of them, or I’m comfort eating all the wrong things. Sometimes I can manage a journey from somewhere to somewhere else without needing to eat something on the way. Usually, the thought of not being eating is too much. Such an unhealthy habit.
I can’t imagine you doing that. Not at all. I have managed periods of winning against food. I bought something bright orange to wear. I felt free but it didn’t last. I don’t think I’ll wear the orange thing again. I’m always trying but I don’t look like winning again anytime soon.
Actually, it's hard to see anything under the shadow of what I am trying to do at any given time. The trying to do always seems to make heaviness. How can one find the things that create lightness and a lack of trying? We wrote on our whiteboard something from Star Wars – do or do not, there is no try. We wrote other things on there, too, but I’ve rubbed them out. Last week, in the early stages of recovering from us, I talked about love with one of our friends. He thinks that when you say I love you what is meant is clear and unequivocal. I’m not sure at all about that. The taste of I love you hangs in every breath around here and you are gone. The words stayed the same but what we meant is changed. Perhaps it is that loving you has reached into every fibre of me and there’s nothing that’s untouched. 10 years. Is that long enough for all my cells to have renewed? Does it mean that there’s no part of me that hasn’t been part of loving you? I’m new, born of the time when I’ve loved you. Nothing of my body is left that remembers what it was like before.
Everything will need to be sorted because our things have all wrapped around each other. Your books, my books, books we gave each other, things we shared because no one has room for two sets of everything. Where are the saucepans I had before your saucepans? Now I only have two. Nothing small. And all the things we liked the most, the homeliest, most useful and lived in things I brought to you. Quite deliberately. I wanted you to have the things that had made it feel like home here and take them to home there. And what will home be like wherever it is, without you? Without the loving of you?
Everything will have to be sorted. That will be my job, I think. I’ll be checking over and over. Is this important to you? Is that? Do you want this? Do you want that? Without the filter of loving each other these will just be things, that maybe you don't even really like. I’ll have to steal myself and face the separateness of us, something I’ve spent the last 10 years taking my eye off, while I looked at our togetherness.
We have grown though. You’ve helped me grow and now I’ll have to learn how to be me without the flattering light of your loving me. I’ve grown into someone who’s grown away from you. You need light from somewhere else now. I don’t want to grow. I don’t feel the light on me at all. Just a cool shadow and I’m looking at someone who seems drab and plain without you. That’s not the case for you though. You’ve been planted out into the garden. This little pot can’t contain you. Light is coming from all around and you are shining already. Can I think that I made a little of that happen? It might make the pain of finding that your fingers have slipped out of mine a little easier to bear.
I know I’ll feel better. Cells are renewing all the time. Perhaps the first ones are coming new since the last two weeks. Maybe they will begin to discover there is a new thing after you. Just now though, all that I am is proved in you. One part new to however many million parts that have you in them. I am made of you. At least for now. I can feel you being withdrawn like colour seeping and leaving me paler. The new cells are not very strong yet. I know they will be.
Looking back at that woman writing our story in a tiny book in a yellowy café on Green Lanes. She didn’t know that she would be me. I know she’s already gone. And that’s what’s supposed to happen, isn’t it? Everything is in a process of becoming. Yes, changing. Trying not to cling to what has gone before. Lifting one’s eyes to the light ahead.
Part the second. Two paths no longer joined. Nourished by loving, allowed to grow. Going on.
feb 2019
photograph by graham hosker