Relinquished
“Don’t look” her voice was either warning or a wish, I’m not sure which but it was the very last thing I remember before it happened, before I flew, before I fell, plunged, lunged, leaped. Don’t look back. Her lips were lush as she gave me lashings of loss.
I’ve spent all my lifetimes looking for you.. I pleaded.. I once lost sight of you.
She breathed in melancholy orgasms as ripples of lives we no longer held touched her from the death we lived before we lived these lives but she couldn't believe what she could feel. She wrapped her arms around her waist, chilled. You must love me only in those quiet spaces where we stood alone before now and I must never speak your name, I will never even remember who you are to speak of again.
I turned around to face the sea, the wind swept the smell of ancient salt deposits and tangled it in my hair turning me silver like an old woman. I looked to her once more and asked if there was any other way but her head motioned in refusal with one sultry twist of her naked neck, she sent me away. Her skin slithered over her vertebrae as she swallowed her desires, heartbeat convulsions throbbed through her body causing her to gasp. She reached out to me one last time, her fine fingered hand brushing the side of my cheek - I thought I had lost you she whispered reading the pages ahead of us in a story that came before. You will not lose, I promised not knowing quite what I meant. The evening went dark as I got out of her car, my feet shifting the sidewalk into the realms of our memory. I turned to ash, withering bones piled like sand at her saintly feet while her wheels turned against my crossroad crucification and her eyelashes kept a solemn beat.
From this night she carried me away inside the blackness of her eyes where not one other could pry, no matter that she tried to blink me away, I was to be her only stain. From a shadowy world I waited over and over for the glass to turn clear and reveal. Then in one moment that felt like fifty years I heard myself choke as the motion of the commotion around us froze, leaving us alone with-in a crowd of glossy people. Her eyes pierced my vision and she captured my cold life. Her lips breathed warmth into my face and in her smooth timbre she welcomed me home. For one shy moment, I thought she welcomed me home to my place with-in her gaze and then she retreated from my arms. Who do I call you? She asked in pain and then cast herself away to gift her gaze on another while I faded.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
am tidal
I am an ocean
When the current flows out there are vast distances between you and the horizon but
When I wash up against the shore with my foaming fingers outstretched, I caress until the moon sinks beneath the dawn and draws me to oblivion again.
I have the reach of a river.
I trickle through secret crevices, then turn and wash away, stealing you in pieces with the whirl of my wake.
I lick lightly at layers.
I’m deeper than skin.
I am air and I am in.
I am the ghost of nothingness.
I haunt the laughter lines of your territories with unspoken shivers backfilling sensations with fleshly memories that deliver
storm surges, a relentless gush, the invasive thrust that renders you quiver and then when the storm clouds retract, I collapse and drink sweet-tasting rain-drops from the sway of your back.
In a whisper, I will leave, my breath moist at your neck
A salty sea breeze,
I’m the chill at your knees.
I’m a hunter by day when la lune is away but I don’t pursue prey,
I conjure so slowly, bathing in agony the agonising.
I am want.
I am pain.
I am
lost in a sonata, I don’t surface for air
I will sink in and
write devotions with the wind.
You, when you are quiet and alone may feel a pen stroke or two
Lay back my love, let my tidal words wet you.
Let my wandering rhymes wreck you.
Let my longing reflect you.
For when I am uncovered by the beacon of dawn, I am subsided
on the tide that the moon has withdrawn.
November 2016 - Notes to the Future You
Hello you it’s me.
I never knew such deep heart-ache existed until I found myself six months or so after your death, listening to the song you posthumously sent me through a mutual connection – “Hello it’s me”. I am sure you knew that I would never have listened to this song unless you made a point to send it, you often communicated through music, some of it was really bad but your tastes varied, DJInlove as you once were. And I am sure you know – all knowing, that I spent an entire weekend in my bath tub sobbing desperately as I listened to the lyrics. I was completely undone by this tragic end of you.
Hello, it's me
I was wondering if after all these years you'd like to meet
To go over everything
They say that time's supposed to heal ya
But I ain't done much healing
Well this is my way of meeting to go over everything. In a way where it all began and all ended, by the clacking of a key board and birth of sentences that only hold meaning between you a me.
The last time we communicated you had reached an impasse in your life, unhappy in love, thinking a child would cure you and wishing you could live your life backwards. I had long since moved on. I know you yearned for London and our youth again when we had our whole lives stretched out before us but wasn’t it a surprise to find the emptiness when we arrived here? The truth is, age changed your remembrance of time, we were still empty in our London days but when you are young you think that emptiness is potential, you expect the void to fill-up with more than just wine and disappointment. The great idleness of youthful hope would always be our undoing – We were Dreamers, there were signs.
I still have the book you gave me all those years ago, The Little Prince by Antonie De Saint-Exupery. The pages are now stained yellow with age, much like our acquaintance – a relic held dear in my heart and stored away in some ancient chest but a story not often read but I am making a point to sit down now and read our story over some 15 years after it was written and one year after you have died.
It was a great romance, two girls from opposite sides of the world, connecting even though it was clear that time was running was out. We didn’t know that each of us was tied at our ankles to the homes we had fled and when the New Years clock ticked over four years in a row we were catapulted back to our realities.
I made such a mistake in the years before you died, casting you aside and becoming non-responsive because I thought it wrong to keep up with a lover you still loved. I made a mistake that will always echo in the silence of your death. I know you thought of me in those final moments and I will think of you in many moments since.
01/10/2015 Notes to the Future You.
Well my dear friend, I am about to leave the country for a month knowing that you are not safe with yourself and may not be here to greet me when I return. My oldest, dearest friend, the only person on earth who knows what has been between us for these long and painful years and I’m not sure that I can remember it all on my own. The truth of the fact is, that without you here - none of that happened - all of those moments are invisible because they will only exist with-in me. There are no records in museums or galleries. The only proof I have of us, is the ongoing existence of us both and if you leave now, you take most of me with you. There was a time when we were so young and hopeful for our lives - but isn’t that the story of all humanity? We grow and we discover that mostly it is pain and challenge and loss and the deepest heart sickness that we are sure there is no recovery and maybe there isn’t. Life erodes your heart away until all there is left is tears and sorrow. I find the loss is the hardest thing to shoulder and I know I have to get better because it will happen one day - but I would trade everything I have if that were not true today.
Right now, I am sitting here at a cafe having breakfast. Right across the road from me, on the corner I can see my ghost of yesterday. The me that stood on the busy city street corner shaking and crying while I tried to keep it together long enough to tell the ambulance where you were and what you had done to yourself. The me that had all too slowly realised what was going on from your messages - the humour, the early christmas gift, the encouragement to look after myself, then the message about the note you had left on your phone and the pin number for me to read it. The me that shook so badly, I could hardly dial three numbers. The conflicted me because you asked me to let you go. The me that is shaking right now reliving it. I hope you will forgive me that I didn’t comply with your wishes for I am too selfish to let go - not yet, just not yet. I understand that the time might come and I promise I will be strong but we still have a way to go before we are done.
Now ironically, I have to go away on a once-in-a-lifetime trip and I have to enjoy it. I have not shared this story with my company for the trip and I won’t. It will be our secret. Please hold on until I return to find you in the dark place you are hiding. I am not afraid of the dark as I am afraid of the loss. I don’t know where you have been taken as I write this but I hope you are somewhere safe. If you cannot care for yourself, let someone else do it and stay alive for me. I will come to find you.
05/06/2013 Notes to the Future You.
Six weeks ago, On the evening of May 1st 2013, your father died suddenly on the way home from work, you are just five years old - or soon to be five anyway. I will never forget that evening, trying to keep calm in front of you while your Mother came to get you. You were sitting on the sofa with Nat playing knock knock jokes - your knock knock jokes are pretty strange:
"Knock knock"
"Who's there?"
"Banana."
"Banana who?"
"Banana eyeball!"
And you roared with laughter. I guess being just five the nuances of the knock-knock gag are of no concern, it's just the rhythm you delight in, actually, your combination of banana with something completely odd to create a new idea is what you delight in. You were a born absurdist.
So then, five weeks ago to the day, I found myself driving my Mother to the Gold Coast hospital to identify the body of her thirty-eight year old son, your father, my brother. It was the hardest drive of my life and I remember just trying not to be sick as I drove. All the cliches you hear about a child dying before their parent is true. It's the single most heartbreaking thing you could ever see. So there we were, one minute I was in my bed at home looking through catalogues and the next, I was looking at the body of my older brother, my only sibling - it was my worst nightmare. I was always afraid of my brother dying and leaving me with the pieces of my Mother, and he had gone and done just that. I didn't think it possible that she could survive this.
I was about your age when I experienced my first death of someone close - my grandmother, my mothers mother. She was just forty-eight when she died (it seems to be a curse on our family, the death of the young) and she was the centre of our life (you were born on her birthday so we were sure you were a gift to my Mother, her only grandchild at a time we all thought she would have none) and although I have very vivid memories of her death, as time wears on, you stop trusting the tricks of your memories until you are just left with the fact - this happened - but the colors and smells and sounds are drained away, untrustworthy and they leave you longing for a voice. That is why I wanted to write you here. Due to circumstance beyond my control, I am no longer part of your life, so I am hiding a time capsule for you here. I hope some day you will find it and it will bring you comfort for knowing the story of ourselves is one of the only keys to gates of humanity. I'm hiding this key for you.
When we were children, your father used to tell me stories, one of my favourite was the tale of the purple gorilla, have you heard that one? It went something like this:
A man was walking along one day when suddenly he heard a noise from behind him. He turned around and suddenly saw this massive purple Gorilla standing behind him. The man screamed and started to run away, but the gorilla ran after him. After a while the man came to a big snake pit, he looked back over his shoulder and saw the gorilla coming - he thought, either I wait for the gorilla and get eaten or I risk the snakes - snakes he decided and jumped in. As he waded through the snakes they pulled off his legs (writers note: forgive me, after all these years I cannot remember the order of the animals but I'm sure there were snakes). He reached the end of the snake pit and came to a plain - not the type of plane the flies through the air but the kind you walk across (I just loved that bit). He looked back over his shoulder and saw the gorilla swinging over the snakes (I ad-libbed the swinging) so he turned back around and as he hand no legs, started to crawl on his hand across the plain............
As a child, probably about your age, I thought this story was wonderfully adventurous and by the time the man - who was now just a head that had to nod across the plain - not the plane that flies through air but the type you nod across - came to the end of the line, with the purple gorilla in tow - the gorilla taps his head and says "you're up for tiggy". Well, much like your banana-eyeball, this story delighted me and I would pester your father again and again to tell it to me - and he would. People often look back and wonder if they had that last moment again with someone, what would they ask for. If I knew your father was going to die tomorrow, I'd ask him to tell me this story again, so I could remember it to tell you correctly, I know you'd love it as much as I did.
Now that I sit here writing this story to you and talking of the key to humanity, the moral of the tale hits me. Do not fear what is unknown to you as this will lead you to make uninformed choices. I should not have feared the death of your father as your Glammy (that was your name for her) as she always has done, became the rock that got us all through this. I wish you well and I hope one day we meet again.
“Don’t look” her voice was either warning or a wish, I’m not sure which but it was the very last thing I remember before it happened, before I flew, before I fell, plunged, lunged, leaped. Don’t look back. Her lips were lush as she gave me lashings of loss.
I’ve spent all my lifetimes looking for you.. I pleaded.. I once lost sight of you.
She breathed in melancholy orgasms as ripples of lives we no longer held touched her from the death we lived before we lived these lives but she couldn't believe what she could feel. She wrapped her arms around her waist, chilled. You must love me only in those quiet spaces where we stood alone before now and I must never speak your name, I will never even remember who you are to speak of again.
I turned around to face the sea, the wind swept the smell of ancient salt deposits and tangled it in my hair turning me silver like an old woman. I looked to her once more and asked if there was any other way but her head motioned in refusal with one sultry twist of her naked neck, she sent me away. Her skin slithered over her vertebrae as she swallowed her desires, heartbeat convulsions throbbed through her body causing her to gasp. She reached out to me one last time, her fine fingered hand brushing the side of my cheek - I thought I had lost you she whispered reading the pages ahead of us in a story that came before. You will not lose, I promised not knowing quite what I meant. The evening went dark as I got out of her car, my feet shifting the sidewalk into the realms of our memory. I turned to ash, withering bones piled like sand at her saintly feet while her wheels turned against my crossroad crucification and her eyelashes kept a solemn beat.
From this night she carried me away inside the blackness of her eyes where not one other could pry, no matter that she tried to blink me away, I was to be her only stain. From a shadowy world I waited over and over for the glass to turn clear and reveal. Then in one moment that felt like fifty years I heard myself choke as the motion of the commotion around us froze, leaving us alone with-in a crowd of glossy people. Her eyes pierced my vision and she captured my cold life. Her lips breathed warmth into my face and in her smooth timbre she welcomed me home. For one shy moment, I thought she welcomed me home to my place with-in her gaze and then she retreated from my arms. Who do I call you? She asked in pain and then cast herself away to gift her gaze on another while I faded.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
am tidal
I am an ocean
When the current flows out there are vast distances between you and the horizon but
When I wash up against the shore with my foaming fingers outstretched, I caress until the moon sinks beneath the dawn and draws me to oblivion again.
I have the reach of a river.
I trickle through secret crevices, then turn and wash away, stealing you in pieces with the whirl of my wake.
I lick lightly at layers.
I’m deeper than skin.
I am air and I am in.
I am the ghost of nothingness.
I haunt the laughter lines of your territories with unspoken shivers backfilling sensations with fleshly memories that deliver
storm surges, a relentless gush, the invasive thrust that renders you quiver and then when the storm clouds retract, I collapse and drink sweet-tasting rain-drops from the sway of your back.
In a whisper, I will leave, my breath moist at your neck
A salty sea breeze,
I’m the chill at your knees.
I’m a hunter by day when la lune is away but I don’t pursue prey,
I conjure so slowly, bathing in agony the agonising.
I am want.
I am pain.
I am
lost in a sonata, I don’t surface for air
I will sink in and
write devotions with the wind.
You, when you are quiet and alone may feel a pen stroke or two
Lay back my love, let my tidal words wet you.
Let my wandering rhymes wreck you.
Let my longing reflect you.
For when I am uncovered by the beacon of dawn, I am subsided
on the tide that the moon has withdrawn.
November 2016 - Notes to the Future You
Hello you it’s me.
I never knew such deep heart-ache existed until I found myself six months or so after your death, listening to the song you posthumously sent me through a mutual connection – “Hello it’s me”. I am sure you knew that I would never have listened to this song unless you made a point to send it, you often communicated through music, some of it was really bad but your tastes varied, DJInlove as you once were. And I am sure you know – all knowing, that I spent an entire weekend in my bath tub sobbing desperately as I listened to the lyrics. I was completely undone by this tragic end of you.
Hello, it's me
I was wondering if after all these years you'd like to meet
To go over everything
They say that time's supposed to heal ya
But I ain't done much healing
Well this is my way of meeting to go over everything. In a way where it all began and all ended, by the clacking of a key board and birth of sentences that only hold meaning between you a me.
The last time we communicated you had reached an impasse in your life, unhappy in love, thinking a child would cure you and wishing you could live your life backwards. I had long since moved on. I know you yearned for London and our youth again when we had our whole lives stretched out before us but wasn’t it a surprise to find the emptiness when we arrived here? The truth is, age changed your remembrance of time, we were still empty in our London days but when you are young you think that emptiness is potential, you expect the void to fill-up with more than just wine and disappointment. The great idleness of youthful hope would always be our undoing – We were Dreamers, there were signs.
I still have the book you gave me all those years ago, The Little Prince by Antonie De Saint-Exupery. The pages are now stained yellow with age, much like our acquaintance – a relic held dear in my heart and stored away in some ancient chest but a story not often read but I am making a point to sit down now and read our story over some 15 years after it was written and one year after you have died.
It was a great romance, two girls from opposite sides of the world, connecting even though it was clear that time was running was out. We didn’t know that each of us was tied at our ankles to the homes we had fled and when the New Years clock ticked over four years in a row we were catapulted back to our realities.
I made such a mistake in the years before you died, casting you aside and becoming non-responsive because I thought it wrong to keep up with a lover you still loved. I made a mistake that will always echo in the silence of your death. I know you thought of me in those final moments and I will think of you in many moments since.
01/10/2015 Notes to the Future You.
Well my dear friend, I am about to leave the country for a month knowing that you are not safe with yourself and may not be here to greet me when I return. My oldest, dearest friend, the only person on earth who knows what has been between us for these long and painful years and I’m not sure that I can remember it all on my own. The truth of the fact is, that without you here - none of that happened - all of those moments are invisible because they will only exist with-in me. There are no records in museums or galleries. The only proof I have of us, is the ongoing existence of us both and if you leave now, you take most of me with you. There was a time when we were so young and hopeful for our lives - but isn’t that the story of all humanity? We grow and we discover that mostly it is pain and challenge and loss and the deepest heart sickness that we are sure there is no recovery and maybe there isn’t. Life erodes your heart away until all there is left is tears and sorrow. I find the loss is the hardest thing to shoulder and I know I have to get better because it will happen one day - but I would trade everything I have if that were not true today.
Right now, I am sitting here at a cafe having breakfast. Right across the road from me, on the corner I can see my ghost of yesterday. The me that stood on the busy city street corner shaking and crying while I tried to keep it together long enough to tell the ambulance where you were and what you had done to yourself. The me that had all too slowly realised what was going on from your messages - the humour, the early christmas gift, the encouragement to look after myself, then the message about the note you had left on your phone and the pin number for me to read it. The me that shook so badly, I could hardly dial three numbers. The conflicted me because you asked me to let you go. The me that is shaking right now reliving it. I hope you will forgive me that I didn’t comply with your wishes for I am too selfish to let go - not yet, just not yet. I understand that the time might come and I promise I will be strong but we still have a way to go before we are done.
Now ironically, I have to go away on a once-in-a-lifetime trip and I have to enjoy it. I have not shared this story with my company for the trip and I won’t. It will be our secret. Please hold on until I return to find you in the dark place you are hiding. I am not afraid of the dark as I am afraid of the loss. I don’t know where you have been taken as I write this but I hope you are somewhere safe. If you cannot care for yourself, let someone else do it and stay alive for me. I will come to find you.
05/06/2013 Notes to the Future You.
Six weeks ago, On the evening of May 1st 2013, your father died suddenly on the way home from work, you are just five years old - or soon to be five anyway. I will never forget that evening, trying to keep calm in front of you while your Mother came to get you. You were sitting on the sofa with Nat playing knock knock jokes - your knock knock jokes are pretty strange:
"Knock knock"
"Who's there?"
"Banana."
"Banana who?"
"Banana eyeball!"
And you roared with laughter. I guess being just five the nuances of the knock-knock gag are of no concern, it's just the rhythm you delight in, actually, your combination of banana with something completely odd to create a new idea is what you delight in. You were a born absurdist.
So then, five weeks ago to the day, I found myself driving my Mother to the Gold Coast hospital to identify the body of her thirty-eight year old son, your father, my brother. It was the hardest drive of my life and I remember just trying not to be sick as I drove. All the cliches you hear about a child dying before their parent is true. It's the single most heartbreaking thing you could ever see. So there we were, one minute I was in my bed at home looking through catalogues and the next, I was looking at the body of my older brother, my only sibling - it was my worst nightmare. I was always afraid of my brother dying and leaving me with the pieces of my Mother, and he had gone and done just that. I didn't think it possible that she could survive this.
I was about your age when I experienced my first death of someone close - my grandmother, my mothers mother. She was just forty-eight when she died (it seems to be a curse on our family, the death of the young) and she was the centre of our life (you were born on her birthday so we were sure you were a gift to my Mother, her only grandchild at a time we all thought she would have none) and although I have very vivid memories of her death, as time wears on, you stop trusting the tricks of your memories until you are just left with the fact - this happened - but the colors and smells and sounds are drained away, untrustworthy and they leave you longing for a voice. That is why I wanted to write you here. Due to circumstance beyond my control, I am no longer part of your life, so I am hiding a time capsule for you here. I hope some day you will find it and it will bring you comfort for knowing the story of ourselves is one of the only keys to gates of humanity. I'm hiding this key for you.
When we were children, your father used to tell me stories, one of my favourite was the tale of the purple gorilla, have you heard that one? It went something like this:
A man was walking along one day when suddenly he heard a noise from behind him. He turned around and suddenly saw this massive purple Gorilla standing behind him. The man screamed and started to run away, but the gorilla ran after him. After a while the man came to a big snake pit, he looked back over his shoulder and saw the gorilla coming - he thought, either I wait for the gorilla and get eaten or I risk the snakes - snakes he decided and jumped in. As he waded through the snakes they pulled off his legs (writers note: forgive me, after all these years I cannot remember the order of the animals but I'm sure there were snakes). He reached the end of the snake pit and came to a plain - not the type of plane the flies through the air but the kind you walk across (I just loved that bit). He looked back over his shoulder and saw the gorilla swinging over the snakes (I ad-libbed the swinging) so he turned back around and as he hand no legs, started to crawl on his hand across the plain............
As a child, probably about your age, I thought this story was wonderfully adventurous and by the time the man - who was now just a head that had to nod across the plain - not the plane that flies through air but the type you nod across - came to the end of the line, with the purple gorilla in tow - the gorilla taps his head and says "you're up for tiggy". Well, much like your banana-eyeball, this story delighted me and I would pester your father again and again to tell it to me - and he would. People often look back and wonder if they had that last moment again with someone, what would they ask for. If I knew your father was going to die tomorrow, I'd ask him to tell me this story again, so I could remember it to tell you correctly, I know you'd love it as much as I did.
Now that I sit here writing this story to you and talking of the key to humanity, the moral of the tale hits me. Do not fear what is unknown to you as this will lead you to make uninformed choices. I should not have feared the death of your father as your Glammy (that was your name for her) as she always has done, became the rock that got us all through this. I wish you well and I hope one day we meet again.