Everything Under

The places we are born come back to us. They disguise themselves as words, memory loss, nightmares. They are the way we sometimes wake with a pressure on our chests that is animal-like or turn on a light and see someone we'd thought was long gone standing there looking at us.

The places we are born come back. They disguise themselves as migraines, stomach aches, insomnia. They are the way we sometimes wake falling, fumbling for the bedside lamp, certain everything we’ve built has gone in the night. We become strangers to the places we are born. They would not recognize us but we will always recognize them. They are marrow to us; they are bred into us. If we were turned inside out there would be maps cut into the wrong side of our skin. Just so we can find our way back. Except, cut wrong side into my skin are not canals and train tracks and a boat, but always: you.

But sometimes I wonder if you are right and if all of our choices are remnants of all the choices we made before. As if decisions were shards from the bombs of our previous actions.

You cannot lie down behind your badly made decisions and call them fate or determinism or god.

I'd always understood that the past did not die just because we wanted it to. The past signed to us: clicks and cracks in the night, misspelled words, the jargon of adverts, the bodies that attracted us or did not, the sounds that reminded us of this or that. The past was not a thread trailing behind us but an anchor. That was why I looked for you all these years, Sarah. Not for answers, condolences; not to ply you with guilt or set you up for a fall. But because – a long time ago – you were my mother and you left.

I was the same as you: less a person and more a hole cut away from everything.

Forgetting is, I think, a form of protection.

Memory had a habit of erasing, leaving only the most necessary.

I’d always understood that the past did not die just because we wanted it to. The past signed to us: clicks and cracks in the night, misspelled words, the jargon of adverts, the bodies that attracted us or did not, the sounds that reminded us of this or that. The past was not a thread trailing behind us but an anchor.

the thought stays with me through the quiet night. That we are determined by our landscape, that our lives are decided by the hills and the rivers and the trees.

Death has worn you smooth as a stone.

Her parents. Her genetic parents. All their genes inside her wreaking secret havoc. People give more to their children than hair and eye colour, don't they? Children are a map of genes.

The understanding pity of others is a hole.

Anything can be lost if you try hard enough.

Your attention is the same as the ray from a lighthouse. I am struck dumb beneath it.

nothing you remember about me exists any more.

You crouch by the water and drop your hands into its cold rush until you touch the stony bottom. People, you tell me one day, who grow up around water are different to other people.

People, you tell me one day, who grow up around water are different to other people. What do you mean by that? I say. But you won't answer or have forgotten you said anything to begin with. Still, the thought stays with me through the quiet night. That we are determined by our landscape, that our lives are decided by the hills and the rivers and the trees.

If — in any sense — language determined how we thought then I could never have been any other way than the way I am. And the language I grew up speaking was one no one else spoke. So I was always going to be isolated, lonely, uncomfortable in the presence of others. It was in my language. It was in the language you gave me.

I tried to find you but instead found someone else who wears your face.

I wanted to tell you everything that had happened to me but you were a sieve and anything you retained was peppered with holes or formed of debris.

The baby was there whether you had wished for it or not. And you still believing it was not possible until it was too late to do anything about it. You grew so fast it felt like something wolfing through you, stealing space... You did not tell him that you had never wanted a child. You would do it, if for nothing else then for him. People did it all the time. People did it daily, thoughtlessly. Couples had babies because it was something made of the two of them. You would have a baby because it was made of a part of him.