Night Side of the River

I feel submerged at parties. I wade out of my depth and I can't swim. I will stay here, holding on to the handrail. Safe.

For those whose life together is not one shiny, sunny thing, and often a mixed blessing, Mercury is the natural ruler. We were not easy, you and I. You were trouble and I am difficult. You were faithless and I am fixed. You said you had struck gold when you met me--but you loved bonds that could be broken--gold dissolves in mercury just as salt dissolves in water--but, in reality, nothing is lost. Death, though, is a different reality. You are dissolved. Into what? Into time, into space, into the leaky container that is me, who will also dissolve into time, into space. No. 80 on the Periodic Table, you are gone. But before I take up my role as the long-suffering one--the gold-band-wearing survivor who was always there and is still--I am aware that mercury makes possible the extraction of gold from poorer-quality ores. You brought out the best in me.

You can believe your life into any state you want, he decided. Reality is plastic. You mold it. You pretend things into existence.

How like her, though, just to stand and stare at the jets hitting the water. She loved to notice things. Had taught Judith how to be still in a world that moved too quick. "We're not mice," she used to say. "There's no need to scurry.

That's the trouble with time. Never happens when it should.

ME is a simple word but it takes a lifetime to find the words that go with it. I had a library version of myself--a sound hardback copy of ME that the public could borrow and read. And then they were sure that they knew me, and then I felt safe. Elsewhere, in a drawer, was the ME I was writing, quietly, and alone. It wasn't much of an adventure, though it was a mystery, because what is more mysterious to us than ourselves?

If you had never lived, and my mind was full of you--a fantasy figure with whom I am having an intense personal relationship--they'd give me treatment. They'd lock me up for being delusional. As it is, yes, it's an embarrassment. The black-armband days were easier. It was a sign to say--I am a bit odd. Give me space. Give me time. Grief takes time. I am grieving. I discover that grieving means living with someone who is no longer there.

We're always roaming around in the past or the future. The present is a hard place to live.

There is nothing when we are gone--at least nothing that means anything to those left behind. Dead is gone. But still we hope.

How could I not go on talking to you? How could I not expect to see you when it's the end of the day? Our life together was many things, concrete, tangible things, that included bacon, potatoes, coffee and toothpaste, but it was also a pattern. We had flow, colour, texture. We were the originators and makers of the shared life that we worked on every day. Now, I have to work on it alone. What I have are memories. The past. The present is no longer a work in progress.

Every night I want to be Heathcliff with Cathy tapping at the window. I want to be Hamlet on the windy battlements. I want the Flying Dutchman to dock. I want what everyone who has lost someone wants: a visitation. Every second, someone dying is promising to come back from the dead. Every hour, waiting for it to happen, someone living notches up another hour lost. For the Dead, time stops. For the living, time slows. I am in slow-motion now. It takes me twice as long to clean my teeth, half the morning to make coffee and wash the cup. When I go shopping, I don't remember what I need. That's because it's you I need. I stare at the bag of potatoes, the packet of bacon. Absurd. Go home.

If death frees us from the prison of the self, even for a second, before we meet with oblivion, then death is more than a biological event. It might not be a bridge to elsewhere, but perhaps it can be a blessing.

Humans are pattern-makers. We make patterns with other people in our lives. We are enmeshed. Break-ups mess with the pattern. Death is a break-up of a relationship, and with it, a part of the self.

It's hard, you know, getting divorced.' Billy gave me a hug. 'Love is hard--whether you got it or you don't.

What did Albert Camus say? It's not one thing or the other that leads to madness; it's the space in between them.

Noel's face is the face men wear when they fear the woman in front of them is crazy. Men are frightened by crazy women.

Sir George Everest. You don’t think a mountain in the Himalayas was named Everest by the Tibetans or the Nepalese, do you? Royal Geographical Society 1865 – named after the Surveyor General of India, Sir George Everest. To his credit he objected – said it couldn’t be written or pronounced in Hindi. To them Everest will always be the Holy Mother.