Spill Simmer Falter Wither

My sadness isn’t a way I feel but a thing trapped inside the walls of my flesh, like a smog. It takes the sheen off everything. It rolls the world in soot. It saps the power from my limbs and presses my back into a stoop.

Life never misses an opportunity to upscuttle us, I think. Life likes to tell us it told us so.

I lie down and let life leave its footprints on me.

And I wonder if any of the road-kill creatures actually wanted to die and threw themselves beneath the speeding wheels. A lethargic swallow who couldn't bear the prospect of flying all the way back to Africa again. An insomniac hedgehog who couldn't stand the thought of lying awake all winter with no one to talk to.

I was wrong to try and impose something of my humanity on you, when being human never did me any good

What did I use to do all day without you? Already I can't remember.

I’m afraid of losing you, I never expected I could be so stupidly afraid of losing you.

I’ve never been anywhere in the world. I wouldn’t know how to get there in the first place.

I’m fifty-seven. Too old for starting over, too young for giving up.

MAKE WAY FOR A WHOLE NEW YOU. But it took me fifty-seven years to become this me, I think, and I just don’t have the stamina to make so many mistakes all over again.

Now we see it, lying in the middle of the road. A swan, a mute swan. It looks like an offcut of organza, crumpled around the edges, twitching. As we pass we see its long neck has buckled into its body like a folding chair. We see its wings are tucked back as if the tar is liquid and the swan is swimming. There are two men and a woman in the road. One man is standing on the tar, the other is directing the traffic. The woman is kneeling down beside the swan. I think she is crying, she seems to be crying, and this makes me suddenly angry. I think of all the other creatures we’ve seen since we set out. I think of the rat, the fox, the kitten, the badger. I think of the jackdaw, did you see the jackdaw? We passed it in the queue to pass the swan. Its beak was cracked open, its brains squeeged out. Why didn’t anybody stop for the jackdaw? Because the swan looks like a wedding dress, that’s why. Whereas the jackdaw looks like a bin bag. Because this is how people measure life.

It’s a sad place, but then I seem to find most places sad, and maybe it’s me who’s sad and not the places after all. Maybe there’s nowhere I can go, and no point in going.

But with summer comes hope, and with hope comes disappointment.

Now see the nasturtiums. The leaves are like tiny green parasols blown inside-out and the flowers are terrifically garish. In every village we pass through, see how they are everywhere, how they fill every gap in every wall, every crack in every path. The nasturtiums have it figured out, how survival’s just a matter of filling in the gaps between sun up and sun down. Boiling kettles, peeling potatoes, laundering towels, buying milk, changing light-bulbs, rooting wet mats of pubic hair out of the shower’s plughole. This is the way people survive, by filling one hole at a time for the flightiest of temporary gratifications, over and over and over, until the season’s out and they die off anyway, wither back into the wall or path, into their dark crevasse. This is the way life’s eaten away, expended by the onerous effort of living itself.

But it's too late, I'm sorry. Now I have no idea how things begin, nor how to know that they are safe, nor how to show strangers we are safe too.

We’re still standing outside the front gate of the shell cottage as a boy in football socks stomps down his driveway to retrieve a wheelie bin. Now we watch as he drags it up through the laurel and back to the house. All his gestures are exaggeratedly huffy, though there’s no one to witness his protest, no one but you and me, and the boy didn’t even see us. We walk from the thistles to where the cliff drops into open Atlantic and there’s nothing but luscious, jumping blue all the way to America. I’m still thinking of the boy in the driveway, of how he doesn’t realise how lucky he is to live here where there’s space to run and the salt wind ruddies his cheeks each day, how he takes it all for normal and considers himself entitled to be huffy with the wheelie bin. Now I wonder was I was lucky too, and never grateful? Sometimes a little hungry and sometimes a little cold, but not once sick or struck and every day with the sea to ruddy me. Perhaps I was lucky my father took me back when the neighbour woman rang his doorbell, lucky he never drove away and left me on the road again. But it’s too late to be grateful now. It’s too late now for everything but regret.

I was wrong to try and impose something of my humanness upon you, when being human never did me any good.

you can smell everything. You can smell feelings; you can smell time.

I expected it would be exciting;  I expected that the freedom from routine was somehow greater than the freedom to determine your own routine. I wanted to get up in the morning and not know exactly what I was going to do that day. But now that I don't, it's terrifying.

Soon it will be the time of year when it’s vaguely acceptable to be crepuscular, to be wonkety.

How can this blade possibly smell new and different from that blade, and why is it that some require to be pissed upon, and others simply don’t? I wish I’d been born with your capacity for wonder. I wouldn’t mind living a shorter life if my short life could be as vivid as yours.

Gossamer ribbons swing from your beard and when they hit the kitchen tiles they form a viscous puddle of drool. There’s something resplendent about the way you sit in your viscous drool, and it suits you. Resplendence suits you.

Appreciate the people around you. Don't replump their pillows until they return safely in the evening.

See the bird walk, the information board, the noble fir in all its hollow frippery. See the takeaway, the chip shop. The pub, the other pub. The grocer’s and the hairdressing salon, all shut. See the community we were insidiously hounded from. See how community is only a good thing when you’re a part of it.

And I feel faintly ordinary, faintly inconspicuous, faintly unsuspicious. And it’s good, so good.

I look out the windscreen at all the people walking on the street and sitting on high stools in cafes and queuing beneath the shelter beside the bus stop sign. I know each person is carrying a tiny screen in their pocket. I know each screen holds a list of the names of other people who are not here but somewhere out there also carrying a tiny screen. I know that inside each pocket there’s a goldhaired woman whispering to the person who carries her, telling them they are included.

It’s only now you’re gone I see how you’re my reason for doing things. Now I’m a stiltwalker with the stilts removed. My emptied trouser legs flap in the wind and I can’t remember how to walk without being precipitously propped.

This is the way people survive, by filling one hole at a time for the flightiest of temporary gratifications, over and over and over, until the season’s out and they die off anyway, wither back into the wall or path, into their dark crevasse. This is the way life’s eaten away, expended by the onerous effort of living itself.

recognise him as a person who is lonely as opposed to solitary, who did not choose to be on his own but involuntarily lost people until he was.

I realise that you were not born with a predetermined capacity for wonder, as I’d believed. I realise that you fed it up yourself from tiny pieces of the world. I realise it’s up to me to follow your example and nurture my own wonder, morsel by morsel by morsel.