I'll start with a dream
half poem, half man
in a room blush red
he lies naked.
If he sleeps
arms bent
a sash about my waist
his breath sometimes touching
this bubble we call home.
When I wake I realise, all this will change. There is nothing romantic or even optimistic about rubbing this much sleep from my eyes, nor standing a teaspoon upright in a slush of green tea. It is even harder not to burn his eggs and fill the small kitchen with a smell we both detest. I look at him over the top of yesterday's newspaper - the news is still the same. I half expect it to be a headline : Sophie is leaving Harry, these simple thoughts a hand-made bullet, pointed at his heart. I've been careful not to sleep too close, but really I haven't slept in days. Our thoughts once shared the same dreams, and sometimes if we swapped pillows I might have dreamt about a game of rugby. Harry would have dreamt about flying, or falling. Things he didn't understand, things that only made him grumpy the next day. I'm leaving the man I spent seven years with, the father of my two year old son. Not because we no longer share, but because he is the man who when I narrow my eyes looks more like a restless boy walking out of a dream. I'm closing the gate and telling the paper boy 'no more advertisers' - 'no more junk mail in my box'. This hasn't been easy, by next Sunday the house I lovingly put together will resemble a thing without a couch, or even a seat to sit on. For almost two weeks I will be cold and humbled by my own decisions. There will be boxes stacked full of heavy books and all the nick-nacks that annoyed him. My girlfriend calls on Tuesday, to tell me she's found a house on the sunny side of Kelburn. Three weeks later I meet a man who just might change my life forever. Yesterday seems distant. The months that have passed no longer have the same reach, but I recall them anyway. A lifetime has gone by. I feel like a pink lizard, shedding her leather skin.
* * *
No one said it would be easy.
I was 23 and I wanted my sex drive back. I wanted to be in love. What reminded me was a memory of the man I'd once loved - what taunted me was knowing this love was gone.
I made a decision to leave the father of my son. I wanted to wake in the morning and not have to deal with it, so I drank. I went out and didn't come home. I made new friends. They were drug dealers and failed models, gay men, men whose fathers were dying of cancer - men who no longer feared their mortality. We would meet often four times a week in John's warehouse apartment. I would sit, mostly in stoned silence, sometimes laughing with the others. Depending on the mood I often laughted at the those who's lives seemed more fucked up than my own. Elvis was especially unassuming. It was impossible to pick his age. To the average outsider he radiated what he'd originally started out as - a white, middle-class male, a school dux, a boy with a future. Elvis's reality was quite different. He'd spent several years of his early adulthood imprisoned for drug possession. The truth was, Elvis was a recovering heroin addict with everything in his actions suggesting, that at any minute, he would reach full circle. We were all 'others' of a sort. We had all chosen a slow death. Like Elvis I wanted friends who loved me. When I finally realized I had none of the things I so needed, I took the last seat on a short downward spiral. My mother took my baby and gave me a week to think about it. I contemplated death - but it would have to be quick. That afternoon I sat on my neighbor's lawn for over four hours, locked out of my own home without even a window I could reach to break and enter. Barefooted and wearing last nights clothes, I chain smoked the last of my cigarettes and as I began to sober I thought about spending the twenty dollars my father had given me on cheap bottle of wine.
Eventually I chose to slow the drunken pour. Summer came soon. I wanted to say one thing and mean another, and mostly I did. I often wondered where love had gone. I wanted to tell the world I was a fake. I wanted to remember my talents. I tried eating again. I only loved my little house. Without any further intervention, I chose life. I recalled the struggle of my own mother and as a mother I also owed it to my children's children, not to give up.
2002 was a difficult year. If I looked back at all the things I wanted, they were really things I needed. That year I would have died if it hadn't been for my quiet dreams gently spirally in the softer parts of me.
Then came 2003, I wrote poems all summer. I sat indoors when I should have been at kindergarten meetings, or drinking tea with the next-door neighbor. I pined over words I couldn't quite make sit still on paper. I wrote a poem called:
Deep White Clocks
She is tired of sunsets aging,
the dead reckoning of desert ants
navigating by the stars.
In winter she sleeps,
ceaseless, her dreams anti-dial
adjacent to the sun.
and another called:
Crane Song
Birds chart
the gifted shape of letters,
you cannot touch
their auras burn
a brilliant orange collision,
their wings
the layered ocean floor of evolution.
They are love
looking for a sky hook
to hoist above the stars,
they light the passage of exodus
they know the secrets of old planets
melting as they collide.
I wish for endings
or the space for new beginnings.
You read into houses,
rotten teeth,
otherwise beautiful smiles
in a busy street.
Will it pass,
this need for two places at once?
My knack for walking backwards
all at once
and standing still.
This house is broken.
The wishbone chipped.
Sometime later I met Owen and suddenly the world tilted. In the early hours of Valentine's Day I found myself alone at a small private party on Kent Terrace. The friend I'd arrived with had called it a night with her man and I'd resumed dancing, mostly oblivious to a guy who after several mutual introductions still refused to acknowledged me. That guy was Owen. After a fluted attempt to impress me with his drunken break dancing I invited him to come outside, and later he followed me to another bar. Looking back there were lot of silences. Occasionally Owen would stroke the bare skin on my back, his touch made everything stand still. When he offered to give me a lift home I found myself in his car telling him to take me back to his house. Numbed by alcohol and aroused by the pursuit of my own freedom I stood in his bedroom swaying on my best heels until he came up and gently kissed the air behind me. In the morning I told him what a fake I was. How he'd never see me again because I was a mother and at home my other half waited. Yet Owen never left me alone. He listened patiently as I sobbed and then unfurled my clenched hands, counting my fingers, forsaking my thumbs.
I found myself outdoors again on a garden rug counting worker bees with my busy two year old. Owen would drive his old car all the way out to Karori to see me. Still to this day, I don't know why. Once his car even broke down on the hill, but he still arrived two hours late, carrying two cold pies. He would arrive and sit beside me in the sun, leaving as quietly as he'd arrived. I would wait for him to kiss me and sometimes he did, but when I drew his face close to mine he would stiffen and then sigh. In the sun, in the middle of somewhere it were as if physical contact frightened him. Owen became my man of movement. Just by knowing him and occasionally lying in his arms I found the power to vacate my former life, and to rebuild another. Sometimes Owen was sensitive and took everything I said the wrong way. He would raise his voice at me and look physically annoyed. Sometimes he would just laugh in absolute disbelief at this things I did, and said I'd done. We seldom understood one another and then one day he told me I wasn't his type. I would stand on the mezzanine floor of his warehouse and turn up the music. Sometimes we would go out together, mostly I arrived back at his place drunken fumbling with clothes that were too small and jewelry tangled about my neck. It didn't take him long to tire of this. Eventually I got over all of that. If anything Owen taught me to tread more carefully, and to listen with both ears, including listening to the voice inside. There were times when I wanted to flaw him with my wit and beauty yet I was lucky if a wiry eye brow was raised. Mostly he treated me with the tolerance you might show an annoying little sister, still oddly enough our friendship persisted.
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