I feel unmoored by how time is so elastic now. Seven and a half years. Almost six years. Milestones in the past that feel both immediate and millennial. Seven and a half years since the boys died. Almost six years since we moved here. A hundred lifetimes ago. And also, it stands still. I could be with you now in that hospital room. Shaking and shuddering from the medication they gave me. And it was another me that did that. I look down on her from above. I feel in my body what happened in her body. And I look away because it’s all too much.
“What brought you to your current role?” we were asked to ask each other at a work do last week. “My babies died. I moved to Bute. I looked out my window for almost five years in abject bewilderment. And then I had to get a job for the money. And here I am.” I didn’t say that. As each new person stood in front of me, I steadied my feet and went into auto pilot. “What’s the best job you’ve ever had?” we were asked to ask each other. “Who gives a fuck?” I didn’t say. Life began and ended on that day in the hospital. Your lives. My life.
I don’t like how time stretches away from me. I don’t like how far in the past it feels since I held your bodies next to mine. I don’t like how I can’t touch the hope and expectation I carried in me while I also carried you. How utterly gone that is. How all I can do is move further and further away from it all. While carrying with me the space that I had made for you. For us. And how I have to try to make something of that. I bring you with me as best I can but it’s not enough. I don’t want to move with purpose. Let me drift.
I no longer have the nightmares, or not that I remember anyway. I daydream of sleep. It feels like the only place where I am not torn between dissonant selves. Where time doesn’t stretch and collapse in on itself. Or if it does, I’m not bothered by it. Whatever self it is that exists in sleep, it doesn’t long for a life it cannot have, to hold bodies that no longer have form.
I woke the other morning and I conjured you. Here come the knees and the elbows. In their stretchy, soft pyjamas. Maybe trains, maybe bears. Maybe spots maybe stripes. Elasticated at the cuffs. Wrists and ankles. One sleepy, one bouncy. Up you come, come and see me. One on either side, snuggled in my armpits. Wrapped around my legs. What did you dream of last night, my boys? Did you see the giant rabbit who would nibble at your toes? Did you canoe through the rapids right up to the edge of the waterfall? Did grandad give you a quarter of sports mix in a paper bag? Did you save the black ones for last because they’re the best ones? Are you sleepy heads or chatterboxes this morning, my boys?
And later on that morning, a thousand knees and a thousand elbows, glittering on the surface of the water, followed me as I walked along the sand. Knees and elbows peeped out of the oystercatchers’ long, orange bills. And time stretched out beyond the Cumbraes and over the horizon.
Time
Just beautiful. Heart wrenchingly beautiful
These tears rolling down my face insignificant to the oceans you've shed since that dreadful day Lucy. Your complete, unwavering love for your boys, seamlessly flows; pure
through your short given glimpse of the agony of daily existence in this intolerable seperated void. You also made them so beautiful to meet for this first time. Thank you xxx xxx xxx xxx