Winter

Memoirs of a haunting banshee

Now you are eight, my boys. And I am forty-nine years old. I hardly know what to do with these numbers. Your eights are twisting and curving, symmetrical. I could trace them all day with two of my fingertips. Two fat ladies at the bingo. What kind of eights would you be? Would you be quick? Would you be gentle? Would you be swashbucklers, dare devils, Evel Knievels?

It was a clear sky last night and I looked up into it to see the stars. My vision is starting to fail me and things are blurrier now than they once were. One of the stars was blinking and moving and turned out to be a plane. The other night, the wind roared through the trees and they creaked and they howled. I stood in it for as long as I could. I lifted my face up to the dark sky and asked the wind and the rain into my face. I wondered if you were in it. In the wind. Were you riding hell for leather? The dogs scampered and sniffed. Jessie frantically hoiking mouthfuls of grass and weeds. She loves her greens.

This morning, we woke early and out we went into the bright winter morning. Four swans swept over our heads, glinting in the morning sunlight. I heard their wings cut through the sky. Jessie hoiked mouthfuls of seaweed. Charlie tried to chase a crow. He may be old but he’s still game.  We’re all getting so old now, boys. How would I have kept up with you? It’s been so tiring to be without you all these years. I’ve been all out of gas. The year is slowing down to turn. The darkness comes earlier and leaves later. The people have gone, for the most part. The beach is ours once more. The geese are feasting in the fields and along the shoreline. Honking like dozens of rusty hinges. The little egret is back. Shiny white. Shoelace necked.

These early winter days are thin places for me. Where the membrane between where you are, boys, and where I am seems more porous. Where I can dawdle along a frosted beach, marvelling at the wonder of saltwater lapping under ice. Where the blinding low sun bounces off the still water, turning the dogs to glimmering silhouettes. Where a three-quarter slice salami moon can hang in the sky at three o’clock in the afternoon, just above the hills across the water as they start to emit a golden glow. Where the slower pace of things, the solitude, the slumber beckon me toward liminal places. Where the duality of all of this can be held less clumsily.

There is a ghost life that walks alongside me. Often, I have felt like I am the ghost and the other life that branched off, untouched by bottomless sorrow, was the earthly one. I have floated above and around it. Wailing and howling to be let back in. Rattling my chains and blowing out their candles. Full of fury, terror and despair. Trapped in the bardo between the life I can’t have and the life I don’t want. In years gone by, that has been especially true at this time of year. Surrounded by people who can’t see the ghost of me. In places where the membrane feels impermeable. I just couldn’t do it. Still can’t. Don’t want to. I need to find thin places. Slow. Quiet. Spacious.

It's good, knowing what you need. It helps to stop the vertigo that occurs when you just can’t work out why you can’t be normal. The feeling of tumbling through space even though you’re standing firmly on the ground. This is normal, in as much as anything can be now. Learning to walk with my ghost and seeing where we can get to together.