summertime

summertime and we are walking through endless green landscapes, eating poached eggs, sharing unfolding family secrets that hang like dark bubbles, buying second-hand anatomical books, sitting on soggy lime green grass and licking white double cream from brown chocolate butterfly cakes. we are in our homeland our old land, where we were born but not where we live. As I write I have just been given my grandma's silver coffee spoons. I hold their tiny slender perfection, necks fragile and steely like swans. I sit, I write, I wish, I am, anxious and steady as the girls beside me watch Alice sliding through the looking glass, I hear the gentle clink of cutlery from the tidying kitchen  and feel the jabberwocky haunting our soft sofa dreams.

packing

I am packing to leave. I fold tiny clothes and place them in idle black bags. I add forgotten underwear, a present for my aunt. The house feels empty, clean and stationary; time is treading water. I tick last items from lists scrawled in red, green and blue, eat hasty meals and prowl like a cat through gradually vacating rooms. Half of the family has already gone; we'll join them in a matter of days. Inside I am unsettled, variable; likely to change. My space feels surprisingly too big; normally I relish my own company, devour the silence and the freedom. Now I am unresolved.

There are days when all the world is tiny closed fisted hard little grey nails, pining bodies down with the herculean force that the Liliputs held Gulliver in place. These sneaking tiny unforgiving things hold spirits tight and will not let you be; placing undue strain upon the soul. Anxiety bleeds into hearts and crushes dreaming butterflies - miniscule moments binding fluttering wings. Other days  all  doors are opening  every house across the Universe; stars are being born into night skies. Precious smiles trace upward curves on mountain tops reflecting eagle's eyes. All the possibilities are possible - then you are safe,  you are free.

flying

Feel at the moment like my head is buzzing from morning until night. There are plays to be prepared for community protests against cuts in education, bags to be packed, books to be written, dissertations to correct, patient evaluations to write and babies to be fed. Stop. The sea is blue as the sky is blue. A rich deep azure. The colour lies between green and indigo and when I swim I become a psychological primary hue. I am cerulean, lazuline and sapphire; a lycaenid butterfly afloat on the salty water. I have four wings covered in tiny scales, a slender body and knobbed antanae. I have metamorphised from the larval caterpillar, I am the imago, I can fly.

Nightime and I should be asleep, brushing my teeth, reading my book, sipping my herbal tea like a little old lady with shaking hands in an old pink nightgown. In late adolescence I adored bedtime; sleep a natural reversible state common to vetebrate animals. I would jump onto my big double bed and wait for the sandman to come to kiss me goodnight. Snuggled in a silky purple eiderdown, slippery and warm, I could control my dreams, would experiment with flying, jumping through time and space. The unconscious mind awake for the blinking of a second. 

life giving life

they are growing and she is getting bigger. now she turns from me to meet the gaze of her sister or her father or another giggling child. she is nearly 9 months and her little teeth have started to nip when she feeds. today i wonder whether nursing is coming to an end. the thought is so very hard. the intimacy that we share, that bond is so very close. the feel of the rush of the milk when it comes, what her grandma calls the 'zinging in your breasts'. the feeding of the babe, the quiet ectasy, the warm blanket that envelops the universe, reaching up to the stars and around every planet and lonely meteorite until every last thing is so soft and calm that angels fall from heaven to join us. in these tiny moments i could live forever and all thoughts of deadlines and rushing and obligations fade into obscurity, blinded by the light of the here and the now, me and my child, hearts beating, eyes meeting. this is the beauty of life. life giving life. 

finishing things

I am trying to finish; to send the letter that I promised them with a quote for a price that they said that they wished would arrive before I finish putting clothes into drawers and folding knickers inside of fridges after I have breastfed a hungry child and given fresh soup to my hospital patient while I learn the words to a Spanish song and write another page of my story and hoover the dust from inside my brain and prepare the house for a family visit and clean the cat shit and try to understand my work teams behaviour and finish reading my chinese novel while booking my ticket to a  wedding in spain and deciding childcare for a hot day in august and giving up coffee yet sorting through little girl's too small dresses and there is never a moment when it can all finish as the woman at the end of the earth told me so many years ago, completion is death.