life and light reflecting

 Reading a book in the pool as the sun starts to set, ripples of light reflect from the water and hit the page. The scene is beautiful in its flickering tranquillity and yet every book that I read of late is about neglect and death and suffering and sorrow. 

            I’ve been thinking of the significance of months. For instance, September. I was born in September. I moved from England to Spain in September, I moved from Spain to Cambridge, MA, USA, in September and then I moved to Dallas, Texas in September. I became a US citizen in September and, one year later, my friend, Jill, who attended my citizenship ceremony, died in September. The queen of England died on my birthday in September. Then there is December. Every second December for six years I met women whose names all began with ‘S’ who became my girlfriends. Finally, my mother died in December.        

            There is a line that I read in Bread of Angels earlier and it touched me as a beautiful way to express what I have been attempting to express in recent writings about the silence that stems from the disappearance of someone through death or break up: ‘she had entered the realm of the disappeared, the heart’s private burial ground.’ It’s beautiful and sad, it expresses the friend and my mother and the three women whose names start with S… they have all, in different ways, entered the realm of the disappeared, my heart’s private burial ground. And so many more… and life is so short and fragile that I am wondering if I should jump up and cycle off to watch the USA v Belgium in a public place to see people and feel life. 


Bread of Angels by Patti Smith

Las Colinas, Texas. 

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