I was driving along the M4 the other day, just as dawn was breaking, trying to ignore the Tesla breathing so close to my neck, the driver could almost smell my perfume. All of us in a scramble to complete our journeys before getting stuck in traffic like flies on a glue-trap. But then dawn came, and where there had been a vague smudge of blue and grey, the arrival of light outlined the clouds waiting patiently in the dark, turning the sky ahead into a portal. Trails of white fluff streaming upwards, the gaps between them corridors into something beyond.
The longer I stared into that gateway, the more I wanted to be there. Spaces that are liminal, that are the boundaries between elements always remind me of my late husband Rob, and for a brief moment I was sure he was there, just beyond reach.
Grief for me, is an ourobouros of madness and comfort, and in my car, with Green Day playing in the background, a cup of coffee sloshing around in my belly, I said, hello, Rob. I asked him whether the clouds were his handiwork, and did he ask the light to move in a particular way to make the sky look like an ocean, all foam and blue and scudding crests?
I couldn’t tell you how I knew he was there, I just knew. In the same way that when I try and talk to him at the cemetery where he is buried in Auckland, with the estuary in front of him, and the whisper of trees around us, I know he is not there. It is an absence, an emptiness, like ringing the doorbell of someone’s house even though all that is inside is dust and sunlight.
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