My writing from the eighth day from the ‘write a page a day’ assignment on Diving Deeper:

You might wonder where the silver lining is in all this. It comes in moments, in small waves, in streaks of pink across the sky, in the stationary elegance of a heron waiting by the river’s edge. In the flapflap of duck wings, the tiny yellow faces of buttercups. I too, wait, at the river’s edge, looking for darting, sliver fish. A list of pleasures: eating doughnuts in Syntagma square in Athens when I was eight years old. A dream of my brother, last night. I half-woke, returned to the dream where simple things happened, nothing to speak of, enough to make me happy.  My list seems to be short today. There are many years between those two events. I could draw them on the wall in pencil, a series of interlinking circles. I close my eyes and stick a pin in the wall. The wall is solid stone. The tip of the pin bends as it breaks the surface. A spray of plaster dust lands on my foot. I dig into the gouge, trying to make the pin stick. The hole just gets bigger, uglier. I’ll have to cover it up somehow. There was a time I sellotaped my poems to the wall, not this wall, another one, in another country. Australia, Melbourne. Tin walls, a sloping floor, an old off-cut of carpet curling up. I had a bed, a mirror, my poems. A listing metal staircase linked room to ground, a walled backyard, no grass, pure concrete. I passed through this yard to get to the toilet, to the shoehorned-in kitchen. I hardly needed the kitchen, I lived on almonds and fresh apples, on yoghourt and beepollen. I hung my handwashed laundry across the sky. A neighbour once stole my knickers. I worried about him, but my landlord told me he was just a sad man, alone, I should not grudge him my underwear. I wondered how the man got in, did he walk across rooftops? Did he use my washing line – strung so loosely from window to wall – as a tightrope? Did he spy on me as I slept? Did he read my poetry? I was not what the landlord expected, and he was not what I expected. I had missed the bit in the ad about the house being gay-friendly. But he had a room (that tin hut in the sky) and I had the money. We inspected each other up and down. I was a slip of a girl on a year’s working holiday visa. He had seen better days. He lived in boxer shorts and a knotted vest, his curling chest hair poking through the holes like tufts of yellow grass. I sometimes wondered if he wished it were his underwear the neighbour coveted. Perhaps he was the culprit all along. I would not dare to stick my poems up on the wall these days, not those poems. Instead I have a Dali print, one of his many melting clocks. It’s a real print, not my own, my brothers, but I have secretly adopted it. I like the colours: the palest blue sky and swirling delicate clouds, an endless horizon, three pencil figures in the foreground, gesturing towards that clock, floating so vigorously downwards. Perhaps I should poke my pin into that clock, perhaps I should swivel it around, fling it skywards so it falls far far away from me. I cannot stand the ticking of clocks.

I envy the silence of rocks. Perhaps they are not silent, perhaps they are whispering amongst themselves in rock-speak. I envy the dewy softness of clouds, how they glow around their frilly edges. Perhaps, to some small insect or some smaller particle, a cloud is as hard as a rock. Everything has its refutation. The shadow of a swallow licks across the gravel outside my window. Gravel, to the paws of my cat, as smooth as stepping stones. And I, I feel like a sponge squeezed past bearing. I scan my insides, the long lines of nerves, veins, the smooth surfaces of bones, the wet, pulsating organs. I come to rest inside my skull. The answer must be here: a switch I can turn to ‘off’. Or at least a dial, from zero to ten. Five would be good, a nice balance, a good number. It looks pretty on the page, if you mark it in dots, like the side of a dice. That is how I see five: two evenly spaced dots above two more evenly spaced dots, and a single dot perfectly placed in the middle. I see five as the colour blue, although I am not synaesthesic. Three is red, two is yellow. One, white or black. Black, the colour of my wedding dress, a froth of lace that ended just above my knees. Lace tights, a wide-brimmed, black felt hat, a tiny veil just covering my mascara’ed eyes. I even had lace gloves, on sale at Victoria’s Secret. White: the colour of mourning in Japan. I married a samurai. I still have my wedding ring, etched with the mon of my ex-husband’s clan. The ring rests peacefully inside a black lacquered papier mache box I bought in Srinagar. I left the bargaining to the man I was then with, who I later married, Husband number 1: an American jazz saxophone player who unbuttoned me in a great tangle of blankets that smelled of mould, the houseboat rocking gently against the wet green lake. I remember: one night in a generic mid-western city, its landscape a mouthful of broken teeth. My slabfaced hotel room is courteously provided by United airlines. I’m stalled, enroute from Toronto to San Diego, from one man to the other, and back, I have a return ticket and a multiple-entry visa. My long-toed feet are slip-sliding, my arms are flung wide, my fingers tear through lace, white this time and as thin as ghosts, the earth below a blue-green marble in a game I’ve forgotten how to play. The room’s cyclops TV eye glares down on the bed where I’m pressed flat by sheets tucked tighter than a straightjacket. I cannot sleep for fear of falling, for the sound of pinball in my ears.

Too late, so late, beyond late. Squeezed into the back of a day, the last hour of your day shift. Time for the night shift, the last sigh. Sometimes you wake up thinking, why bother? What, exactly, is the point of it all? You look back. Was there a specific moment where you lost interest? Or were you always pulled along, a bit squashed, like something caught on the underside of your shoe? It’s no good you know. You can’t carry on like this. Oh I know, I know, it’s not exactly as if you lie around waiting for things to happen. It’s not as if you don’t do things which indicate a desire for movement. So, what is the problem? There is a problem, isn’t there? Or are you just whining? Maybe you’re just whining. Now that’s a sad waste of type. Of my time. Of your time. You’re staring into space. Who do you see? Gerd, with his tool belt and his paunch, flinging you up in his arms like a child. Gerd, who had been in the Nazi youth. Lyle, who was half Cree, who didn’t want you to take your bra off when he made love to you. Lyle, who wasn’t very good at fucking. Kim, Lyle’s girlfriend, who drank jasmine tea and was kind to you, even when she found out you’d been with him. Tom, his fingers always inside something hard and electronic. Shirley, his wife, who didn’t like you much. Zak, who had plans to plant a thousand trees across Toronto. Who wrote you poems, not very good. You broke hearts and relationships, and almost a marriage. Perhaps it did start there. You remember the joy, don’t you, of the time before. You were, what? Twenty something? You lay on the grass, outside the house on Hurndale. You could not contain yourself. Being inside the house was like wearing a dress one size too small. You didn’t want to miss anyone who might come inside the house, anyone who might leave. You’d gather them in, spin a shallow web, walk your sticky feet across their chests.

May Fifth was the day on which I was married. Twice. Also the day my second husband was married, his first time. To a woman who had the same name as mine. Confused? It is confusing. None of this was planned. I only discovered it later. The first marriage: a cold London day. We’d forgotten we needed witnesses. A frantic series of telephone calls to friends and then, when no one was home, to acquaintances. “Perhaps we can ask someone on the street?” my husband-to-be suggested. In the end we found two willing people. We promised them a pub lunch for their troubles. It was a civil ceremony, though not that civil really: we were all giggles and raised eyebrows. Marriage was not a thing my boyfriend and I believed in. Or was it that he did not believe in it, and I followed suit, because I was still a girl and he most definitely wasn’t a boy, but a fully fledged man, an American, no less, a man who’d played saxophone with the greats, a man who’d studied philosophy with Alan Watts – who considered marriage an obsolete institution (Watts married three times). The second marriage: a park in Toronto, in the rain. The two of us wore black. We had a minister from the United Church. She read our vows, not a mention of God. Something Native American (do I have my spirit guide to blame?).  At our wedding reception, her mouth full of the carob spirulina cake I’d baked, the minister told me, “none of my marriages ever fail.” Who would think to send her a note telling her otherwise? Not I. The man I am now with – for twice as many years as both previous marriages put together – is not interested in getting down on bended knee. Not that husband number one or number two did either. The first marriage was a matter of convenience, the second a matter of blindness. I think perhaps, although he was not called John, he was my soulmate. What the seers neglect to tell you is that soulmates and marriage are not always compatible. “This one’s dangerous,” a friend said to me, those first days when I was delirious with love. I knew what he meant. It was too late for me to say, Too dangerous. I’d one foot hovering the air, the other on the edge of the cliff and I was falling, falling. There are some men who, if you fall in love with, you do so at your peril. For they have shattered hearts of gold, too broken to be mended. I tried, I failed, and ended up in pieces, on my knees, trying to fit us together again. They say a broken bone mends stronger. A broken heart they do not care to mention.

Get it out of the way. Done. Over. So I can feel like a good girl. I’ve done my job, my duty, my requirement, my penance, my practice, my promise.  Two lines. A sigh. The sound of small paws, padding on the hardwood floor. Padding up and down, up and down. Trying to find, what? Release? Fun? Escape? Something. Anything. Other than this. Padding again, a slanty-eyed glance my way and then disappearing down the corridor. A call from the distance. Nothing will do, not today. Nothing will fill the gap, the need, for what? Why is it so very difficult to simply feel alright? To simply be okay with this moment, right here? Each day a step towards the night, and only then a feeling I can allow myself to let go, to read a little and then to face the long night, during which I must continue to pad up and down, up and down, for when I wake I am more tired than when I went to sleep. The wind has blown a seed tray across the gravel. It’s a good seed tray, one my mother lent me. I should go out and put it somewhere safe, where the wind cannot find it. The dark, underneath a chair, behind the throw, tassles for bars. That’s where my cat settles, sometimes, to calm himself. In small enclosed, dark space. Perhaps this is what I should do, find myself such a space and curl up. I made a wish list today. It was hard to wish, it’s not as if there are too many things I wish for really. I wish for a wish list, perhaps. There is something a little disturbing about too much freedom, too much choice. And now that I have a cat I can fret about my freedom. Perhaps this will help me choose my list of wishes a little more wisely, more carefully. There is no simply running away now, for who will take care of the cat? Who will take care of me? What a question. My herbalist asked it of me a while back. Was it possible my illness had something to do with me wanting to be taken care of? After having taken care of another to a such an extreme degree I was brought me to my knees, the same knees that went searching for the shattered pieces of myself, of him, only this time I knelt in hollow prayer, Help me, I prayed, help me. Help came, in forms unexpected, a friend, a guru or two, a man with brown eyes and unbroken heart. And here I am, still kneeling, less distraught, not distraught at all, just asking.