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.

“Dora Hannides, PHd, Clairvoyant from California,” said the sign on the window of Mysteries, a new-age shop in Covent Garden I sometimes went into. It was dark and crammed to the gills with crystals and self-help books and tarot cards and incense and amulets and shop assistants who looked like dried out ghosts, as if they had been pressed between the pages of a book of spells. I’m surprised I saw the sign, there were so many others  – so many people available to tell me the secrets of my ascendant, the answers to my prayers, the meaning of my life –  this life – or if I preferred, the meaning of my past lives;  I could meet with the dead, I could find out who my spirit guides were – I had three, apparently, a Japanese woman, a Zulu warrior and a Native American (it seemed to me that dead native americans were very busy with this spirit guide business); I could find out the name of my soul-mate. John, a woman in Dublin had breathed into my ear. You’ll meet a John. He is your soulmate. She grasped my wrist with twig-like fingers until I gave her a coin. To this day I’ve never had a lover, or a good friend, called John. Perhaps he’s still waiting for me, just around the corner, all honey-eyes and muscle. Dora held my wrist too. But lightly, her fingers cool and feathery. She stared over my shoulder as she talked, as if the real me were there, a few inches outside of my skin. Dora told me a story. A story I knew already, for it was the story of my life: with one difference: in her mouth this life was a beautiful thing. A meaningful thing. Every twist and turn and collapse necessary and valuable. Not one single event, not one single action, not one single thought, was wrong. I was not wrong. When Dora finished her tale, she turned her head and looked me in the eyes, as if I had entered my skin.

My girlfriend and I planned to make a lot of money. We would set ourselves up as high-class prostitutes. It would be safer in twos, one could keep guard, while the other did the business – keeping an eye out in case anything untoward happened. We did not discuss what ‘untoward’ might mean. I was eighteen and bulimic. She was my best friend and Irish. We drank rum and cokes and flushed with excitement with all the possibilities. The things we would do with the money. It would just be for a little while, of course. A small curve in the straight and narrow path to successful adulthood. I saw that adulthood quite clearly: fame, fortune. I’d be a dancer, an actress, a writer, a poet. I’d be a journalist, an architect; I’d photograph the moon from a space ship, I’d go to Tibet and become one with everything. The world was my oyster, and I was licking at her briny, sharp edges. I had no doubts, none at all. That I would be fine. I would. So she and I, my best girfriend who is no longer my best girlfriend, and nor me hers: we catastrophically failed each other’s expectations of each other – discussed into the night how we’d proceed. We were all talk of course, and the talk was good, until I woke up the next morning, my head a chainsaw massacre, my only thought of where and when and how. My month’s allowance was spent. My credit card maxed. The kinds of foods required were hard to steal. No slipping a box of creampuffs into your handbag. Not easily anyway. My best friend lent me money. She did not know I spent it on fast food, food that went fast in and fast out. And later, when I returned from ‘lectures’ (I hadn’t been to any for several months, she did not know), we’d discuss our plan. We needed beautiful clothes, a quality advertisement, our hair cut, our nails painted. By four am we’d fall into bed – the same bed, it was big and there was only one in the apartment – certain that tomorrow we’d do all these things. But we didn’t. What I did do was answer a small advertisement in the back of a newspaper for ‘photographic models’. It was not exactly what I expected. A married man, short, fat and kind faced. His wife much in evidence. After one roll of film he persuaded me to take my clothes off. “I’m going to do something naughty” he said, and before I knew it he’d tweaked my nipple. Hard. “That’s better,” he told me, and the flash went off, blinding. My mother has one of his photographs on the wall of her spare room. It is not one of the nudes. I never told her about that. I’m looking over my shoulder. I’m wearing a red satin blouse. My mother put it in the spare room – where she would not see it every day – because, she said, “You look so terribly sad.”

An assignment I set on Diving Deeper: A Writing Workshop is to write a page a day for a month (or more…) I thought I’d post my contributions here…

One page, just one page. If I could write one page a day in less than a year I’d have the first draft of a novel. If I wrote one page a day, I might feel better about myself. As it is I don’t feel better at all, and I’ve written three lines. Surely I should be part way there already, some iota of feeling better? But no. I’m certain this is not going to achieve what I set out to achieve. And what is that, prey? Health, wealth and happiness? Or is it ‘pray’? Yes, I’d better start praying. What if I’d started this whole caboodle earlier? Like when I was seventeen? Would I be a better, happier person? A book-published writer? Instead I lived the stories I’m now writing. There’s something to be said for that, I suppose. And now what? What if I had a different life? How would that look. Richer, and I don’t mean money. I mean – dinner parties, laughter, people, family, my brother. His children. I’d see them grow, and perhaps they might even call me auntie. Instead all I see are photographs. Pixels, in fact. My nephews are pixels. My niece is made up of fewer pixels because she’s smaller. I look at my life with surprise. I wasn’t meant for this, I’m sure of that. Parts are fine, parts are not. What happened? I got sick. Ok, so start there: What if I hadn’t gotten sick? Now there’s a thought. It pains me to think of this. It’s too big a what if. Maybe nothing would be different. Perhaps it’s time to try a different tack. What if has an underlying, what, something. It assumes the ‘what if’ could never happen. If. Not a good word really. I should eradicate it from my vocabulary. I have to stop now, I can feel myself getting melancholy. This is not helping, just as I expected. Too much thinking. I’ve got an idea, a different approach. Positive what ifs. As in  things narrowly missed, thank God. What if my father had not died? I’d have been sent to boarding school and I’d probably be .. what… I wonder. Generally in the family – the family sans father – this possibility was thought of as Not A Good Thing. I’d have ended up – what?  a wreck or a whore ? Well, inspite of never going to boarding school I’ve been both. I once made a list of all the boys I’d slept with. The list was long. It gave me a certain sense of achievement.