It's not finished yet, but I sort of want to see if people can follow it. If they think it's working or not, so any concrit would be absolutely fabulous. Please be honest; if you don't think it's working, tell me, but also tell me why so I can do something about it!
Hope you're all okay :]
Meg x x
*
Ephemera (working title)
"because love -- any love -- reveals us in our nakedness, our misery, our vulnerability, our nothingness." Cesare Pavese.
If you start by closing your eyes, I’ll talk you through the rest. Close your eyes and breathe through your nose and listen to me because you’ll probably be here a while. Can you imagine a little path, winding through sandy dunes with scrubby grass growing either side? It’s sunny, the sky is blue - proper blue, cartoon blue - and there are seagulls above and you can almost taste the salt of the sea more than you can smell it. There are cottages on the hill in front, white cottages with blue roofs (even though this bit is definitely made up because you’re in England still, the breeze carries a chill enough to make the hairs on your arms stand up and your chin wobble with suppressed chatters) and you can hear the sea like the inside of a shell. Can you see it yet? The sand is soft underfoot because you left your shoes at home, and you forget to notice how cold it is. Carry on the way you’re going while I explain. It’s August, the middle of a long summer. You might be on holiday with friends, maybe with family, but it’s definitely August because you can hear the beach, full of children giddy with the promises of summer, and you are completely and utterly in love.
Keep walking because you haven’t reached the summit yet, but the sand is becoming looser underfoot and the path is harder to make out because it hasn’t been trodden as often. In love, and you’ll insist that that’s the truth because really there’s no other word for it. Have you ever been in love before? Don’t look like that, don’t open your eyes, just think about it. Keep walking, too; there’s something I want to show you. I don’t know if you have. You might have thought it, written letters and poems dripping with emotion, but I don’t know if it’s love, not like it is now. Completely uncontrollably, totally unreservedly and deliciously; it’s devoured you and consumed you and all of the other things that people say when they’re in love because there simply are no other words for it.
There, look. Stretches on forever and ever, doesn’t it? Two shades of a perfect blue, and the horizon stretching around you until you can almost forget where you are. I told you it would be worth it, didn’t I?
Love could be cherry red or lipstick pink, or it could be blue, green, purple. Anything, and as long as it carries on eternally it doesn’t really matter.
You’re in love and you stand at the top of the dune and look at the endless horizon and everything could be perfect, everything would be perfect, but you’re in love and you don’t know how to say it, and you know (this more than anything you’ve ever known) that you shouldn’t be.
**
People count down the seconds together, getting louder as they wait to welcome a new year.
Resolutions? she asks me, as the fireworks begin and people begin shouting and laughing and smiling.
I don’t really… I reply.
Three. She holds up three fingers to illustrate. Three resolutions.
Next year, I want to fly, I answer. I want to fly and walk on water and invent a new colour.
She tells me they aren’t real resolutions.
Three, then, I tell her. Your three.
I want this year to be better than last year. I want to get better at something. And more than anything, I want my first kiss. She smiles at me. See? Those are real resolutions.
Maybe. Perhaps. (I’m teasing her now.) I want to die and come back to life. I want to become a bassoon virtuoso. I want to name a butterfly after… Morrissey.
They probably have, she replies, and goes off to join the celebrations.
I watch her leave and feel as though I might have disappointed her.
Later on I hold her hand as we watch the end of the fireworks and I whisper to her that I’d like to do something I’d never done before.
She turns to me and stands on tiptoe to whisper back that that was a real resolution and it was so good she’d let me off with just one.
Have you noticed yet? It’s obvious, really. I think it is, anyway, but maybe that’s because I’ve done this already.
Terribly poignant, I like to think, to start with a new beginning. Happy New Year.
You’re older here than you were at the beach and you watch the fireworks but you don’t really see them. You’ve been in love for two years, fifteen weeks and 6 days, and the sand dune, the endless horizon, the way the seagulls flew overhead, they’re all distant memories, like faded photographs or scratched records. You want to do something that you’ve never done and you remember to keep it ambiguous, to make sure that your resolution could mean anything to her.
She finds me before I leave and takes my hands (both of them, holding them up, inspecting them, like she always does. Did). She asks me if I have to go. There are things we haven’t done, she tells me. You promised me we could.
And we will, I answer. January the first, we have a whole year to do all the things I told you we would. Where do we start?
You start the next day (January the second because the end of the day doesn’t come until sleep) and you make a list together. She uses a purple pen and gesticulates a lot, and you notice that every time she does she draws on her face and on her hands. (You’ll remember those little purple scars forever.)
What first? She holds the pen above the paper and looks expectant.
I don’t remember everything I’ve ever promised you, I tell her.
How can you keep them then? She puts the pen down, and I know that I’ve frustrated her again.
Promises? I don’t know. (I’m honest with her, but that’s not always the best way.)
She closes her eyes. You promised that we could sleep by the sea. That we’d collect shells on the beach and paddle in the waves and eat ice cream and watch the sunset. She opens her eyes again now. You promised to take me somewhere I’d always wanted to go. That you’d take me shopping when we didn’t have any money because we’d have fun anyway. That we could go for a picnic and feed the ducks in the park. That you’d hold my hand when we watched a scary film.
She shrugs. I suppose you didn’t mean them though, now.
No. I shake my head. No, I did. Write them down. Quick, before they escape again.
You spend the afternoon together, writing lists and watching the television, listening to the rain.
You might have forgotten about the way she smells, the way she tilts her head to one side as she listens. Her toenails painted shell pink, or the blonde in her hair. She was always Summer, even when it was raining outside and there were films on the television because it was the new year.
Show me, then. She doesn’t greet me in the normal way (she never has done), as though she needs to capture my attention, to ensure she isn’t like everyone else to me.
Show you what? I answer. And hello to you, too.
Don’t. You promised me this. It’s on the list.
The list was pages long, and made me realise how many promises I’d had to make to make sure that she stayed interested in me.
Everything is on the list. Horse rides and dancing and swimming in the sea and everything in between. What do I need to show you?
Sunrises and sunsets. Thousands of them, so they all blur into one but never lose their magic. We have to start today.
It’s April now, and you catch the train to the beach. You point out the daffodils and the daisies and she laughs at you. She moved from the city two years and seven months ago. She pretends to love the trees and the cottages, but her heart lies with concrete and shopping malls really.
The beach is different though, because it’s magical. She holds your hand when she sees the sea through the window.
We’re nearly there, she whispers. To herself more than to you because her eyes haven’t left the horizon yet.
She’s wearing yellow and orange and green, and I watch her climb rocks and write her name in the sand and throw sticks for a stranger’s dog. I think about all the things she hasn’t done yet; being drunk, spending the whole night dancing and laughing and then watching the sun come up in the morning. Dropping everything to get out, just to leave for a while, forgetting about responsibilities. Having responsibilities, because it’s easy to forget. She seems weighted down with responsibilities. That’s what makes it hard. I forget, sometimes.
Seventeen, she shouts at me. Seventeen seconds. I bet you can’t do it faster.
I probably can’t because she’s much smaller, more compact. I try though, closing my eyes and willing myself forward. I can hear her laughing, but it’s in the distance; it’s almost dreamlike and I feel like I’ve been going forever.
Nineteen. I told you you wouldn’t do it.
Take her hand now. That’s it; gently. They’re cold, aren’t they? They always are, cold and soft and so small you worry you could break them. You have to show her the view, the stretch of infinity that you can see from the top of the sand dune. Do you remember the way? The little path that you can’t see unless you know it’s there. Do you worry about what people will say? Keep walking. She’s talking to you, can you hear?
She talks about the city when we go to the beach. She follows me up the dune, and talks behind me. There was a house, she says, ten minutes from the city. You could see buildings and taste pollution on the air. (Grit, she tells me. Grit and smoke and… and the buildings around you and all of the people you ever met.) She used to spend hours in the park with her older friends. They used to smoke and seem sophisticated and
cool. She sighs the last word out wistfully and goes quiet when I ask her if she ever tried it.
I wanted to sing back then, she whispers, so quietly I’m afraid her sentiments will get lost on the wind. I was only young (she still is, I think) and I was going to audition for one of the talent shows you hate so much (we hate so much, I thought, but then wondered if I ever really knew that) and my life was going to change. I was going to be a pop star but I was going to sing jazz and blues. Be like Ella and Billie and Etta.
She sighs. Everyone wants to sing when they’re little though, don’t they?
She seems so weary, although you don’t think she’s done anything. She hasn’t been here long enough, you reason. Maybe that’s why she’s so special to you. Old beyond her years, you think, and then berate yourself for such a cliché. There’s little other way of describing it, though.
You met her two years, fifteen weeks and five days ago, and the sky was iron grey and sea was the colour of aluminium, and you wondered when everything became so grey and mechanical. You sat on the beach and watch the grains of sand trickle through your fingers, chilling you to the very bone, to the very core of you. She was like sunshine, though you resent that thought. She was more like the summertime storm that disperses clouds and lets the sunshine through, more of a transition than a conclusion. She smiled at you, and you nearly fell in love right then, were it not for the fact that you aren’t the kind of person to fall in love straight away. No, you waited until the next day to fall in love, and then remembered the twenty four hours of falling for the rest of your life.
Imagine that, she smiles at me. Singing, me. On a stage, with hundreds and thousands of people coming to watch. My name up in lights. She giggles at the idea, giddy within her own fantasy. She stays standing as I sit down and holds her arms out wide. Could you imagine it?
And I can because I can’t imagine how anyone could not love her as I do.
I wasn’t supposed to tell you, though I suppose you’d have guessed sooner or later. This little specimen of perfection, this ray of sunshine (this summertime storm, my own transition), I loved uncontrollably and unconditionally and her mannerisms and her peculiarities served only to make her more precious to me. She was fragile, like shards of sugar-glass or the wisps of cloud that cling to the moon. Delicate like the veins in the wings of aphids. And completely and utterly perfect.
She wakes in the night often. Her eyes don’t roll back and she isn’t covered in a fine sheen of sweat that glistens like clingfilm in the moonlight, but instead she lies quite still and listens to your breathing, counting up to a hundred, again and again like there are no numbers after that. You try to keep your breathing the same; deep, even sleep-breaths that convince neither of you but that fight to keep the illusion of normalcy within your carefully balanced life.
She could hurt you, you realise that. You rest ambitions on her. You pin devotion and obsession (though you’d rather not admit it) to her, taking care not to scratch her porcelain skin. When she is asleep, her eyelids flutter and you worry that she is dreaming of someone else. You know enough to be scared by the passion that has permeated your very existence. She is the centre of your universe; your meaning of infinity and your explanation of everything. She will, you realise that, as well. As soon as you know that she could, you know too that she will.
The sunset bruises the sky. She draws her knees up and tucks them underneath her chin. Her fingernails look like children’s nails, I realise. She still picks at them when she’s nervous. She sucks her thumb when she thinks no one looks, as well. And twirls strands of hair around her middle finger, and looks to the left when she thinks. I am more aware of her mannerisms than she is. I know her better than she does, I imagine.
Are they losing their magic yet? I ask.
She shakes her head slowly, thoughtfully. They’re all different, she says. Every single one of them. They won’t, will they?
Got the key of the door, never been 21 before.
She doesn’t come, even though I’d invited her. Her and her parents. I spend the night drinking too much and pretending to have a good time, all the time thinking of the way the moonlight tangled in her hair as she slept next to me.
We sleep on the sand, even though she insists it’s not practical. She’s right, of course, but as we rise to watch the sun crawl back into place, dyeing the clouds spectacular shades of orange and pink, we decide that it doesn’t matter. I decide it doesn’t matter. She sleeps through the sunrise, instead.
You don’t remember when you stopped being individual and started being plural. Two of you. We. You use that word even when she’s not with you, even when you’re on your own and people don’t know who the other half of you could be.
She sings for me, on the top of that dune with the sea as her backdrop and the clouds as her audience. Birds join in but they don’t know the words and soon get bored. She has a voice far older than her, a whisky-soaked, sorrowful voice that embraces each note tenderly. I close my eyes and pray that this could be an infinite moment, that she would never stop singing for me, and for the clouds, with the sea as her background.
