16/06/23

That place held, holds, significance, my mind warps memories around this place. The worst thing did not happen, he was never that person. But he did hurt me, because of him I saw things I should never have. And that place, that fence, became the maypole around which those 9 days danced and still dance to a tuneless tune.

Everything was abandoned there, the walk home saw me shedding all of my skin, all of myself, it was all gone by the time I got back to my room, seeing the sunrise, forcing myself to forget. I made sure no one walked those streets anymore, except for my own ghost. My body was no longer mine, nothing belonged to me anymore, I existed solely to be picked apart by carrion birds.

But my mum sings there, now. 

She sings there. 

When a place is abandoned by humans, nature floods in, an unnaturally natural force, takes hold. Roots fill the gaps left by man, butterflies unseen for decades begin to hover, birds otherwise gone live again and again in a place that was thought to be dead. It's the persistence of life, of nature, there is no end, there is no death, only continuation. Life goes on, things get better because they have to, not through effort but because they just do. 

Just like the bings where Dad would take me to see the moon, even since then, that place, a monument seen from space to man’s efforts to extract energy from the earth, that place has been reclaimed. A no man’s land, a place of lost hope, a beautiful blight on the landscape, has been taken by nature when man could do nothing. 

I emptied out my life years ago and filled it with artifice, with explosions, with trans dimensional movement and bearing witness to the end again and again. Never fully allowing nature to reclaim the ruins of my body, slowly, slowly it tries to take hold. The way I see the world, the way I view my life, was learned from my mum. In the same pattern she thought she’d lost herself.

But my mum reclaimed her life, in a way I was and still am not capable of doing. She filled her life with enjoyment, drive, and unselfconscious expression. The forces took hold, supported by our family and friends that make up the earth we walk on. 

My mum sings there now. 

The worlds overlapped, abandoned worlds where we lost ourselves, an intersection of realities created a portal. 

I wanted for years to lay flowers there, I don’t know why, I wanted to memorialise, to forgive myself, to put an end. But what good are dead flowers to memorialise the undead? The ground had been salted anyway, I made sure my own flowers could not grow. 

But, her voice is a rare bird I have yet to hear, in the conjunction between spaces it flew in and took roost. On the other side, at that church, she meets up with others, and she sings, she sings and she sings. The testament to the continuation of life, that things get better because they just have to.