Читать книгу Twice The Speed of Dark - Lulu Allison - Страница 10

Sometimes I am hooked by a stray wisp of gravity and pulled back to the body of the Earth. Soft grass, hot dust, a sharp stone – for drifting moments I remember how they felt underfoot. I remember how it felt to have a place. Gravity is once more my friend, my engine. The breeze on my ghost skin brushes memories of life into shimmering being.

In this endless black emptiness, this vacuum field of bright spilled beads, I yearn for form, a body. I long for a chance to face the eternal dark of death once more.

Did I die because by chance I met a boy? Or did my destiny shape me in some way, to meet him, to become a component in his acts? No, it cannot be so. I died because he chose it. That shivers through me. The memory of it. How he could betray love so completely. He played himself so fully that he knew no boundary to his self-expression. Perhaps he didn’t choose to kill me, but he chose not to prevent himself causing fatal harm. He chose not to censor himself. He chose to hurt. It is puzzling, such a choice. There is so little to gain. And it hurt so much. The thud of my heart trying to hold that hurt still echoes in the blackness. This blackness is a rich enough medium to hold such waves.

Other waves, records of love, also echo through me and the blackness. Minute, telling imprints, tiny waves. A disc, a furrowed dish. A plate of love spinning out from the warm beat of a body. The blackness holds thin echoes of those waves. So does my memory. The soft denim of my father’s shirtsleeve, the solid warmth of his shoulder beneath as I leaned my head against it. The two of us in profound and mundane harmony, sitting on the sofa, watching a film. Toast and jam cut into nine small squares. My mother sitting on my bed until I slept, because I was scared. Hours and weeks and years of familial love. And sunny days of friendship – happy girls, bright with the fun of going out, high-heel–and–lip-gloss happy. I died young, but I am ancient now. The light can’t find me any more to make me bright. I have no surface.

I am part of this blackness, subject to it anyway, riding the waves of its vast echo, being ridden by the jags and troughs of its monstrous silent beat. It hurls me in ferocious arcs. Sometimes, I am thrown back to the softer realms of Earth, and how I try to cling, to form within myself a holding–on. To anchor in the calm blue orb of Earth.

I often found myself, at the beginning, for long enough to gather, in the fields. I had memories of the clods of clay soil. When I lived, I was there often; it was so familiar. Many hours in these home lands. Pockets of countryside, fields and copses. Small ranges, but enough, when you look inwards for much of the time, as I did, to get lost for days. Stopping to stroke the skull dome of a chalky hunk of flint, the grey underside sheared smooth and cold as a blade. Tickling my palm with the fringed field edges – long grasses and cow parsley. A tingling memory of those sensations. I looked up at the sheltering sky for as long as I could, trying to consume, trying to become. Trying to breathe it, trying to make a new body, trying once more to become something out of nothing. But that trick belongs to a secret order. The seeds of something out of nothing are scattered liberally; it is a daily, hourly miracle. But not one we are able to perform for ourselves. I have learned for certain that you can only be given a body, not make one. You can only be gifted a place in gravity’s purlieu.

To start with, when I was first dead, I was confused, caught between memory and experience, between memories from before and those since. I had pictures and knew faces, but I did not know if I had seen them through my living or my dead eyes. Because I see them still, those I loved, but they don’t see me, I don’t think. Sometimes I feel something, a tremor, and wonder if they do feel my presence, or think of me. But these visits, they became part of the kaleidoscope jangle of what I drag with me. I don’t always know where the pictures belong – sight or memory, living or dead eyes. I hang onto each one, to sort and join together, to find its place and knit my story stronger for the telling.