Here I am, here I am...

Singing songs into the darkness

This week’s The Crow is another in a series of pieces that fly close to the pain and ecstasy of Love. It’s a tale that stretches through time and place, weaving grand universal themes through small fleeting moments.

One of the many rewarding aspects of writing Jonathan Foster’s The Crow is the freedom to experiment with form and genre. I hope this piece manages to sing a quiet song in your heart.

Photo by Gabriel Dizzi on Unsplash

1.

I watched a young women pushing a pram. She was strolling along, gliding, a picture of confident tranquility, two newly born lives on the precipice of everything. She slowed for a beat and glanced at her reflection in a vast window as she passed. Yes, that’s me. Us. I am now Mother. Forever.

Lost in the moment I felt an unbearable lightness of being, both anchored and anchor-less, the tantalising sensuality of peering into deep clear water, the addictive nature of vertigo, as I watched them topple toward their new lives.

And then I’m pulled back in as my own daughter reached into my hand and, as our eyes met, asked, “Will Grandma go to Heaven or Hell?”

“Heaven or Hell don’t exist,” I reply, “not really, they are just ideas. Your grandma lives in your memory now.”

“What if I forget her?” she asked. I say she shouldn’t worry, that it was ok, that everything changes, even if you forget her you’ll always love her and she’ll always love you

“What if I forget you?” she asked and I laughed and lifted her and kissed her and said “you’ll never forget me,” and she held me so tightly I can still feel it to this day.

---

After the drinks had been drunk and the bills paid and the car park slowly emptied we walked from the funeral through the village for a final time. I know I am not a good keeper of memories and all this would eventually dissolve. I know too that memories shift like tectonic plates over time, reshaping my interior landscapes. I know that memories are living creatures that can suddenly unveil intuitive perceptions and epiphanies out of the blue like small explosions of forgiveness or tolerance or understanding. I know all this because of you.

I have, on rare occasions, told people about your last words to me, as if it were heroic on my part to display my battle scarred heart. I’ve told them how you were sitting on the edge of your hospital bed, looking me straight in the eye, neither of us speaking, knowing this was the last time we would ever see each other, and that you sharpened your gaze and with what little intensity you had left, said, “It’s a shame that you never did anything with your life before I died.”

I’ve told them these things because I did not know how to forgive you and I did not know how to let go. But as the years past and my own daughters became young women I felt my memories shifting like tectonic plates, I felt those living memories baying through the mists and I heard their song differently than I once heard it. And I learnt to soften. And I learnt to forgive.

I wished I had battled through the weight of emptiness and reached toward you and told you everything would be ok and that I was sorry and although you were to blame you were also not to blame. But I didn’t do any of those things. Not then. But now.

2.

“Do you remember when you told me Heaven and Hell didn’t exist?” my daughter asked

“Oh yeah, huh. Not really, when?”

“I remember feeling grateful but I didn’t know why. Not grateful, More relieved, I think. It was a relief. It was at your mother’s funeral.”

“I told you Heaven and Hell don’t exist at my mother’s funeral?”

“Yeah, you did.”

We both start laughing.

“What do you mean, it was a relief?”

“I don’t know. You spoke to me so honestly, so clearly, like I was somebody.”

“You are somebody.”

“You know what I mean. It felt like you saw me. It felt like if you saw me like that, really saw me, then who cared about Heaven and Hell. Like if you really saw me I was always safe.”

“Did you actually think that as a kid, that I saw you and you were safe?”

“Nope. But years later, looking back I realised that’s what I thought.”

“I’ve always seen you my girl.”

“I know you have.”

And I felt the shimmer as I dissolved.

3.

I don’t remember when it dawned on me that I needed to keep an eye on you. Not for your safety, but for my own. Did your unpredictability train my sensitivity, my empathy? I learnt to read your moods, to be one step ahead, just in case.

I don’t remember when I realised you were a conduit conveying pain that was not only yours, but a burden carried from the past, through time, from one act of cruelty to the next. I don’t remember realising that you couldn’t help breaking everything around you, especially the most precious and important things. You couldn’t stop yourself. It was all you knew.

I don’t remember realising that our hearts had been broken over and over, again and again. And that broken hearts sometimes grew in strength, and sometimes they stayed broken. And that unbroken hearts were very rare. Maybe they only existed very early in the morning, just after waking, just before remembering.

And I don’t remember realising that it was up to me to break this pattern.

But I must have known these things for I know them now.

4.

As I lay on the sofa listening to humpbacks singing, my mind’s eye fills with great white flippers languidly lolloping through the Pacific. I could see huge powerful tails slowly beating through the deep. I could feel their ghostly ancient voices singing songs. A mother and calf with their rubbery liquorice undersides. A mother and calf peacefully breaking the surface. A mother and her calf. A calf and her mother. The ever blossoming self-perpetuating cycle of life.

The record, “Song’s Of The Humpback Whale,” had it’s own clicks and scratches mingled in with the whoops and drops and whistles of the whales. Before digitalisation there was a intuitive and mechanical simplicity to things. Whales pumped air through their mighty larynx’s. Records spun at 33rpm as needles scratched vibrations from the groove.

People have tried to understand what the whales were “communicating” to each other, but I don’t care. I knew they are singing love songs into the universe, calling to each other, here I am, here I am. I thought being a whale was exquisite. I thought being a human was not. We had silenced the love songs we once sang into the universe. Our singing days are over. The waves of love that once seemed warm and true were now calculated and unknowable. We had digitalised our love. It was no longer enough to sing here I am, here I am.

Nobody gets through this life unscathed. Maybe that’s the beauty of it. Maybe life is nothing more than singing love songs into the deep as Orcas ever circle in the gloom. Maybe that fine balance between sanctuary and danger, that safe haven in the firelight as hands are held and the dark is repelled, as death circles in the gloom, maybe that is where dignity and true love reside. So rave on, rave on and sing your song, till your lost and bursting, then sing some more, then sing some more.

5.

I shall sail within you across the darkest seas, where no maps are drawn, nor eyes have seen, where I be you and you be me, singing songs that echo through the universe, sing with me, if you dare, I am here, I am here, I am here.

I should have braved these words when you were still alive. But I was yet to fully unfurl. You should have braved those words, but your unfurling was broken by a shadow. Such is the way of things. But I didn’t know that then. Not then. But now. But now I know.

6.

In this gossamer thin, delicate life, with all its transience and volatility, with all its seemingly perishable meaninglessness, there is an elemental, essential power held together by those songs.

Through this shimmering illusion of life and death we shall reach toward each other, beckon each other, resurrect each other and never relinquish or surrender to the emptiness.

So I placed my daughter on the ground and kept warm hold of her hand and I knew that one day, as the domino’s fall, my time would come and she would be my memory keeper in this ever blossoming, self-perpetuating cycle of life.

So careful shall I be, with the tenderness of the human heart, and with gentle hands shall I reach through the shimmer to be remembered. So careful shall I be, as I rearrange the broken pattern handed down to me.

Yet carefree shall I be as I sing here I am, here I am, here I am.

And I knew all these things as we all walked together through the village hand in hand. And I knew I need do nothing more in this life than strive to eventually live well in my daughter’s memory. To pay attention. To see and be seen. To reach through the emptiness and forgive all. These very days and forever more.