Once upon a time, a man who was leaving university to go out into the world had a party. It was August, and hot, and dissertation time in England.

A girl was in her room that afternoon, piles of books and papers strewn over her window sill, her desk, bed and floor. It was too hot to breathe. The oak tree outside creaked in the occasional breeze. A dove chortled with it's mate and the grass swayed this way and that with a low gentle swishing. The muslin curtains were hot with the sunlight. White hot and still.

There was a violent blue in the sky. A violent green in the oak tree. So green, the very principle of green.

Everything so still, the breeze making only tiny punctuation marks in the quietness.

The girl's phone beeped. She was invited to drinks that evening, to bid farewell to the man who was going out into the world.

Dusk. Showered, dolled up, a tiny peach camisole because it was a hot night. Her grandmother's apricot shawl flowing over one arm in case it got chilly later. And then, the day swirled and gave up it's stillness and spiralled into the glittering of cocktails and ripples of cigarette smoke and the nameless enlivening laughter that is the background to all good party-memories.

A beautiful boy sat, one leg tossed over the other knee. A black shirt to match the black night and starry blue eyes. Violently blue, softly glimmering against the black.

The girl forgot the stillness of the day and had a drink and smoked and laughed and her eyes flashed and she danced.

She danced alone and poured out the stillness of the day, gave up the locked-down quality of the afternoon's heat, swayed like cigarette smoke. Twisting through the music, the boy with the black shirt found her like this, alone on the dance floor and smiled at her.

"There he is again," she thought, and reached out for his hand. Not realizing until much later what that thought really meant. There He is. Again.

And we're still dancing.

Amy, I hope you don't mind me writing about you on the internet.

My grandmother had a flower-table.
It was on the front-end of the house, on the top floor. You could see her at work at it when you drove up to the porch.
A slim, tall old lady with her hair done up and a belted pastel dress (always belted, always pastel, always a dress) and sometimes a cardigan.
Even at 80 she was slim and tall and wore a belted dress just below her knees and her legs stretched out out out long long long.
She had a walking stick. I've forgotten how fast or how slow she walked. I was too young to be alarmed by such things.

Anyway, the flower-table: It was a long sturdy trestle table with a light, summery plastic cover on it. At one end, an assortment of vases. No, not 'a couple' of vases. About a hundred vases. Every shape, size, texture and colour. At the foot of the table, several large buckets. These the gardener would fill every morning before she awoke, with fresh flowers from the gardens around the house. (I should explain: it is a huge house with extensive grounds and FLOWERS!!).
There'd be tiny bunches for little vases. These would be filled and lovingly placed on my grandfather's desk, in front of his picture. Other photo frames would be similarly graced with bright pink phlox or deep, thoughtful pansies or hazy violets. Every frame was beaten silver. Perfectly polished, impeccably simple rectangles holding the faces and smiles of people she loved. So many. And in the light that streaked through the drawn blinds in the afternoons, every slash of their silver edges was set further afire by a red rose, a saffron gulmohar, a huge explosion of raani-pink.

In some of the silver bowls there'd be ferns. These would sit as table arrangements at the lunch table. Something exquisite about the baby green of a frond, caressing an old burnished silver. Something that brings in all the damp green freshness of the fern-garden by the pond and melts a swathe of completely refined silver elegance into it. Takes away the impression of mud, leaves its lacey softness. These are things she taught me, wordlessly. I still feel a heart-lurching delight when I see them in my mother's house. No doubt she spent many mornings at that table too.

What I remember most is the colour and the smell.
Her colours were always light and airy and hazy. Like all the colours of the flower table had aged and mellowed and been diffused over time and had found their way onto her. So while on the table there'd be a deep emerald green, on her dress or belt there was mint or pista. Her fingertips, always fondling the petals on the little phlox flowers, would give way to baby pink palms. For every colour of flower or vase or day she had a corresponding mist in her skin, her eyes, her dresses, her soul.
And the smells. Her eu-de-cologne, her old Camay soap and the fresh smell of a new day that only comes when the entire house is surrounded by trees and a small army of gardeners with hosepipes, spraying the hot earth with water from the garden pond. The wet smell of the insides of vases, the wet smell of freshly cut flowers.

Every so often, I had to run downstairs to the garden and relay messages between the gardener and her: 'I asked for the blue ones!' 'Tell her I already told her they haven't flowered yet!!'. They loved each other. Everything he touched turned into blossom. Each blossom, she cherished. The clip-clip of her scissors so gentle. Never any hacking or tearing of leaves. Always time enough to feel a flower's petals. To point out its colour or softness or scent. To look into it's heart and put your nose in it ("Check for bees!!") and inhale!! A mock-deep breath and widened eyes were our sign to each other that truly this one is loveliest of them all. We always checked that yesterday's vases had enough water, enough light. No flowers ever wasted.

Once, there were too many little ones in the larger silver bucket.
She said, "Run down to Janardhan and ask him to do that thing he did for your mother. Go."
Janardhan was squatting by a flowerbed, smoking a bidi. He saw me clambering down the garden steps with a huge bucket full of pink and blue flowers.
Wordlessly, he took the bucket from me, handed me the hosepipe, "Here, you hold this." I was so delighted that I was being allowed to take over the watering, I didn't think to ask what he was going to do with the flowers.
Ten minutes later he nudged me. In both hands, a perfectly formed blue and pink and green wreath in his hands. Made without a shred of wire or rope. A crown of flowers. He put it on my head and said "Raani."
I was a garden fairy-queen that day. I spread my arms and mock-floated, mock-flew, up the steps and back to my grandmother, wearing my crown, and she let me keep it on all day.

Rage

The 'quiet within' is overblown.
It's a veil.
There's nothing silent about shock.
I want to cry violently.
Or smash something. Noiselessly. But not quietly. And not a glass. A table. A chair. A door. The wardrobe and all my shoes within it. A building. A mountain. Bring it on.
Tear down a tree.
Scream in a desert.
Fuck someone.

And all this, not out of anger. There is nothing to be furious about.
But adrenaline is like an atom bomb, sending shockwaves long before the noise. Then a white heat before the thunder.
And right now there is white heat white noise, and I want to break something.

Except I will be nice to myself and the universe, since it it colluding in my father's recovery and just smoke a noiseless cigarette outside in the sun instead.

Finite lives, finite planet.

Even when the day is bright, and the afternoon is long, time swishes this way and that and is gone.
Never enough time. To love everyone fully, even when love is coursing through every vein, jostling your blood out of the way.

For someone with such a ruthlessly effective and final 'let go' mechanism, I find to my surprise that now,
I can't.

I stood outside the house smoking today.
I looked at the moon and there was a veil of mist passing it by. I watched it pass.
The brightest moon this year.
The warmest night.

I love my father so, so much. I cannot bear being away from him at this time. And yet, here I am. Doing bullshit all day.
He would be so disappointed in me.

My mother is so brave, so brave.
She grew up intensely alone. Terribly lonely.
She wraps her own arms around herself in times like this. Such a fragile, sensitive, soft woman. But her aloneness is like steel. She eats her breakfast, she does her hair, she selects her clothes, she folds them.
On days when I couldn't bear to brush my teeth or wash my face or even change my underwear. She's fresh and clean and bathed, with food in her tummy and her steely aloneness even through her tears.
I, having grown up in a house with two angels like my mum and dad, surrounded always by the most intense, palpable love, can never wrap steel around myself like this. I simply don't have it in me.
No steel. No walls. No armour. No moat. No blanket. No nothing.
Just cigarettes and the occassional bleed onto a blog post.
These are all I have right now to keep my expression straight, my fingers moving, my breath going in and out.

I love them so much.

Particularly cogent right now.

Be kind. Everyone you meet is fighting a great battle.
- e.e. cummings.

I vent therefore I am.

Or something a bit less self-indulgent....
But anyway here is my list of thoughts as they're occuring to me, all at once.
It took a coffee and a cigarette and the first warm sunshine of the year to be able to seperate these out as seperate thoughts.

The thoughts are:

• Dad is better now so I can stop panicking. They've diagnosed what it was, treatment started within the first half hour of it's onset, excellent doctors - including him - managing his treatment, stop stop stop panicking!!
  
• Dad is better now so I can stop making a militant effort at keeping calm, and therefore fall to pieces with pent-up panic combined with shattering relief. (Boyfriends shoulders are excellent for the sort of Biblical deluge this brings about.)
  
• However: Still feel numb from shock. That gave me a big fright. My Mum called me and said 'Papa's not well, he's in the ambulance, he's not conscious.' Whatever lurched inside me at that second, I hope it wasn't my heart, because that was one solid smash I felt. I think I am still stuck, mentally, in that moment 2 days ago. So I have two days worth of feelings as backlog. (No, they don't actually go away when put into storage; you have to feel them through and through. Gah.)
  
• To put everything into perspective, this thought: Get over yourself, you wretched, self-absorbed, self-indulgent, entirely stupid girl. Think what Mum must feel.
• However: Mum is right there and can hold his hand, and he can hold hers. I feel adrift and alone, halfway across the world, hearing his heart monitor bleeping in the background when I'm on the phone.
  
• But: Having said that: Come on, child. You're your Dad's daughter. This is a man who would not have you sopping and 'feeling numb', he'd have you say a short prayer (since you're so-inclined), gather yourself in a quiet corner and plunge into the day knowing that this too, shall pass, and just helping out whenever you're needed. None of this crying or wailing down the phone would impress him at all. Therefore. Stop.
  

Whoo that was difficult to type out, even harder to seperate out into seperate thoughts. In my head it all feels like a combined mess of aaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrhhhhhhh!! But when it comes to dealing with the aaarrrrgh divide-and-conquer has definite advantages :)
Yay. On my way back to smiling at the sunshine again.