The last conversation I had with my Father, I think I knew it was the last.
A voice at the back of my head said, oh, you should tell him what's going on with you. Tell him you're writing a book. Tell him you're happy, or sad, or scared, or whatever. Share yourself.
But what came out instead was I love you, Papa. And he said, I love you too, yes I do. 

I didn't believe what I knew, so I smiled and hung up and went about my normal day with a neutral mood and allowed myself to be frazzled by stupid stuff like the next day's deadlines and schedules and how Marks and Spencer was about to close and I should run there to get dinner.
And that was that. The end, for me, of my relationship with my Father in this physical life. And it came as I thought about my dinner and my hunger and my deadlines.

Days later, I stood by his hospital bed, and we knew that he would not wake up, no matter what, no matter how much music we played or how much we talked to him. I wanted to tell him so many things and people said that he'd be able to hear me, or sense what I was saying. I thought I'd tell him I was writing a book, or that I was sad, or scared, or happy, or fine, or not. I thought I would say that I had always loved and admired him, that he was (?is) my hero. I thought I'd ask if he hated me for being in England while he was ill, that I missed his last day of consciousness, that I was thinking about Marks and Spencer during our last conversation. I thought of saying sorry for so many things. Thank you for so many more. Small and big. Compelling, banal, life. I thought I'd recount every memory of the two of us, memories that were flooding my mind. But all that came out, again and again, loudly, softly, silently, in every possible way, was I love you, Papa.
I thought I'd say don't go, I'm scared, please stay, I need you. But all that came out was I love you.
Maybe that is all that matters. 

I often dream that my Father is still alive.
I often dream that we still live in the old house with the garden at the back.  We moved out of there seven years ago.  The site of our home was demolished 4 years ago, and in it's place a brave new building grows taller every day.  But you wouldn't know it from my dreams.  
I wish my heart would catch up, but it seems to keep its own sweet time. 

I have lakes, and lakes, and lakes, of sadness inside me.
At the edge of each are golden sedges and meadow flowers, and the mist above each is rainbow hued because high up there, the sun is shining in a perfect bright sky. As I walk through this landscape, I pick wildflowers, I smile at the rainbows, I turn my face up to the sun.
My feet dry in the warmth, on solid ground.
And just ahead, there is the next lake.

The flowers float to the surface, but I do not follow, not for a long time. Deeper and deeper and deeper until I touch the soft dark sand at the bottom. And then it's a long, dark, cool swim back to the open sky, not knowing which is up and which is down, until the surface breaks and I'm back amongst my floating flowers.

Here's a thought that makes me smile:
My fingertips touch hundreds, maybe thousands of different things every day and I am probably unconscious of most of their sensations. But when they brush against the Man's fingertips, even just in passing, my whole body notices, and my mind  stops. Every time, any time.

I like to think that if there are auras and personal energy fields, you'd be able to see something happening around my fingertips when I touch him. I like to think that on some level, there's an actual sound, like a crackle of electricity, that we make when we touch.

And I think: I've held... how many hands so far, with other men I've loved and been with? Dozens? Hundreds? And it was nice, of course. But it didn't spark my body and stall my mind. And that tells me something.   

The night the clock went back

I turned around in bed last night to see the Man curled up beside me, in a deep sleep.  A wedge of streetlight came in through the window and splashed across the foot of our bed, and  the chestnut tree rustled in the wind. Two leaves gone, four, golden summer dropping away one leaf at a time. The clocks went back silently, but I think I woke up at the moment that they did, and saw the timeless things around which the world turns. Golden leaves falling in the wind, streetlight, the fan of a lovers eyelashes.
I took it in, in the half-dark: Time passing, time stopping, time moving backwards. And us standing together within it.

It's what's inside

Lets: curl up together like two cats (me grey, you brown and white. Both purring) on the windowsill of whatever ruin we are inhabiting. In the bar of sunshine, fanned by the breeze. Why don't we: Discover the corners where the nightwind does not reach, where the broken wooden floor creaks, where it doesn't. We'd learn how to use the stairs without breaking them, how to lap water from any pool in the garden after the rain. Let's just Be here, together. Let's prowl under the thornbushes and watch the sunset, let the flashing street flash by. Let's sit silently side by side and just watch. Let's listen to the creaking house and let it creak. Let the wind play with the curtain or take the chimney down. We have what we need: a bed, a sill, each other's shoulders and chests and paws. Let's wake in the middle of the night to the sound of the rain, and in the morning to the sound of the setting stars. I want all this with you, as the flashing street clatters by. Let it go on, on and on, as we sit in here. Let them think it's a ruined house, abandoned and empty. We know its every creak. We love its every corner. I love every moment in it. Our palace. 

Dark have been my dreams of late

I've been dreaming again. There are times in my life when I simply crash into oblivious sleep, and others when I spend night after night after night wandering my emotional landscape. Sometimes the landscape is magical. Sometimes terrifying. I wake tired, sore even, and recognize that while I never left my bed, I have actually been on an inner journey.  

I've been dreaming of water. Flooded rivers and deep forest pools into which mysterious magi dive from great heights, from diving platforms high up in the trees. Dark forests on the edge of deep blue oceans, the colour of no ocean I recognise. I dream, for the first time in my life, of being pregnant. In these dreams I am wandering wild landscapes with burning sunset skies and I am anxious about whether I really am pregnant, or whether I am dreaming the whole thing. 

I wake frightened, with my palm pressed against my tummy. I remain unsettled through the day, half because of the landscape I have been in, and half because I want to return there as soon as possible. 

Who is to say which is more real. The forests of my dreams with their fire and water and freedom and panic, or the world in which I type these words.