The consummate funambulists

‘You once asked me to speak to someone unconnected to our situation about this high wire act of mine. To get some sort of support. The truth is, I cannot voice this pain to anyone but I can write about it. I must write about it. My contrary nature, my secret underside shrinks at the very thought of sharing.’

She would not risk hearing what she did not want to hear. She didn’t want to be told that her behaviour was self-destructive, because – for the time being, at least – she wanted to go on sweetly destroying herself. Or rather, she still wanted the highs and knew that the lows were the price she paid for them.

But perhaps it was that she knew it would do no good, that the healing had to come slowly but surely – ultimately, eventually – from inside herself.

He thought it would be easier, a relief, when she finally decided that she could not continue to behave that way; when sufficient time had passed that he knew for sure it was over. That she no longer wrote must mean either that she was avoiding facing the pain, or no longer felt it, or that she felt she must hide it from him, and so put it behind her that way. He thought, with it over and she silent, that he would be forced to move on. But his feeling of loss never seemed to lessen. And if she cried out for him tomorrow, next year, or out of the blue in a decade’s time, he knew that he would let the lucid madness of their love – their high wire act – envelop him all over again.

The patience of a saint

She was an easy woman to love. She was not an easy woman to love.

To love her required only a look at her face, a taste of her mind, an encounter with her heart. But when the shutters were up, to continue to do so necessitated having the patience of a saint. He doubted many had waited longer than he, in the whole history of the human race. Perhaps only in fiction was he beaten, by Florentino Ariza waiting nearly the whole of his adult life for Fermina Daza, or by the Roman centurion who watched over the cell of Amelia Pond for a thousand years before reclaiming her.

But could he really call himself a saint, when he was in fact a sinner? Possibly not, but his waiting did seem sainted, or saintlike. Or perhaps it was monkish. Like a Benedictine, he used the time to brew up the headiest concoctions. Like a Trappist, he self-abnegated. Like a Buddhist, he mindfully meditated away building frustration before it turned to anger and reproach. He calmed his troubled mind until it reflected the sky like a millpond beside a wood on a still summer’s day.

When he had her, when she readmitted him to the inner sanctums of her mind, body, psyche, it was as though he was flying (no wonder, then, that the stories they told of their love were scattered with bird imagery). Afterwards, for a day or two he would be exultant. Then he would sense a change in the weather. The temperature seemed to drop or the wind got up. He put on an additional layer of protection against the cold. The exultancy slowly drained away. He waited out the cold, the wind, the storm, knowing that she suffered their effects no less than he, and was as powerless to do anything about them.

Though often he imagined it might be more like a dead calm, with far-off, real life intervening. When and where everything stopped for as long as it needed to stop. Again, he calmed his troubled mind until it reflected the colours of the sky like a millpond sea. He observed the clouds, the indescribably blue blueness of the sky. He understood. He was a giant mouth or cerebral orb of understanding. He was a sinning saint, a sainted sinner. He would continue to wait. He waited, because she was not free, any more than he was. He waited, because she was worth waiting for. He waited, because the love dictated that he must.

Test of faith

Each time she went away, he drew on his belief in her to keep him going through the long hours, days and weeks of her absence. He barely had to add any fuel at all to keep the fire burning. But inevitably, after a time – it might be a fortnight or longer, depending on the nature of her absence and the comings and goings of his day-to-day life without her – the situation would once again become intolerable, or as close to intolerable as it’s possible to come, if you are not to blot out your consciousness with drink or drugs or sleep or death. And then his faith would be tested. If she loved him at all, how could she desert him for so long? How could she not answer the call implicit in the visible tokens of his love, the words he wrote for her and her alone? Why was he persisting with someone who so rarely answered his prayers? Every day that ticked by without her was one less left to him; should he not find a better way of spending his time than in this endless waiting?

He was shoulder-to-shoulder with Patti Smith when she sang, ‘Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine’, but that didn’t stop him from feeling like Jesus in the wilderness of the desert. One by one, he faced down the temptations that the devil placed before him. He would eat no bread other than hers, even when he was at his hungriest. He would not throw himself from a mountain top, and demand that she catch him. And he wanted no riches, no splendid possessions; he wanted only to serve her with his love.

The day before he died, the pope’s long-term sweetheart had apparently said to him: ‘Jesteś całym moim światem’. You are my whole world. And so it was for this unholy man. He would not take the easy path. He knew that this love was worth waiting for. Every moment of his life that he had dedicated to her, whether in thought or words or deed was to him the best possible use of time. He believed in no other way than love and so what could he do but carry on giving her his all?

Every time he faced the feeling of being forsaken, he managed to come through his test of faith.

(Don’t You) Forget About Me

Every day there are reminders, and on top of those, experiences or thoughts or ideas and sometimes even facts that I wish I could share with you. I know it’s been so for you too.

Writing my stories that no-one reads. A woman’s accent, or the colour of another’s hair. A photo of a heron in a swamp. A scene in a book or on a screen; the dilemmas and hazards of love. Memories too of the raw, urgent wanting that became a lifeblood necessity.

Then there is the constant debate I have with myself about whether to speak (directly, indirectly, in words, in images, or through the burial of treasure) or to stay silent (and so voice the love that way, preserving the fragile peace of a decision to live life one way rather than another). The answer mutates, evolves, performs a volte-face, solidifies, melts away. Forget about me. (Don’t you) forget about me.

The song comes on the radio, portentously sung, sounding as cavernous and as redolent of its time as ever. It worms its way in, despite. I imagine a softer, acoustic version. I even imagine that I could sing and play it, that I am doing so in a cellar bar, following it with a cover of a song that is wholly different in all but name: Forget About (and (don’t you) forget about Forget About). You are among the audience, having slipped in quietly at the back, unobserved. I can’t see you, but I can sense you. I sing both songs for you, of course. All my songs would be for you, even the ones that weren’t specifically about you. I imagine you swaying on the breeze of my music, which, like a glass or two of your favourite wine, carries you simultaneously into and out of yourself. I imagine the rush of desire you would feel, knowing what the audience do not, that the songs are being sung to you, for you. I know that rush, I’ve felt it myself, it’s intoxicating. I know you will be waiting for me after my set, standing to one side until all the well-wishers have dropped away. Then the need for us to be alone will become increasingly urgent. We might not even make it home before it takes us, before we take each other.

In reality, both of us struggle to hold a tune, so it’s pure fiction, but believe it or not, I am learning the piano, taught by my bossy son, who has something of his mother’s pedagogic streak. And on Friday night I will be in an actual cellar bar, listening to someone who really knows how to play guitar turn the craft of strumming and picking at strings into molten music. You will be there with me, in my pocket, in my mind, in my heart.

Like the early-turning leaves of fiery maple trees and the ever-changing shape and degree of opacity of clouds against the sky, the reminders are invariably also consolations. They bring me closer to you, masking the absence, making me forget about it. But only for a time, because whether momentary or sustained, as soon as the experience is over, there is the urge to tell you about it. In turn that urge reminds me of where we stand, parted and apart and yet forever conjoined in a period of time that stretches both back into the past and forward into the unknowable future, where hope still manages to best the shrewdest assessment.

And here in the present moment, you are once again wholly on my mind.

52 things I loved about you (and love about you still)

Clubs

• A: Your love of words and stories and where imagination can take a writer and a reader. Where it took us.
• 2: How you would search for or happen upon the right myth with which to tell your stories; particularly, of course, our story.
• 3: Your ideas. Some I took, and ran with, but it wasn’t theft, not really, because you were my muse, and I was yours, and it all got mixed up, so that you were in my ideas and words and I was in yours. You were a starter, but by your own admission, rarely a finisher, and sometimes I would finish what you started, for the love of it; for the love in it.
• 4: The way you could steamroller me with words when there was something on your mind, so that I could hardly get one in edgeways. Not that I minded, and not that I wished to. In full flow, you were magnificent.
• 5: That you were searingly honest with me about the fluxing state of your feelings. It was not in you to pretend, and so I always got the unadulterated you.
• 6: The precise combination of fearless and fearful that was you.
• 7: Your taste, in all things, from cacti to books. Everything you handled and warmed to either physically or mentally was, I think, an expression of the youness of you, and by extension, a part of the you I loved.
• 8: Your frankness, that unwillingness to call a spade anything other than a spade, no matter that I might think it a fork or a shovel.
• 9: Your black moods, when nothing could rescue you from the hole or paralysis you were in, not even love. Because although we both might have wished them never to descend, they were a part of you, and they only made me love you all the more.
• 10: How you were (are still) knitted into the various communities of which you were (are still) formally or informally (but mostly the latter) a member – quietly proud of them, but never blind to their deficiencies. You were (are still) wedded to a place in a way that I am not, and yet you knew (know still) the value of a contrast.
• J: Your love of animals.
• Q: In particular, what became our shared love of birds. Oh, and the comically highfalutin names you gave your poultry.
• K: So catholic in your taste, so unwittingly Catholic in the way that guilt plagued you. Again, I loved you all the more for it, for never allowing us to believe that it could be an easy ride.

Diamonds

• A: Your flaws, and that I could see how you had stuck yourself back together after you had broken. How it was a tanka of yours about those fractures that ultimately led me to this place. You never hid them from me; quite the contrary, you drew attention to them, mending the cracks with the golden lacquer of your words, the golden joinery of them.
• 2: Your eyes, ‘a blue million miles’.
• 3: The way you used those eyes for your work, and what you chose in that quick computation which took place between them and the aesthetic and commercial parts of your judgment.
• 4: How our conversations would range across hours, days, months even, always picking up where we left off, until we were connected by a myriad of threads, any of which could even now be picked up at a moment’s notice.
• 5: That you could be the life and soul of a party and yet simultaneously the detached observer, noticing everything, at least until your head was spun out of its observances by the drink.
• 6: How you led me (or we led each other) into other cultures – Russian, Japanese, Greek, Central American. We infused our own blood with shots of theirs, and magpie-like, took anything we wanted from their mythologies and added it to our own.
• 7: Your wish to do the right thing, at no matter what personal cost.
• 8: The intoxicating rush that was your hedonistic streak. That you loved to drink, and how wild you were when you did. That moderation was always difficult for you, though perhaps you have achieved it now, at a time when life has finally suggested it of you.
• 9: Your impatience. The heady rush of that, too. And when you were feeling both impatient and hedonistic, well, nothing could stand in your way, and certainly not me.
• 10: The way you have sought to heal your body from those excesses, with the kind of determination which is I think more second nature than you know or believe.
• J: I was never quite sure how much I had to do with it, but that you became a runner, more or less from scratch; and if you did take any inspiration from me and my running, then for taking inspiration from me, too.
• Q: Your insistence on living in the moment. Being determined to make the best of what you had (have), rather than pine or yearn. A lesson I am still trying to learn from you.
• K: Your love of the natural world about you, and the way you could describe it with a raw sensitivity that would be the envy of any writer.

Hearts

• A: Like any mother, but no less admirable for that, the unconditional nature of your love for your children. That undoubtedly they each have something of you, which will live on in them, and in the children they go on to have.
• 2: That really beautiful poem you wrote about your own mother.
• 3: All of your poems, written with all the most vital organs of your body. To find myself captured – or rather, held for a moment in time – in so many of them was among the greatest of the many gifts you gave me.
• 4: Your prose, what were to me spellbinding insights from right inside of a woman, drawing on everything around her. To read you was to be you, to feel and see it all.
• 5: Your tipsy typos. Sometimes, your stone-cold sober ones. And how you would always welcome the attentions of a certain member of the typo police. Especially in relation to crimes involving the apostrophe.
• 6: The colour of your hair. The way it curled about your face, the way it felt in my hands, the way it grazed my navel.
• 7: Your being ever so slightly lop-sided and asymmetrical. Your figure less than Greek, but all the more beautiful to me for that.
• 8: The hard-won flexibility and pliancy of that asymmetrical body of yours.
• 9: Those traits in you which might be called spiritual or even hippy-dippy, but which acted as a foil to the underlying existential bent of your mind.
• 10: How you loved to tease me, to try and get a rise out of me; oh, and the trouble into which it got you.
• J: Your rootedness, despite what that meant for me, for us.
• Q: Your ability to assert yourself.
• K: The many, many times when you made me feel that I was all that mattered. And I know that in those moments, I was, as you were to me, too. We were all that mattered.

Spades

• A: That you were, like me, a wanker, and proud of it. How you used to suggest that there are only two kinds of people; those who were wankers, and those who were not.
• 2: That you were experienced. Oh, the tales you could tell.
• 3: Both your inability to escape omphaloskepsis, and your urge to do so. Not to mention your willingness to use words like omphaloskepsis. I still contend that you are more of a bluestocking than you think you are.
• 4: That you were both a creature of the night and a lover of the light, an ethereal, moonlit woman of mystery and seduction, and a rare meadow wildflower, longing for and turning your head to the sun.
• 5: The look of your mouth, and the way you would bite your lip. Even the way you bit your nails.
• 6: The taste of your mouth, and our kisses, from the softest to the greediest.
• 7: The way your body felt against mine, whether clothed or naked.
• 8: The endlessness of our love-making. How it could never quite finish, how it almost immediately rose phoenix-like from the ashes of each petite mort.
• 9: The look in your eyes when we sat a little apart, touching ourselves – proud almost to the point of defiance, not unaware of the power of your sexuality, and yet at the same time, as vulnerable and needy as a novitiate pleasing a man for the first time. How could something be both an unselfconscious performance and at the same time, a self-conscious truth? And yet it was so.
• 10: The way you loved to be treated sexually, and where and how and why you loved to be so treated, not to mention with what.
• J: The way you sucked my cock as much with your eyes as your mouth.
• Q: Your cunt, and its particular taste, indescribably intoxicating, though I tried once to describe it, in a poem.
• K: Your dirtily beautiful and beautifully dirty mind.

 

Wall, come tumbling down

Better the problems you have without walls than the ones you create through building them. – Old Japanese proverb.

I’m staring at a blank white wall. It’s higher than I can climb and so long that after its vanishing point, I imagine it wraps itself right around the earth. Or is it simply wrapped right around me? Every now and again, by some process that I don’t understand – because it seems to seep through from the other side – graffiti appears on the Wall. These are all the words I am allowed, and my eyes are greedy for them. Mind and heart, they are other matters. The mind varies from millpond calm to overwrought, while the heart is starved but valiant; both seek crumbs of comfort in the words. Sometimes I imagine that I am rewarded, and sometimes I imagine that I am not, that there is no consolation in them. Occasionally the words are so bleak that my heart is filled with an urgent sense that I should break through the wall to help or at least provide solace. But the wall is thick as well as high and long and such tools as I have at my disposal blunted and useless.

I have however been able to rent a shack in the lee of the Wall. The border guards supplied me with a table, chair, and all the paper I require, as long as I write for them whatever proclamations are needed in protection of the Wall. When I am not working for them, I am free to continue writing the book I began shortly after the Wall appeared. I have heard that it may be possible to get the book distributed on the other side of the Wall and I hope that one day my book will find its way into the hands it is meant for.

When I am not writing the book – and it is an all-consuming thing, because time has never been more of the essence – I think about walls, and what lies on each side of them. The Great Wall of China. Hadrian’s Wall. The Berlin Wall. The wall sealing off the West Bank. The grotesque wall once built and destroyed nightly by a rock group. The pointless wall that two indebted poker players built as penance for their refusal to be cowed, or was it their lack of humility? And the one built out of compacted ice and simply called The Wall, intended to keep out an army of the dead commanded by wraiths.

Though it remains to be seen what happens with the last of these walls, history seems to teach us that whatever necessity or understandable rationale might have inspired their creation, there is no joy to be taken from them; that it is only their ultimate destruction and subsequent state of ruination which give us any kind of pleasure. Crazed, putative wall-builders would do well to remember that.

Besides my writings and my imaginings, very little happens. I exert myself physically two or three times a week, and take myself and my memories in hand every now and again, and that is all. Occasionally I take a break from the world I have become absorbed in creating to try to scratch out something on my side of the wall, wondering if the words will permeate the structure and appear legible on its obverse face. But I never know for sure what kind of effect the words have on the reader for whom I intend them, and that absence of reaction defeats the hopes which that stupidly valiant heart of mine continues to cultivate.

Sometimes I imagine the Wall might be like that of Jericho. That if I blow my massed trumpets made out of rams’ horns hard enough, it will come tumbling down. Can I conduct such a gale force wind of sound? I’m not sure that I can, but periodically I feel I must try. Because to do nothing is tantamount to dying quietly and a little more each day. And here in my shack I am not prepared to do that. Because once love has awoken you, it seems to me that there is no going back to sleep.

Memory believes before knowing remembers

Believe me, I’ve tried. In my drafts are pieces variously entitled ‘Wall, come tumbling down’, ‘All I have is words’, ‘Room of one’s own’ and ‘Her bright smile haunts me still’, among others. All but perhaps one of them seem fatally flawed in retrospect. The temptation is to build a Frankenstein out of these pieces but I really don’t want to present and leave at large something monstrous. There are poems too, ones which have lost their way and are wandering around eyeless in a forest, unable to orient themselves and so discover a path back out of the darkness.

Something is telling me that I need to reinvent my writing here, that it’s not enough to write as I have done before.

But as ever, silence isn’t as flat as it seems. I have in fact been writing furiously; that is, the words have been tumbling out of me, free cartwheeling and backflipping and even occasionally somersaulting. The aim of them is an offline book rather than to fill these virtual pages. It’s a third of the way into being and occupying my every writing moment. My subject? What it has always been for the past seven years, only set over the course of a lifetime.

In mind and heart as well as in writing I too have despaired, I have cried out in frustration, and I have worried about the lack of joy to be taken from anything which doesn’t occupy my brain with its physicality. Delight has come either from nature or through becoming lost in my own story or in the stories of others, stories which have no bearing on mine, stories for which I am simply a curious fly on the wall. Stories which – yes – allow me to forget myself, for a time.

Oh, there are so many things I could say, but the underlying, the fundamental truth is that since nothing has changed for me, I simply don’t know where to go from here, save for back into the pages and chapters of my book. There, memory and knowing are mixing together in a fiction that is realer to me than reality. And there, again for a time, I can throw off the heaviness cloaking my heart.

Cuttings

She looked at him seriously now. ‘You hand me too much power, George. It is not a burden, but it might become one, and I do not wish that.’ She touched his arm. ‘I know you do it out of your abundant kindness, but there may come a day when both you and I would wish that I treat you less carefully. And that must remain a possibility, George. If there is never a chance of hardness or pain, then softness has no meaning.’” – Patrick Ness, The crane wife

“The volcano frowns. ‘I will not listen to your riddles, my lady.’ … ‘This is not the way our story ends. You know this.’
‘Stories do not end.’
‘Ah, you are right, but you are also wrong. They end and they begin every moment. It is all about when you stop the telling.’” – Patrick Ness, The crane wife

It’s my belief that everything which matters is speakable, if only it matters enough, and you are both determined and fearless in the telling of it. The choice you have is whether to tell your truth to an audience, no matter how large or small, or to the person or people that it concerns. The choice you make will of course affect how you tell the story of your truth, and how in turn the story – the truth – is received.

There are some days – weeks, it can stretch to – where I feel I have to be free of this thing, that I cannot bear the great, surging, all-encompassing swell of it any longer. I try to wither it within me, so that I may move on, so that she may, without the tug of me in her ear, or the back of her mind. I try looking about me. And yet each time I do, there comes a day – usually sooner rather than later – when its call cannot any longer be ignored. The great, surging, all-encompassing swell of it spills over, and I am hopelessly within the element of it once again.

I miss her with an ache which seems to combine the functions of all of my vital organs, stretching each to the very limit of its capacity. I miss her like the inconsolable teenager who breaks her ankle at the most inopportune moment and so misses out on what was going to have been the trip of a young lifetime. I miss her like the old man who, reviewing the course of the decades, comes unstuck all over again in face of the greatest ‘what if?’ of his life. I miss her like the keening of the wounded crane in Patrick Ness’ book, shot through its wing by the arrow of love.

But if she does not miss me in the same way, or not quite the same way, or with not quite the same never-ending constancy of heartbeat or breath, then inevitably I am left wondering, what exactly is the point of my keening? What good does it serve? It is only making two people unhappy. The solution which presents itself – not for the first time – as the only possible one is to take my keening voice away, and try and subdue it for long enough that I can begin to control it rather than have it always controlling me.

It’s a solution which never seems to last for very long before the need to keen out loud again – to be heard and witnessed by the one reader who is in a position to understand everything that I write – aligns itself with the need to crave, the need to breathe and the need to love. I have felt the apology rising within me, but as she once wrote, there is no point in saying sorry – sorry doesn’t touch the sides of what this is, was, could have been.

And so here I am, and there she is. Here is where I will now try to focus the keening until it emerges from my throat as melody and song rather than weeping and wailing. There is where she tells her truth slantwise, and I confess I am left confounded. I search her heart for answers to my questions, but I can no longer see into it or the present or the future as well as once I could. And of all the things which cause me sorrow, it is perhaps this that troubles those stretched but still vital organs of mine the most.

Love brought me to a silent grove

This is not a diary entry.

Or maybe it is, of a kind.

But it is also me capturing the state of my existence. The state I am in. My existential crisis. An essence of years condensed into a day. A bad day. October 3rd 2016. But it could be October 12th. Or a number of days before those, stretching back over the recent years. One or two after them, too.

I’m sitting here in my lonely room in sunlight. I can see the reflection of my red running top in the white of the virtual page. I have yet to go for my run. I meant to go to the gym, but domestic chores meant that time ran out on that option. Forced into a new routine, to go shopping when I normally would not, I felt and still feel burdened beyond what I can bear to carry. I trailed round the aisles feeling lost and alone and trapped in a life which should feel blessed. And for roughly half the time it does, but when I cannot have what my heart – my whole being – most craves, then nothing will console me, and the ordinariness of the everyday is an affront in its ongoing indication of the absence of the extraordinary. I can’t find ketchup, where the fuck is it? I trail the same aisles over and over, uselessly, until a memory comes to me of a row of shelving at right angles to the majority of the aisles, where all the sauces and pickles are. Eureka, I don’t think, when I finally track it down. I keep hoping that someone will see how lost, alone, miserable and bereft I am, that they will take me in their arms and let me cry it out. Preferably someone whose breasts allow me to imagine, if I close my eyes, that they are hers. How pathetic is that?

In the last few days, I have come as close to not wanting to live as I ever have. At least, that is, I long for the balm of forgetting, I long for some ongoing distraction which will fill my days in a way that I had wished the love of my life would. But I can find nothing that consoles, and plenty which only makes the sense of absence worse. Working to a deadline, reading a book, listening to music, playing sport, drinking with friends, eating curry, watching a film, wanking out the contents of my secret heart, all things in which I have found greater or lesser degrees of pleasure and sustenance in the past – nothing works; or rather, when each of those various activities is over, the absence and the not living the life I wish I was living only assails me all the stronger. Nothing matches what I need it somehow – miraculously – to match.

But this particular day, this particular time… for the first time in decades, I find myself wanting not to exist. I am never going to kill myself. My desire to live is too strong, and my sense of more to come beyond this current crisis is ultimately too buoyant. Tomorrow is another day, another chance. I would never do that to them, to her, just as – having felt the same way – I don’t believe she would ever do it to her kin, or to me.

I wish… I can wish till apples grow on an orange tree, as the song goes in a rather different context, but I’ll never be able to undo the tangle I have made of my life and the living of it. I think I have come to the place she was in some years ago, when our love first became too much for her, when it first truly tested the nature of the life she had built for herself. That is, defeated and unsure, knowing that life cannot continue as it had been, knowing too that what she held was fundamentally good, but still not convinced that life as it stood offered enough, or quite as much as it ought. Quite as much as roughly half the time she needed it to.

I had best go for that run, and see if by some slim chance it helps.

*

Half an hour later. It did help, in so far as blood was pumped hard round my body, and the body can’t but help feel better for that. My mind is comfortably numbed, and the thoughts within it which were confused and crumpled are smoother, if not ironed flat.

Under a still blue October sky, I saw again the very tree with its uppermost branches dipped in some skyborn confection of brilliant crimson; or, as she put it, the blushing red of autumn in just the top leaves of one singular tree. I saw fly agarics coming through beside the path, where they were when I first photographed them for her all those years ago. I saw the Sleeping Giant’s hills in the distance, as sharply delineated and as clear as I can ever remember seeing them. I saw Virginia creeper setting fire to one side of the fence along what she would call a snicket and we call a twitten.

Perhaps my salvation lies in nature, and in running through it. Just perhaps it does.

And then, after a shower, I realise afresh where salvation lies, if not in love. In writing, where it has always lain for me. For what have I done yesterday and today to avoid the silence but write? And through it come to terms with continuing to breathe, and preparing to lift myself from rock bottom.

In absentia

On days like today, when he had nothing in particular to do, and no particular place to go, was in fact to some extent confined in what he could do and where he could go, what was there for him to do but to think of her, to dwell on where she was right then, and whether in spare moments and still or silent times, she had been thinking of him too, remembering back, perhaps even imagining that things were different.

(Not that he did not think of her on busier days, quite the opposite – she continued to be the fine red thread which ran through his every waking hour – but on days like today his mind and heart had the time to wander freely where they most wanted to go, and linger there.)

They were parted, and yet he had the sense that they were not, that even in absentia they remained faithful to the love that they felt for one another, that it could not be broken, that it would go on in spite of themselves, even if it turned out to be the case that they never saw each other again.

He dearly hoped that the sadness of their situation was not undermining her full enjoyment of the moment. If that were so, he would rather that she forgot about him for as long a time as necessary than that she pined for him, truly he would. He wished her not to fret, cry, or tax herself in any way, for come what may, the entirety of his heart would remain hers, and he had long since understood and accepted that it could never be otherwise.

Do not fret, do not cry, do not tax

When he kissed her coin before he pocketed it in the morning, as he still did, as he had done every day without fail since she had gifted it to him, it was a way of summoning her presence. Pressing his lips to the obverse cat, in his mind he said her name, and she came alive there, she inhabited the word and the act of kissing and his interior with what he could only describe as her life-force. He not only saw but felt her, and what he felt was that she was simultaneously feeling him, that they were locked in an endless exchange of looking into each other’s eyes, and that abstract notions of love and desire were as viscerally evident as the physical appearance of conjunctiva, iris and pupil.

From the many such moments they had shared, he had bottled the essence of her in the distillery of his mind. So when his lips met first one and then the other face of the token that she had rendered a charm by kissing both, he felt her actual presence as strongly as if it really were she that he was kissing. And for the next month – indeed, for as long as they were apart – having felt her presence at his lips, he was going to wish her back all the luck, happiness and safe passage that she had wished for him.

Then he would slip the coin which was the essence of her into the pocket-within-the-pocket of his jeans, or next to his heart if his shirt had a place for it, and set about his day, taking her with him wherever he went, and whatever he did.

She

The truth was simpler and because of that, somehow stranger than he had at times imagined.

She confounded him at every turn of the stair. Or he confounded himself. Even after all this time, he still had some learning to do. He needed to listen to the sound of her heart more than the anxieties whispering in his ear, the occasional monster roaring in his mind. It was just that at distance, with so little to go on, he couldn’t always hear it beating, and caught in a sudden downpour, the worst thoughts flooded his head. But even before they spoke again, he had bucketed the water away, cleared out the wreckage, and wiped clean the surfaces.

There was no limit to their intimacy. What others might find shocking, they admitted frankly. So she told him that when she made love to her husband, there wasn’t a time that she didn’t think of him, at some point during or after, of him and of how different it would be. He told her that in the same circumstance with his wife, there wasn’t a time that he didn’t have to shut her out of his mind beforehand, because to let her remain there where she was otherwise permanently encamped would be disastrous.

But they remained apart, unable to pursue what they might wish to, were their hearts free to do so. This was the sorrow of their lives. The price they had to pay, the chill that autumn brought.

She told him that there was a soppy song she had been listening to of late, one which made her think of him. She was embarrassed to admit what it was, but he prised it out of her. It was a well-known song. He thought the trick with standards was to try and listen to them as if you were the first person ever to hear it – or, in his case, on this occasion, the second. To get back to the time before the song became burdened with its celebrity, its being overly familiar, a hoary old chestnut.

He listened to the song and he heard what she heard, he felt what she felt. He knew that the lyric worked both ways, for her and for him. He surrendered to the emotion as she had before him, and it joined the pantheon of songs which they had made their own.

Between them, if a song fitted, if the emotion of it served to bind the one to the other, they suspended the judgment of taste. Cool critical favourite or cheesy middle of the road, no matter. Which was not to say that there weren’t some cool critical favourites floating in their cloud. But one thing he had learned, one thing she had taught him was that in matters of the heart at least, feeling counted for more than discernment.

You be Cleopatra and I’m Mark Antony

Yes, we were the characters in your circus, those in my missing letters, but that was not all we were.  We were PLF and Debo, Dorothy Osborne and Sir William Temple, Sylvia and Ted, Leonard and Joni, Johnny and June, John and Yoko, Anaïs and Henry, Bruno and Solveig, Ludwig and the Privy Councillor’s wife, Bilodo and Ségolène, Daniel and Beatriz, and so many others.  We stretched those often fractured relationships till they were endlessly our own; we contracted them into infinite moments, repeated over and over.

We were Jon and Ygritte, too.  Reading the book, I cried when Ygritte died.  It seemed to me that you were dying with her, while I held your hand and in the time remaining we both remembered back and projected forward, building one last castle in the air.  Always an imaginary castle, just out of reach, just beyond the bounds of the lives we were actually living, beyond the bounds of the life you were now departing.

‘You know nothing, Jon Snow,’ she said, once last time, as she died.

And she was right, I didn’t, till I met her.