There has been a flood not a conservation of water but everything that the child eats seems to taste like snow dripping like aloe sap. Secrets can be earth-shattering. Humanity is not meant to keep secrets. Secrets can kill. So their bodies flowed with the water and its carcass became two, and there is an obsession that they carry with them to the grave. Hearing voices, even in spirit Di steals. There is potential in its metallic caress but also nausea, paranoia, and insanity. My skin is a wall, a hellish ruin. A home where I do not want to be. The child Felicity cannot wail anymore. She cannot be held in Di’s arms anymore. This happy ending is washed out. The children involved have been brainwashed.
They both met the wolves at the door. Di’s last words must have been, ‘Beg.’ Then again she held no more power over him. James Smith’s addictions will never die and in his poetry there are shades of sirens. But Felicity and Di are also there, ghosts. Time was just pretend. People, women growing older around him while Di and Felicity stayed forever young. Tucked in a filthy grave made of earth both with their beautiful. With their dark exotic hair and foreign air but they are still in a homeless space. Di surfacing a grown up in a maze, an experiment and in the end she has won but in the end where is her speech. Her perspective, her poetry? Everything cannot have been destroyed.
What would she say? If she was still alive today. James Smith said, ‘Heal Di. Your words are practically magic. They give you an identity. At night, future stories will come to you in dreams. You are the only one who can make you feel safe. I divulge all of the world in my poetry.’ When he put his hands on her body and wrote love poems, loose translations naming the abandonment of body parts. Di was both an adored survivor but she loved to wear disguises. And after all the damages were done Smith said, May all their souls rest in peace’. Forgive me Saint Maybe.
What is there left to salvage? She wears a scarf around her neck. One of my own and now Felicity is an Eskimo princess pure through and through. Our foreignness appears less so now. You can be more bold now indiscreet. Now I live like a cloistered nun. Oh I much prefer it that way. I was dying before but I never had the words for it or the strength to say it when pain conquered everything. Now there is no more cold and no more talking. No more waking and aloof indifference. No more stupid winter London sky. Unstable water, pathetic people sitting on the park benches feeding the ducks.
You’re as frozen as the earth we’re covered in. Your atoms are merely biology, plenty scientific but here is where we say our goodbyes. At the opening of the graves. A kiss for a kingdom. Just a taste. A kiss for the dying but, see, it is far too late for that. It’s salt. Don’t ridicule me. Your behaviour has been far from exemplary. Di found herself locked in an embrace. Safe in the dark. Smith was a poet. Di was a poet with shark teeth. A torso stretched out in the local swimming pool. Daily she would begin a water baptism, a ceremony. There is a writer’s diary in water. The body is an earthworm, and like last chances they search for an intersection.
Once upon a time James, Di and their small daughter Felicity were a family. Then dysfunction ruled the day. James dreamt of his work, Felicity’s legacy. Di in her solitary moments was blue as she braided Felicity’s hair, prepared porridge for the breakfast for the three of them. I have to leave a note was all that Di could think of. I have to put my castles in the air in order. Di was the one who stood over the kitchen sink scratching the grease from the pan that James had fried the bacon in with her fingernails. Every landscape is an image. They have delicious photographs of families, of functions, of get-togethers that Di and James and Felicity was not a part of.
You see in the end I was not so tough sweetie on top of the lake. That list, my recipes keep them hold onto them, save them for the keeper. I’m not a complete hard-hearted fool. Just wounded. I know you’ve been about town and made no secret about it. There are pearls of wisdom. This swarm of words from a summer journal. I threw it into the sea.
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