Ceci n'est pas aujord'hui

So much in one short day. We greeted again, as we had done before. We spent the afternoon together - formal circumstances, but with a vague and undefinable sense of comfort and closeness and familiarity. Once or twice she looked at me, in the way she does sometimes, and the sense of closeness grew a little. It is growing slowly, and its growing is becoming something I can see and watch. But this is certainly no sunflower, shooting ever upwards, as if there is no time to wait for growing...this is an apple tree: plant it and watch it grow...but the waiting! I saw her off when she had to go again, back to where I think she believes her life really is. It gave us a little time, and it was good time. Intense, though: a short, sharp burst of that Growing.

There were more of those fleeting moments, snapshot images that I can still just about replay in my mind, pictures I want to hold on to tightly so that I can look at them whenever I choose. Apparently banal moments: I offered to take her rubbish; she joked that she wasn't one of my five-year-olds; and I apologised for being overly parental. She brushed it off, but with those eyes again, those damned eyes. She asked if I was still smoking: ah, she cares! We were close, physically close, and it was comfortable...charged...and good. We took the escalator and she was on the step above me, higher than me, taller for once. I had to concentrate hard on not exploring the beautiful architecture of her partial objects...I looked away, and then back at her, and as I was starting to fall once more into her eyes she asked what was on my mind: again, she cares! Of course I didn't explain...the best I could come up with was 'thinking about a blog post'!, which meant I outed myself as a blogger: oh dear - I am entering dangerous territory now...if she finds me it will be a dance with death.

It doesn't feel good to look at these images, though. It makes me aware of the gap I feel, the loss, the hole in the centre of me where I ought to have comfort with myself. I feel that gap physically when I take out these photos: I experience a falling sensation, as if I am collapsing into myself, caught by the trap that is my desire and falling headlong into the gaping hole that it has dug. And yet I try to fill that gap with these images, against all logic. Logic can go to hell as far as I'm concerned. This is not a hall for reasoning and rationality. I experience myself as fatally incomplete, and I feel myself trying to fix myself up, albeit with the very things that make me feel that incompleteness. Isn't this in some way true of us all? Are we not all fixated in some way on the things which remind us of our lack, our loss, the mourning which characterises our lives? Are we not entranced by it?

It became quite clear to me over that short space of time - the driving, the dropping off, the drink - that the closeness is deepening, but I am scared of losing myself again, in the hole inside, or in an other.

When we parted, I had to pull myself out of that hole and drive home. As I drove, and tried to claw my way up the sides of the abyss, I was aware that I couldn't bear the idea of sound. No music would have helped me - it would have made it so much worse. If it had been able to articulate the loss, give voice to my position in the hole, then it might have covered over the gap while I was still inside...buried alive.

When I awoke in the morning I was safe again, as if I had emerged from a coma, and it feels good to be able to listen, to bear music, to take the articulation. Amalia is singing for me now, giving me voice...Oh Amalia: the grit and the grain and the gone-ness of it all!