After Noon

It’s just after noon. Summer is starting to thin into September, the trees are noisier, their dry leaves are scratching at the air, impatient. You leave in ten minutes, the world waiting to turn beneath your feet. It feels strange to think of you gone, to listen to an empty house, to hear the vacant air groan, to feel stillness. You’re leaving. Things are at an end. Life will need adjusting, I might move my bed to the window, or turn the living room around, plant a garden, something to trick myself out of missing you.

I remember when I first saw you, you were small, fragile in a world your eyes didn’t recognise, your fingers gripped mine as if they’d never known me, but I was always there. I was always beside you, when you whispered words for the first time in my nervous ears, when you took your first steps over unsteady ground, when your tiny boots got stuck in the wet ground. I watched your hair growing over your shoulders, watched your hands spreading over things you were once tiny against, saw the world shrinking to fit your palms. We were inseparable, the years glued us together like a collage.

Now there is a gulf growing between us, we don’t speak as we used to, you don’t ask me the same things, why the sky isn’t orange, or why whales don’t have feet. You speak to yourself, writing into the long blue of summer evenings in your little black book, your thoughts quiet, silent against the world pouring in through the open window. You ask me serious things now. You ask me why I stopped drawing, why I left my canvases to gather dust in the garage. You ask me why I stopped writing poetry. You ask me a lot of things I can’t answer. I could tell you why the sky isn’t orange, or why whales don’t have feet, but I could never answer the other things.

I turn the ticket over in my pocket, it’s a peculiar thing. As if there’s a different life waiting between its folds, a paper flower warm in the spring of my palm. Twenty-thousand dollars. Twenty grand. I have no idea what I’d do with it. Buy a car, a boat, a horse, a car-boat, a horse boat, do they exist? I could invent one. Do all lottery winners have these thoughts? What if it was millions? What then? A horse…plane? Twenty grand is enough, to dream with, to roam, to go further over the horizon. It’s too much for me though. I’ll be fine without it. Everything will be fine.

Five minutes. I can feel your hands shake through the table, you’re starting to get nervous, your feet tapping an erratic anxious rhythm, out of time with the awful music they’re playing at the bar, one of those radio stations regurgitating the same ten-year-old playlist day after day. I mean, Ricky Martin is cool, don’t get me wrong, but I think if I hear She Bangs one more time, I really will be Livin la Vida Loca. I’ll buy a silk shirt and some fake tan and have a nervous breakdown. I tell you this and you laugh, beer spitting between your white teeth.

So this is it, my daughter, grown, shoulders settled, eyes brown and tender, heart full of the unknown. A head full of ideas and days with not enough hours between them. When I was your age everything was a beginning, everything was a newness, everything was waiting, waiting to be chewed, spat, held, loved, it was all ahead. I see it in you too. But I got old, my bones click when I stand up now, I want to snooze all the time, I’m having nightmares about knitting. Things are starting to feel like endings, like the slow inward curl of an afternoon.

I’ve bought you a new notebook, the same as your other ones, small, black, the size of a postcard, its pages packed with twenty thousand surprises, and pens, black ink, always black ink. I bought you blue ink once and you hid in the attic for four hours, refusing to speak to me. You don’t know when you’ll be back. The world is big after all. Bigger than the two of us. I don’t know what I’ll do without you, who I’ll laugh at the cat with, who I’ll throw bananas at when they’re hungover. Eighteen years we’ve lived together, eighteen years, and it ends here, soundtracked by what was arguably the musical highlight of the 90s. Maybe I’ll paint again when you go, maybe I’ll buy myself a notebook and write like you, who knows. Even at my age there are still unknowns to be known.

You take your present, wrapped in baking paper because I’m awful, and hug me, tears soaking into my ratty jumper. I’m trying to absorb you, to remember this every moment when you’re gone. To remember your blossom smell over the bittersweet taste on my tongue. You talk to my heart, your voice resonates in my lungs and shakes loose tears from my eyes like flower seeds that settle in your hair. Ricky Martin is on again. I kiss your forehead, a blessing, may you always be yourself and leave nothing but love behind you, for now and forever. Maria. They’re even playing the deep cuts now.

As the bus rattles into view through the long glass reflections of shop windows, you pull a notebook from your bag and hand it to me, fat and distended, its corners browned and frayed. Eighteen years in one hundred and ninety-two swollen pages, luminous with memory like ripe fruit. One hundred and ninety-two ways in which you’ll always be near. Pages worth more than gold. My heart bursts and I hug you one last time, just as you are.

You’re gone. My lungs are full of smoke and the street is empty again, all echoes have faded. No reflections vibrate in the windows. I buy myself another drink. The ticket is still in my pocket, it still feels like a flower. Don’t spend it all at once I tell you, as if you can hear me. The song ends. The Boys Are Back In Town. I feel a change, I’ve always wanted to play air guitar and start a bar fight. Maybe I’ll do that. No. I’m too tired. I think I’ll sit out the afternoon and let the evening come.