Follies Fixture

I had been torn between two worlds. The one I had built for myself, and the one I could feel lingering at my periphery.

Unable to be named but realer somehow, realer than this one. I rolled over in my bed in the morning to find this sight waiting for me, a place I had never been and never would, a kind of sweet land waiting for me at the outskirts of my waking. My soul still staying in heaven unable to be brought down in those early hours, I waited. No body taught me how to do this, how to be patient. I had to learn it myself. No body taught me what this was, I had to learn it myself. A kind of calling to a life that was mine, crafted around my thought and word, my call. I saw it in the colours at the outside of my thoughts. I felt what that life must have felt like, real. Like wearing a nice dress that fit your body well. I could not reach it in my waking hours, but in the quieter moments, just before dawn when my body is waking, I can catch a glimpse of it.

It feels fresh and sweet. There are people there who I do not recognise. Perhaps they were friends whom I was supposed to meet, or perhaps I will. It feels bright, coloured like myself. The sounds I hear there are jazz and blues and old wooden houses. Australian bush storms and long afternoons. Perhaps it was the life that I was supposed to live. I began to suspect that it was. I wait for that feeling in the morning. It does not make me sad but hopeful, that one day I might find a part of it again. Perhaps even all of it. I begin to wait for that feeling of a memory before my eyes barely open and my body is still at peace. I swim in those visions, wanting to know the feeling so that I might find them in my waking moments.

My own life has begun to look old, strange to me somehow. I can not understand why I had chosen to work where I worked or sleep beside who I slept beside. A life can be many things but you’ve got to build it yourself. Now I am building a garden. My brother laughs at the absurdity of it all but Winston keeps me company through the long days and the warmth. He watches me write. Laying on the couch under the air conditioning and keeping one eye on me, when I’m digging in the soil he is right there beside me digging up weeds or offering me rocks and all kinds of wise little things. There’s a Turkish man who climbs our fence and helps me cut the branches down, Winston loves to jump all over him and tires to climb over and follow him home. I make love, good love, such that I have not known for some time. You would know what that feels like. When I despair that I am turning upside down I simply sleep. I put my toes under the blanket and I fall asleep asking for some insight into the next way forward. It invariably comes, from where I know not yet. You’ve got to be patient with these things, gentle like.

In the morning I wait for a glimpse of it. That other life. Mind you my everyday life is falling apart. I have left my boyfriend whom you did not like. My parent’s friends raise their faces at me. I saw the capitalist world in which I have worked as the cardboard facade which it was and it fell flat at my feet to collect dust.

I couldn’t make out his name at first. It was long and foreign. He taught me to play bass. Stand up bass. The type that thrums against your waist as you play. He taught me to throw my head back when I walked to the sky, to sway my hips slenderly when I was alone. The days felt longer, I forgot what my career was. The plants in my garden began to sprout. The stranger left me two things when he returned home, he left me a small stand up base with gold lines etched into the side, and he left me a small black notebook. The notebook was midnight blue such that it appeared black, and if one looked quite closely one could see a cluster of small stars in the top left hand corner.

I don’t wish to tell you how to live a life, it isn’t possible. Each of us has within us their own sweet song that they must get to singing. Mine perhaps is guttural and filled with the bass of my youth. It is filled with blues. Yours perhaps is sweeter, or perhaps it is still like a river that has come to rest in an inlet for some time. I don’t know. Everybody has their own sweet song that they are here to live, only what I began to realise in my thirties perhaps is that all of the shapes that fit around me weren’t made for me. They were made by somebody else, for somebody else. That feels like an ill fit. We’re all of us trying to fit into that structure that was made for us, through a name, through an age, through a time but I began to long for that sound of my own sweet life.

Time passes. I grow steady.

In my early forties I visited my friend. He loved my husband, they drink beer and speak about intellectual and other things. I take it as a chance to take out the girl who I had been and explore the Northern lands on my own for some days, finding my way home for dinner.

On the last night my husband pulled me aside against a warm wall that faced out to the summer late sun and asked me a question. I don’t remember what my answer was but it kicked something off in me that I had forgot, a question that I had started when I was a little girl.

My son, he was the youngest, reached up when he was two and pulled the old bass case down upon himself in fits of laughter. I found then in the back section a small pocket that was filled with cash. Euro, and I had not known for all of that time. We lay the cash out on the floor and counted it and I laughed for my friend had left me just enough to live for one year, although I had never known it. My son wanted to build a pool with it. My husband wanted to travel. I wanted to give it back but my friend was too far away and beside I knew that he wanted me to keep it. We built a small room in our garden, I’m in there now laying out on a blue couch with the dog at my feet and rain. It’s all wood, timber and glass and light, the sun beat through the glass to form our meeting here. I’m wearing a sequinned top that casts shapes on the opposite wood wall when hit by the light, I can see the pattern of my heart beat up there on the wall. Thud thud thud.

It isn’t enough to just sit here and tell you what transpired for myself. I met a woman the other day who is sixty and she said that she is still waking up, has not woken yet. Would to her that she wakes. I don’t know many things but I know you’ve got to listen to your own sounds.

I buried that book deep in the instrument case and did not touch it for many years. Sometimes, love does that to you. When I took it out the pages had aged. There was a note in the front inset that I will keep to myself, and I began to use the book to record the sounds of the universe. I wrote about the sounds of my children. Of my brother’s family. All the time I played that old bass and enjoyed the feel of her against my thigh. It was all woven in and through that small blue book. You could have been there. You could have watched.

One day I woke up and realised that I had something wonderful within my hands. The blue book had fallen beneath my bed and lay there, collecting time beside old books and things. On her cover the strangest thing, the stars had crept down the blue ink to overwhelm the page. I felt them over whelm my sight and blinked, great pages filled with a lifetime of collected words filled the room and I reached for my husband’s hands. All around me was white, and the sweet sounds that I had once heard come rushing back in.