The Dinghy

One of these mornings, you're going to rise up singing.

You'll spread your wings and take to the sky.Until that morning, nothing's going to harm youwith your daddy and mommy standing by...

It's eleven o'clock and my chest's tight with a series of toxins. My body is trying to rid itself of a virus that's creeping unseen through my lungs, throat, lower belly and back. I am fighting off invasion from armies that are marching up my bones.

     
It is half-way through the weekend and I'm less mournful than I could be. I'm more a balloon, floating far South on the breeze, catching sight of the needle as it pushes through my rubber. I'm sinking slowly with the sun.

      
And summer is a ghost doing its rounds. I pride myself on my skin's paleness and wear eyeliner to enhance my tiredness. Vampiric, I cower behind car fenders whenever clouds threaten to leave the sun uncovered. I pray for rainy days. I watch myself and others tripping over, time and again, wearing clown's shoes - floppy and ludicrous. And I remember the dull ache of when I got it somehow right, and began to walk properly. When ecstasy left.

     
Where're the dinghy days, I wonder? Days when I was salty with sun and sadness and I pulled my flaccid boat to the beach, just to keep myself from sinking. When the sea was a home, a bed to lie in, a friend, a screaming companion in blue and green; a rage of sunlight, seaweed tangling my toes. It made the memories of Mum swim somewhere further out, somewhere deeper I didn't have to go. Out in the waves, alone, flapping my arms like a seagull, I gave into the sky and floated.       

That was the year when I couldn't take in what was happening to her. The year that the sea-front kept me alive. How strange then, that this year I say: keep me out of the light, keep me in a mossy cavern where I can hear the trickling water. Where I can just lie, and listen.