The weeds
I accidentally crash a wedding at the Countryman.
I feel awkward until the cider hits and I remember.
No one gives a toss.
It’s late afternoon. Heat and alcohol blur the revellers, who care not one jot for my tiny coiled presence on a bench at the edge.
I’m undone from a hot and horrible few days of stress that have tipped me over.
All edges.
***
We talked about the pasties at the shop in Four Lanes. The fog. Family. For 10 years we lived a stone’s throw apart, separated by a generation.
Distance is not only linear.
They were the best pasties, but the fog sucked.
***
A magpie nags … or cackles. I don’t really know.
A phone pings.
Every noise … abrasive against my too-tender spikiness.
The heat is insane.
Biblically hot. A phrase I’ve used too many times.
***
I sleep, at last, surrounded by boxes and bags in my sauna of a bedroom.
The relief is temporary.
I wake up at 5 a.m. and my groggy foot lands in a squidgy, squashy mass of unidentified animal mess. Probably cat puke.
***
Here, we brought horses. Here was a life.
There have been so many.
***
“The gypsies have gone to Sky Bar,” she says.
The gypsies.
I remember them.
And sometimes I wish I was still there.
***
The cider goes down, sticky and sweet like medicine.
A wasp hassles … mania in his buzz … longing to fling himself into the abyss of an apple soup bath.
Me too.
**
“They were trapping all the bees,” he said.
The bees.
***
He says,
“Of course you can stay.”
I hear,
“You’re too much.”
***
Under the blistering sun, fantasy and reality blur at the edges.
You’re too this, not enough that.
The tyranny of weeds.
***
I could live like this if I didn’t have to make a living.
Floating around
observing
absorbing
spectating
travelling
noticing
But for the bills … and the weeds …
***
Martha plays a game.
I blame, blame, blame.
If only.
***
I thought I had to be perfect to be loved.
Turned out I was wrong.
Bugger.
I failed to make myself perfect by a significant margin.
But somehow the pursuit of it became a life vest, something that would keep my struggling body afloat.
***
The weeds … the weeds …
The pasties were the best.
It wasn’t the fog that got me in the end … it was the bleddy weeds.
***
I throw myself in, belt and braces, like I always do.
All in.
A little wildness creeps in at the edges.
Something loosens.
A bag is calling me, an open road, weddings to crash, ponies to borrow …
A different life…
***
Was it because there was too much to lose or too little?