People like to look for patterns

People like to look for patterns

People like to look for patterns, people like to look for logic and responsibility.
You can look in everyday places and see people with meaning glowing like half moons in their fingernails. Women at train stations playing shoe guessing games, university students with spaghetti letters trying to predict their next grade, men on escalators wondering if the woman passing is his future wife because she peels an orange like a planet.
You can make paper clip connections plain as railing silhouettes. You can ask someone, whose face tells you, that for them, the birds have gone out the sky and are never coming back, what they wore when the accident happened.
To explain to someone in crisis that leaves are just geometry, that the sky might as well be made of string, is a kind of cruelty. They look at you as if you have stripped them of skin and start to explain about cathedral construction and the symmetry in the way we lay the table for supper.
At Christmas I spent a lot of time staying with my sister who was in a coma. Having a conversation with a coma patient is not a jigsaw piece for any philosophy and I had a problem with getting anything other than dictionary fingers off my tongue. I asked a man chatting to his wife, why he found it so easy, and he told me to remember what its like to not know how to get home. He told me, that he told her things because it made things somehow still have a routine.
I looked for a long time at the symmetry of my sisters face, at her coat hanger collarbones and butter bean eyes and I found a blood pattern of memories in her ribcage. I told her about how we laid the table for tea, that I bet she was dreaming of potatoes wiping dirt out their eyes so that that they could see, that I carried Tesco bag of rubbish to work instead of my satchel and only realised halfway through the first meeting.
It occurred to me to shake her and her blankets clean off the bed as my brother tried, or to whisper to her about the Christmas tree all knitted with gifts of good thoughts. But she needed plainer things.
I told her what I wanted. That I hoped she had more time to examine meaning, that she needn't have worried about biting back, that she should have rifled through another's things, found a diary and laughed, fucked in someone else's bed, scribbled insults on a wall at eye height and never cried for an apology.
I told her all the stories that I knew, the tall man with the marbles, the two legged cat, the slice cut out of Clare bridge. I told her that the trails behind swallows are energy and that the shape of leaves more than geometry, that most days the sky is white and not just a ceiling for impossible things.
So now, when she calls me on her first week of university and asks for a story that means something, I tell her to remember routine, to not expect a sorry, to not look too hard for a meaning.