Simplicity

05/6

A crackling night fire indoors is a fine reminder of the autumn huddles in the woods. We still had the night back then, owned our fear of snapping twigs and felt alive. There was something about the earth; the new peat of woodland woven by the fallen year, and we were happy in the dirt of Autumn, found leaves soft, and saw comfy places everywhere – a bit of fixing here, bit of handyman there, and it would always be grand.

Simplicity is difficult, and when one wants as little as we thought we did, it still surprises me how complicated it was. We went off in our own complicated directions and simplicity became a dream - an Arcadia or some such imaginary place where I still live, and I cannot yet understand why it is that I always have to leave. When people ask how we can give it all up, we should ask what it is that keeps them at their complicated lives, but it’s insensitive to ask such things, especially at this time of the year.

Twigs are always snapping in the woods, and I am as good as the next person, at sabotage. It is a very bad sign, when complications anaesthetize instead of bringing us alive. Mine is a camouflaged destruction where I hack at simplicity by stealth, finding myself in the middle of complicated, wondering how on earth I arrived. I’ll realise only then, why it is, that I always have to leave. Hers is something else – a variation on a theme. It is simple really – especially when there are spells for cutting circles into straight lines.

Simple – when I was inside her and she was inside me, we could as easily have been side by side or miles away; still, sitting on the twig of each others rib. I still sing for her sometimes, now at a distance from her shoulder, and she still thinks about me sometimes, but from her shoulder I can no longer always see if she is smiling or sad. This is for the best of course, this numbness, otherwise things would get very tricky indeed.

I don’t know where she is, so I have to consider her lost. Sometimes I wake with a feather in my throat and cough up something or other that has the tickle of her, but it looks so ugly on the page. If she starts coming into view, I hurt and look away. Every morning I wake on the corner, a wet curled foetus on an expanse of bed, a licked pink finger about to turn the sheet on an empty page. Yet, in dreams, I am without my hands, so this familiar image sent, does not belong to the me waking, forgetting absence for a moment and reaching out to touch it. A picture and an itch can be no compensation for what was, and is no sweet reminder either.

It is hazy at the moment and there is a mist settling on the patchwork blanket, but complications will snap in the darkness of being wide awake, and clear headed and acutely feral, the grid opens up, the bugle sounds, adrenalin rushes, and the hunt is on. It really is as simple as that.