I last
wrote here in February. Half a sun ago. Six whole moons. It is August now. I
look back along the length of those months, and they warp and shift, the way a heat
haze makes the desert air shimmer. A trick of the light. A dissolution. A
rippling apart, a coming-back-together.
It wasn't
a conscious departure. Only that the words left, for a time, the way words
sometimes do. I know that they always return, like the geese after Winter,
glide in on wings whiter than they were before, making their noises, ruffling
their feathers - I know this, I have lived through these wordless seasons many
times, and am used, now, to weathering them. I go to ground, like the bears do,
like the hedgehogs in their bristled sleep. I wait it out. I wait for the days
to stretch and the light to lengthen. I wait for the turning.
In July,
I wrote in my diary: The words have
settled in my bones like sediment. They will not rise the way they used to,
like birds, like bees, like the fizz in a glass of champagne. It's an
inconvenience, their absence, because there is much to write about. So much
change. I feel like the spark struck from a bit of flint. The woman pulled from
a rib...
I drank a
lot of coffee. I read a lot of books. Sometimes, there was sun, and I did those
things in the garden. Sometimes there were whole weekends in pyjamas. I ran
baths so hot that I couldn't see for the steam, and lay smouldering in the
water like a blind queen. I bought myself roses. I went on a date with a beautiful boy, and I
felt that lovely flip again, for the first time since the last time. And still
the words were quiet. It wasn't always comfortable, but I gave them their room.
I didn't root. I didn't ruffle. I didn't try to engineer their return. It made
me itch, sometimes, the waiting - the way a broken bone itches as it
strengthens itself under plaster and re-knits - but it was a lesson in
patience. A lesson in trust.
This last
year has been the toughest and loveliest and richest and hardest and most
rewarding of my life so far. "Experience",
says CS Lewis, "is a brutal teacher.
But you learn; my God, do you learn." And oh, I am learning. I am
learning and learning and learning. I
have learned more, I think, in the last year of my life, than in all of the
other thirty-two combined. I fell in love, and learned how to be vulnerable. I
fell out of love, and had to re-learn being alone. I felt so crushed at that
time, the heaviness of heartbreak weighing down on me like the weight of the
whole sky, so that I thought I would never get out from beneath it. But I
wasn't crushed, in the end; I was only changed.
(Remember
this for the future. For times of uncertainty. Difficulty. Change. Times when
the words won't come, or your heart is broken, or the weight of the world
itself is on your shoulders. Remember this. That diamonds
are formed under just that kind of pressure. That leaves, under that weight, can alter stone).
