Upward Movement - a study

I find Paul outside, smoking, and looking up at the sky. I can't believe how close we are to the water's edge. It all looks twisted and dark; the essence of new beginnings.

If we are to speak of new beginnings, we shall resort to metaphor. 

*

I travel back home. Arrived, in flesh and blood, in my city of birth, I am shedding snakeskin. 

The air is at once softer and more acceptable. I take thirsty gulps and delight in the stretch of highway that seems to continue infinitely beyond the horizon. I take the train towards the southeast end of the city and look to the sky with my sunglasses on. Mosquitoes land on my shoulders and browse nervously near my lower lip and neck. I slap a loud one against the back of my neck and feel the warmth of fresh blood. 

*

My grandmother on my mama's side enters my room. She holds my hand and smiles while nodding her head. 

"You are home" she says, as I nod. 

"I will get in touch with everyone tomorrow but let me take it all in first." I cannot manage to say more to her because she already knows. 

"Yes, of course," She carefully tucks a black blazer in the dresser I owned as a teenager when I lived with them. 

I am so tired. The bedcovers' coarse design digs into my sweaty palms. My heart beats faster and faster and I hear its rhythm pulse into my ears, pulse into my eyes. I smell my tired heart. 

*

I wake up to a fresh sun - cool, yet brimming with pink warmth.  I choose an elegant black skirt with stockings and a dusty rose lace shirt to go with it. My hair falls in waves and frames my blackened eyes and pale face. I have a cigarette before I start a coffee. I ash into a tiny porcelain vase left behind by my mother. I stretch and rehearse my speech. 

I am here because we divide ourselves in tiny pieces; we cannot fathom where we end, where we begin and so we break along the way and vow to return whole because we are on the precipice, we have swallowed light, we are remnants of our ancestors' dreams. When I walk into the hallway, I find her calling a cab and buttoning her coat. 

"You need to remind me to buy the flowers from the shop nearest the church." I know which one she means and I oblige her. 

"Before we go, I have to tell you one of my dreams. I don't want to forget it."

I dreamt your mother as a very young girl, decades and decades ago. She is playing in sunshine. Raven-haired and playful, she takes photographs of my mother. The sun glitters and glistens through the oak leaves and makes inky undulations against the stucco of our summer house. The dream is much too short; my mother looks out to the main road at dusk and does not turn 'round when I call her. She keeps turned to the road. The sun is so warm, the moment doesn't last and this wakes me up. 

We remember and speak through one another like opened Russian dolls. We fold and remain in hiding underneath the weight of silent confessions. There is no blossoming. There is an infinite movement inside, towards the deepest cells of history, towards individual moments of becoming, we  travel backwards in time searching for bloodlust rumours of what we could be composed of. I speak my mother's tongue with my grandmother's voice on ancient family land.

*
"Death is only the beginning. Death is not the end." I wait outside the Church, smoking the last of the pack. I haven't been here since I was very young. The road seemed so big, the mornings so clear. I am a stranger and the compassion is replaced with objective analysis. I peer through the crowd gathered inside and cannot anchor. I cannot find genesis. I find only momentum. I see my grandmother cry as she holds daisies in her hand. I look at the sky. I have only ever looked up but there was a period of time when I was looking down.

The landscape of loss transforms our footsteps into song. When you walk towards heartbreak, you write yourself into the narrative of origin. Impossibly, with fear, return home as often as you can. Upward movement is possible the deeper in you start. Transform, transform. Flash flash

I see my mother coming from so far. Barefoot, she walks towards me, at the end of our garden. Near the lake, near the small island where the peach trees blossom delicately, I stand and wait for her to cross our land. The landscape of loss transforms our footsteps into song. I see her clearly, two-fold, shining, with her face shaded from the sun, wearing all white, laughing with me. We have not been in the ancient land together since the last time we left. When we left, it was in a hurry. Upward movement is possible the deeper in you start. Upward movement is possible the deeper in you start. We started at the centre of the Earth, it seemed. She joins me. We close our eyes against the sky. We have only ever looked up. She is my tribe.

Millennia ago, in a different universe, in the depths of the dark, in the agony of departure, I looked up at my mother. She is afraid. She is biting her red fingernails and biting into an apple nervously. I'm sitting on our packed bags and I think she is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. 

"Are you ready?" she asks, secretly counting on me.
"I'm ready," I answer because, anyway, I count on her to save me.