Ocean Of Need

❤️ 68 💔 The First & Last Poem

12th June

'Shit. I shouldn't have said anything. I'm sorry,' Mac says.

'It's ok. It's just...'

He finishes my thought out loud, 'You never talk about her.'

'So you know what she did?' I ask. 'You know she died and you know how.'

'Yes.'

'Then you know why I don't talk about it,' I say quietly.

Because how do you talk about your mother hanging herself with a washing line. How do you explain the fury that must have driven her to that?

'You were four.' He says this like I don't know, or don't remember and this confuses me.

'I know how old I was.'

'Who was there for you?'

'What?'

'Who was there for you?' He repeats as he pulls me closer.

'There for me?' I say, as if I'm staring at a tsunami and wondering where my bathing suit is.

'Who was...there...for...you?'

He's holding my face in his hands now and I can feel the tsunami above me. Looming. Threatening.

'I don't want to talk about this.'

His hand winds into my hair, pulling it gently.

'Little Pet, who was there for you?' His voice is strict and I know he's not going to let this go.

'I was,' I whisper. 'I was there for me. I made my own world. I don't need anyone else.' The tears come then, falling down on me from somewhere else. From someone else. And then I realize that he's crying my tears for me. The tears I can't bare to shed.

He pulls me to him tightly as he shudders with sadness. It's our pain now. I don't have to carry it alone anymore.

'She left a poem,' I whisper.

'She left a what?' He says, looking down at me.

'A poem. She left a poem. Nobody knows because I'm the one that found it. "Finders keepers, losers weepers," that's what my brothers used to say when we were kids." So I took the poem and put it in my pocket. I never told anyone. I kept it tucked in the lid of my jewellery box. I didn't know what it was, just that it was my Mum's. I forgot about it for a long time. Then one day I noticed the edge of the page pocking out from behind the lining of the box, where the little mirror was. I was thirteen when I discovered it again.'

'What did it say?'

I put my hands up to his face and wipe the tears from under his eyes with my thumbs. 'You sure you want to hear it?'

'Yeah, I want to hear it. Do you remember it?' He says.

'Every word.'

'Tell me.'

I take a deep breath, close my eyes and start to recite the first and last poem my mother wrote...

My heart is pegged to a never drying washing line. Next to shame and crimes of the heart, which just won't start to bend the rules in time.

Can the neighbours see?

All the shades of me dripping on the line, a subliminal crime, that never tires or bleaches in the sun.

Can the neighbours see?

Beyond their garden gate? Do they wait for me to trip, or drip, or hang myself with domestic boredom, or choredom, or whatever dom I choose to place a peg on my heart and pull it out? Another on my brain to squeeze it shut?

Can the neighbours see?

Me hanging from my place on the washing line as I become another domesticated objected, to be hated by me, and them, and all the other neighbours of the neighbours?

Can the neighbours see?

As I stretch my neck above the garden fence. Rows and rows of empty gardens and sheds and I wonder where all the other women went.

Can the neighbours see domesticity smiling back at me? Did it get to them first? Pack them up in the washing machines, hide them under piles of fresh laundry, or dirty laundry, depending on the day and the mood? Are they trapped inside soup pans, with the chicken, to be consumed as medicine?

Can't the neighbours see how I want to stretch my feet so the grass blades and my toes meet? Or how I ignore the endless lists, the routes and rotas, the sandwiches and sofas, the bubble of the dish-washer, the whine of my husband's work, his fudging of an occupation that became a preoccupation.

Will the neighbours notice how I have left it all inside my house, and pegged my vital organs to this line in an attempt to be free?

How many years and tears and infidelities will it take to accumulate another me?

It's the first time I've recited her poem out loud. The first time anyone, other than me, has heard her last words.

I open my eyes to Mac's ocean green ones, now swimming in fresh tears and I say, 'I have recited this poem so many times that the words no longer hurt. But they have become my mantra on how not to live a life.'

'She left you a poem.' His voice is husky, full of barely contained emotion.

Mine is flat as I say, 'She taught me how to leave.'

'But not how to live,' he says softly.

'No, not how to live. I taught myself how to do that.'