Private Rites

by Julia Armfield

Best to keep on, wherever this is possible. Best, in time, to swim back from a drowning place and continue, struggle back into dailiness, and live with the icing-over of windows, the frozen pipes and bad wiring and increasing impossibility. Better, in whatever small way, to go on until it becomes too cold to do so. Better to hold one’s hands to whatever warmth there is, to kiss and talk and grieve and fuck and hold tight against the whitening of the sky.