bone

by Yrsa Daley-Ward

The top half of my body is at gross political warfare with the lower. One part of me is roaring and the other wholly disapproves. You are a beautiful danger. Do not force me to open up. Some books are bound tightly for years for reasons. Some books are burned for their own good, Love.

Should I touch you, I will suffer and you will suffer and she will suffer.

To those who feel bad in the morning yes, some feel bad in the morning and sometimes they tell you you want it and sometimes you think that you do. Thank heavens you’re resetting ever setting and resetting. How else do you sew up the tears? How else can the body survive?

was a) going through a great deal. Heartbreak, namely b) drinking far too much far too often.

she did not subscribe to the theory of regretting anything.

Anyway,” she went on. “This fettered concept of motherhood is outdated. You can go and come back and go and come back and I shall always be here. I shall always be here. That is real Love for you, and don’t let anyone tell you any different.”

Remember on the right night and under the right light any idea can seem like a good one and love love is mostly ill advised but always brave.

My thoughts about you are frightening but precise. I can see the house on the hill where we grow our own vegetables out back and drink warm wine out of jam jars and sing songs in the kitchen until the sun comes up wena you make me feel like myself again. Myself before I had any solid reasons to be anything else. Last night you gave me space to dream bigger than the single bed. You laughed in your sleep and I cried in mine and this afternoon we might be tired because the sun is fierce today and so much happened between midnight and now but Bhabha you are terror and brilliance so I am the kind of woman who is already teaching my body to miss yours without craving. I am the type of woman who is already teaching my heart to miss yours without failing and I am quite sure that you will find this unnecessary but I am already searching for a place to run to and hide when you say, Uthando lwami. I’m ready. Are you? You know that I would gladly drive with you to the other side of the world with only the clothes I am wearing and the loose change and empty peanut shells in my purse kodwa every time you leave the room I worry and think that perhaps I have imagined you and maybe you have imagined me.

There was a time when fingers on white walls made you nervous a time when you didn’t pray so much a time when you worried about what the men in the street had to say a time when you weren’t yourself they tell you you’re an abomination to God how so? You speak to God more often now than ever before.

You pool pennies together for dinner, most nights but you’re happy. You are. You’re happy.

some couple somewhere having an argument he’s telling her to shut up she’s crying threatening to leave he’s saying he doesn’t give a fuck.

I am tired all the time lately, but am not sleeping. When I do, I have strange dreams in which neither of my parents are dead and they are both shouting over each other, pleading with me, trying to make amends. “One at a time,” I say to them, feigning exasperation, but secretly glad of the attention. “Calm down, both of you. One at a time.”

There are not nearly enough distractions and it can all get too bloody silent, which leaves room for dangerous things, like thinking.

So I ask if he feels breathless or faint or anything. He says, “No, it is just a big feeling. One of those crazy backed up against the wall feelings, where every position hurts.” He says he’s had them a lot lately. Feelings like now there is no one left, besides each other and Aunt Delle. But she is old and she has Jesus. And we’ve been too busy for Jesus. “That big feeling you’re talking about,” I say. “I think its grief. Loss.”

plenty of TV channels and TV dinners. Plenty of biscuits, chocolate desserts, cake and plenty of wine but no love for miles and miles

Know that if you are hungry for something but you cant think what you are, more often than not, only love-thirsty only bored.

if you have made it past thirty celebrate and if you haven’t yet, rejoice.

want to keep her for good - safe from all that ever was and will be. You want to take her away from everything that ever hurt her or still can

So you’ve got to hold her with both hands at arms length. Say there’s too much of her inside of you already. Feel like you cannot stand any more. Tell her no, pull back, it hurts. Know that she scares you and you’re far too used to life as a lone wolf crying at the new moon and marvelling at its orientation in every single new country. Let her know the relief of leaving things behind. Tell her it’s a pain you’ve grown with. Tell her you’ll come back. Visit. Really mean it. Tell her she is better with someone else. The kind of person who stays in a place and builds and knows how to stay put. Know that her mothering isn’t something to get used to. Tell her you stopped relying on this aged six. See her happy in the future with someone better than you. Feel sick when you feel it, but know it.

“They found the biggest tortoise in the world in South America today,” you said, massaging the tender knot at the back of my neck with one hand removing your boots with the other. “They had to get a lorry or something to remove it, imagine that.” I said nothing, thinking of all of the things you understand and all of the things you don’t like how I will love you forever but probably from afar not in the way you want and how you’ll find somebody new to be with. It’s only fair. Maybe he or she will have tightness in the neck a passion for useless facts the power to stick around and really, I miss you already.

She says she cries over me on the train to and from work and one day it will be better but it isn’t better now. she is just like my mother, but alive. knows how to love quietly, completely.

It is not a five star stay. It is not compliments and it is never ever flattery. It is solid. Not sweet but always nutritious always herb, always salt. Sometimes grit. It is now and till the end. It is never a slither, never a little it is a full serving it is much too much and real never pretty or clean. It stinks - you can smell it coming it is weight it is weight and it is too heavy to feel good sometimes. It is discomfort - it is not what the films say. Only songs get it right it is irregular it is difficult and always, always surprising.

If I’m entirely honest, and you say I must be I want to stay with you all afternoon evening, night and tomorrow pressed into you so tightly that we don’t know whose belly made what sound, whose heart it is that is thumping like that until I don’t know if the sweat on my chest is yours or mine or ours.

We sat on a hill in the car looking at where the beach met the sea and the rain hit them both and I (quite desperately, quite selfishly) said, drive into the sea with me, just once and it’s done. You drove fast in the opposite direction to a blessed place of broken brick and stone and said ‘this used to be my childhood house’ and then drove me further on further to a purple house safe up on the hillside and said hey, one day this will be home. It wasn’t perfect. It isn’t now. I still have days when I want to exit the system quicker then you can say don’t you dare give up now and you still have days where you can’t even taste the sweet in raw honey and neither one of us believes in pills. Days when I so want to kiss you but your mouth is sour and my thoughts are bitter and I’m angry, just mad, just crazy with it all but we are each others home sweet home, Love. The roof is screwed on too tight at times and the walls of our house can pinch a little but, my God, they are always warm.

What an odd, romantic time it is, if you remember not to panic. How many times has money almost driven you mad? You only need spices to throw in the bowl you only need flour to make some kind of bread and maybe somebody to lie in the dark with. Somebody’s hands to touch.

my God, how you are loved.

The worst thing about somebody who betrays you, somebody who turns out to be a completely different person to whom you first thought, is the love that you still feel in your heart for them, embedded so deeply into the narrow spaces of yourself that you cannot access it to try and remove it.

She slapped him in the face and the more he stood there and took it and the more she collapsed into tears, the more she loved him and could not understand it.

It had all been too good to be true and his behaving exactly like a saint at all times had only served to set her up for the fall.