H is for Hawk

by Helen Macdonald

Like White I wanted to cut loose from the world, and I shared, too, his desire to escape to the wild, a desire that can rip away all human softness and leave you stranded in a world of savage, courteous despair.

‘Hiding to nothing!’

https://www.collinsdictionary.com/us/dictionary/english/on-a-hiding-to-nothing

A few weeks earlier scores of bay trees in pots were set out all over the college for an Alice In Wonderland-themed Ball; I’d watched students wiring flowers into their branches: soft fabric roses of white and pillarbox red.

; and :

‘What am I searching for?’ ‘That you will only know when you find it.’ ‘Is it wisdom or manhood?’ ‘Perhaps it is love.’

when the hawk was on my fist I knew who I was, and I was never angry with her, even if I wanted to sink to my knees and weep every time she tried to fly away.

The evening is warm, but there’s a torn-paper whiteness behind the sun that speaks of frost to come.

My beating, horrified heart, and my soul feeling like water at four degrees; heavier than ice, falling to the bottom of the ocean.

There is a time in life when you expect the world to be always full of new things. And then comes a day when you realise that is not how it will be at all. You see that life will become a thing made of holes. Absences. Losses. Things that were there and are no longer. And you realise, too, that you have to grow around and between the gaps, though you can put your hand out to where things were and feel that tense, shining dullness of the space where the memories are.

I scratched my name on bits of slate and buried them as deep as I could in the garden, under the earth. Maybe they’d survive the apocalypse.