i don’t know how to grieve you my dear. my eyes somehow stay dry while i ponder the man i knew so well a decade ago, and the stranger i heard about on the phone.

it started tuesday morning. my eyes glide down an innocent message with two lines slipped in like a razorblade in an apple.

hey sorry darling didn’t get back to you life is crazy and also

you’d died.

you’d killed yourself.

and i sit motionless on the sofa until my friend comes out of his bedroom and i go leak tears against his bony shoulder (is he really that tall?), and in the pale light of a narrow kitchen i leaned against his fridge while the words spilled out of me with a strange kind of urgency.

How do you write around secrets, without revealing them?

I don’t write here because I write all the time. A memoir. A great big galloping thing with a word count that swells by the hour, that haunts my days and my thoughts like the most feverish of loves.

In front of me there’s orchids in pots, fat turtledoves and bluetits picking at sunflowers. Lush nettle high as my waist.
But truly I’m swimming in dead goats and thyme honey, olive trees and land turtles hidden in thorny burnet.

It looks like a bomb exploded in the living room.

Strewn in its wake are the archeological wonders that usually sleep undisturbed in the tombs of forgotten cupboards. A layer of silt gets occasionally added as the years go by, but the entrails lie left in peace. Dinosaurs bones under the latest phone bills.

Mary’s dug it all out and sits in a daze surrounded by the flotsam of memories, papers, memorabilia.
Some go back 110 years.