A Year in Recovery

I - Aftermath

Months after escaping, it hit her —

realising is the hardest part.

It was the spring everyone went indoors,

turned the keys in their locks, and shut the sun out.

It’s not that she hadn’t known, as it happened,

her unearthing by a familiar hand.

She saw it for what it was, thinking:

this is what it must feel like to be dead —

cold and still and wordless.

But the difficulty of naming it — 

this was what burned.

Calling a spade a spade

meant admitting that the same hand

which plants daffodils one morning

can uproot the bulbs the next.

The sun ploughed cracks in the dusty fields.

Some nights the rain emerged, shy and hesitant;

life kept on while hers stood still.

She watched the clouds roll on.

In the summer she tanned as she’d never before

from walking for hours, headphones in, each day.

Books, films, music, conversations in her head —

all became distractions; nothing was for fun.

Characters she’d known now wore two faces. 

Take Ariel — a flight of fancy, supernatural creator —

yet bound to serve until the final act.

Not Ariel’s Ariel but Prospero’s Ariel.

I, she thought, must be Prospero’s girl —

an air spirit held captive —

magic in my fingertips, but choices made for me.

One day, she wrinkled in the bath for two hours

wishing that she didn’t have a body.

Not out of self-hatred, as such,

but a terrible fear of ever again being seen.

Other eyes have grown too much for me.

They cover me. They populate the walls. 

Glinting ants, they crawl —

I want to exist in the air, intangible

with no flesh for the water to submerge.

She longed to be the rain drumming on the rooftops:

multiple; faceless; clean.

Nobody is solely a bulb or a spade.

We are so much greyer, each so difficult to read.

There are no good or bad people — no people at all —

only walking collections of choices made.

This, 

she thought, with coral in her bones,

is mine.

II - She Listened to Vashti Bunyan and Felt Fine For an Hour

Another academic year, bringing

with it a new room, a new face to face

the earth with. She’s all right, except

she’s never liked sleep, but hates staying awake.

And so, in the autumn of the year and

the springtime of her life, she turns to songs

simple and pure as a wobbled-out tooth.

She sticks scraps of old magazines to her walls

as Vashti sings of lily ponds, glow worms,

and a horse with a star on her forehead.

All that can be done now is revert

into a strange, blue childhood. Make me new.

The men in their boats, they wave to their wives;

she walks into the sea, holds down her past lives.

III – Awake, Dear Heart

What a waste of bloody time it is

to spend half your hours

making yourself small enough

that somebody can lock you in a cupboard

and the other half struggling to get out.

Another April comes and goes.

Still, we stay indoors more than we’d like

and, for the sake of something to do

go to the shops more than we ought…

[Exit Ariel]

What was that? I think I heard someone leave the room

though I couldn’t be sure. Either way, 

I feel a little lighter now than I did this morning.

I sit, I endure a sea-change

into something rich and strange.

I’m going to admit something silly

and you’ve got to promise not to laugh

and you can’t get all proud of me for getting better

just in case I don’t.

The other day I felt some quiet spell 

unfurl from my ribs, like a budding daffodil.

It’s not the answer or a cure, but 

it’s a feeling I want to wrap my limbs around

and hold tight until I fall asleep.

Come with me to a café by the quay —

we could get coffee and watch the swans go by.

I’ll decide whether I’m getting better

based on how much you appear to believe me

when I say I am.

You really do look wonderful;

I’m so glad we exist at the same time.

Keeping watch at the lake, I am a many-headed hydra —

gorgon of many statues, spirit of many spells.

Some days I eat what I like; I paint my bitten nails all colours,

and in summer stain my hair some regrettable shade.

Red water thins to pink down the drain

as I’m reminded that I was once seventeen —

antisocial, yet brassy in a way I can’t regain.

On the phone, I try to explain the past year to a friend

and find myself using the word ‘kaleidoscope’.

I’m embarrassed the moment the word leaves me, 

but I stick with it, 

shut one eye, and look through.

The earth turns and becomes innumerable, 

dizzying patterns.

You cannot kill me; there is too much of me;

I falter, I falter, and live on into morning.