Opal

A lover left me yesterday.
We held each other and cried so long that he missed his bus twice.
His eyes are lit behind mine as a spectrum of colours I feel like I’ve never seen dance side by side before.
He never let me look in his eyes too long, he found it too intense.
To be stared at by someone with soulful fascination.
It is intense.
As am I, unashamedly.

We walked the cliffs down White Strand the days before…

The waves were huge and white and foamy and the sun was bright and I could feel them crashing in my chest. It all felt enormous, and the suck of the spray back from the stoney beaches makes a clacking clattering that satisfied some deep marrow memories that made our skins tingle. And everything was infinite out to the horizon.
And on one beach we found a scaly dragon rock, not like the flat flagstone or bouldersized pebbles, but one with the indentations of the skin of a reptile. He pointed it out to me.
And the waves were as high as the cliff that we stood on.
And all I wanted was to kiss the feeling of aliveness from myself into him.
Ansuz
Breath of life.
Can I kiss the world into being?

He told me to be careful on some slippy rocks.
I fell flat in a puddle and fucked my knee up.
We were looking at a mystery box, that was just an empty crate that had washed up.
As it turns out.
So I limped back to the car laughing with him at the dramatic way I howled and rolled in pain.
I thought that I would faint.
Not one to take it on the chin.
He made me laugh so much.

Maybe we don’t think about love, because when it’s there; its like breathing.
When that flow gets interrupted, you panic, because you are suddenly reminded, this is life, what do I do without it?
So for myself, I claw and scratch and caterwaul saying ‘flow, flow, flow in any guise at all, gust, breeze, hail, gale or hurricane I need to breathe in your love!’
I think that I am dying, that all the air has gone.

We fought about something so mundane, whether my tone was abrasive in response to something he’d said, and in 48hours he was gone.
It’s not right that word, ‘mundane’,which means of the earth.
It was not an earthly argument that sent him away. It was a spectral reconstruction of a theatre of hurt cast by the shadow whips and angst of elders and ancestors.

I tried to tear past his wall, to force my way through a door and be SEEN SEEN SEEN, because, I thought, in some part of me; I could not breathe.
And I was stripping bark from a tree, ensuring that it couldn’t regenerate and heal, stripping all the ring around the ash tree till it all fell down.
Here was my anchor and my axis and I wanted the world to fall down, because I thought that the world refused me and I could not breathe and I was dying, so the world would have to come with me.

And it did. I tore the world down, because I thought I couldn’t bear to be without the vitality of his attention after a maelstrom of miscommunication had sent him walking away from me once again so I could face a closed door for the evening and know that I was wrong. Incompatible with breath.

We were star crossed lovers I guess. Heavy that fate would have you like someone so much then send you into the underworld.
Orpheus and Eurydice.
Don’t look back I guess.

He bought me opal as my Christmas gift. He said it’s in the post the day he left.
He said to open it and have it when it gets here.

I will go to the sea now in these coming deep winter days to keep me sane.
Smooth my edges out in the shock of cold Altantic
and to learn to hold my breath.