There would be another morning

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I got up this morning but my shadow stayed in bed. I walked through the sunshine in the front room, turned on the bathroom light – nothing.

Where was she? (I think of her as she.) I lifted the duvet but there was nobody there – just a deep indentation where I had slept alone.

She had to be somewhere – I think I may have said out loud. I turned all the lights out and felt that she was there. I turned them on again.

I closed my eyes and that worked too. I could feel her there, the warm darkness of trust. I kept my eyes tight shut and got back into bed.

There would be another morning, there would be some other light.

Strings

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When the shaven-headed nun tied coloured strings around my wrist, I cried.

The strings stayed tied tight for months. Sometimes they tangled with my watchstrap. Sometimes, after rain or a bath, their dampness reminded me they were there.

One day it came to me that it would soon be time to take them off. I could do it any time, any place, but a need for pattern, for meaning, made me decide to wait until April 25th. Why then? Liberation Day in Italy. How is that relevant to strings around my wrist? It is not. But it is a date that is remembered, printed on the calendar in the same colour as one of the strings. The other was the yellow of Mediterranean daisies.

The morning of the 25th, still wet from the shower, I held out my arm and the strings were cut off. If I had had an open fire, I would have burnt them. They would have hissed and curled and disappeared in smoke and ash. But I did not have a fire, though it was cold that Liberation Day, so I dropped them in the bin.

I still think about them, and the sobbing. My arm still feels bare.

Many happy

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Some or many years ago of course my mum was there. Nine months earlier and the man they called my father had been too. Now both are disappeared, one too soon before the other, and the counting of the years wears thin.

The best thing remain the candles – if you forget the jokes about the fire risk and the firemen and now the fire service. Each candle stands for a memory, a year that has passed or a friend, and calmly shines its light into the future. The more candles on the cake, the brighter the light they cast, the better they show us what is to come.

Though, through fear, we may not want to know. So we blow out the candles and pinch out the stubs and blow away the memories and shade out the light. The future is arriving fast enough; I do not want to see it.