The people who hurt you will grow old. Their meanness will grey and their backs will hunch towards the earth. Their bones will wither and their disposition will thin into air that’ll lick your skin in times of remembering. Little use in hating the knuckles that struck you, or the teeth that sneered at you, or the eyes that bore into your soul. Their bodies are no longer theirs in the soil. When they roll over, they’ll become the earth. We all will. To hate remembered parts is like spewing swear words at a fading image of yourself. You can’t save that person. You can only love them.
In the end, it’s the people who knew you that you’ll want to see. Who cares what they did to you? You’ll know that you can talk to them as yourself. No illusions upheld. You can pour yourself out like a cup turned towards the ground. They’ll catch you the way soil captures water. They’ll darken, and they’ll absorb it. Then, they’ll dry up as if nothing happened. Transference. The way we all end up as earth.
i. Remains.
The rupture of a bond once strong appears in retrospection like a strange crook in the road. It’s like running your finger across an old scar, or seeing ruins along the side of the path. The damage is done, yet you lived none of it. Memory grows closer to a story. Fiction. Truths embellished in the folds of retelling. In the gestures of those who nod along to its tale, waiting for their turn to speak.
At first, you’ll remember the people that hurt you by the weight of their physicality. Then, by the bruises of old words that coax familiar ache. Finally, by the clumped remnants that remain. Pieces of emotion stuck to your heart.
Form melts to clay until clay turns to caricature. If anyone could see such a crooked form of a human structure by the side of the road, they would mistake it for rogue rock.
ii. Dissolution.
What’s hardest to accept is that the people who matter the most to you end up between parentheses. Like footnotes of a main text, they become the markers of a larger story. It’s quietly devastating to discover that the people who once stood so three-dimensionally in your life become enclosed inside the brackets that remain over yonder.
In the same sense, I step over the soil that birthed me, knowing I’ll never find the granules I’m indebted to. I’ve left behind so many people, that I can’t be sure if the red-diamond drips along the way are the trail of my own blood. A smile I can no longer retrieve. Tears that can’t be called back. Whispers that’ll never grace my lips again. Lost.
Characters that once featured within the moments of my life, retract into desolate land. The ground on which they stood seems to hold them more fiercely than before. Their legs sink lower into the mud. They almost seem to miniaturise. If frogs could regress to tadpoles, their legs would become tails. Weight on land would turn to weight in water. The outline of once sharp bodies dulls the way vision clouds beneath the water.
iii. Fossil.
One day, you’ll find yourself staring so intensely into the mud that you’ll be left wondering what it was that caught your attention in the first place.
It’s a stark feeling. Like the final flash of a vague inner land grown sketchy the nearer it gets to being forgotten. Like a ruin that only exists when frequented by a stray bird, or a wild horse, a place lost to sight when those who see it, die.
That’s when it hits you. The hate you held for such a person would simply not exist if you did not choose to visit them. You cannot save yourself by ruminating on expired hate. Besides. You are not hating them. But a simulacrum. A fossil.
What is left when they become pencil grey?
What is left when they sink—legs, tails and all, into the mud?
iv. Return
Only love.
What is hate but soured love?
What is love but sustained attention?
Love can bud a newer flower.
Love can stir the roots and surface them above.
To love the jaggedness of pain is to throw your powers into the wind, and discover them restored within you.
Before I enter the soil, the world will provide me clues. Clues composed of one term and clues composed of many.
One, like the colour of the rising tide and the distant caw of a bird. Many, like the mixture of sun and water against a swimmer’s breast. The vague shimmering pink projected on their eyes beneath the water. The sensation of being swept along by a river, and also by Morpheus.
In the onward currents, I can only hope to let go of burdened thoughts that no longer serve me. To let go of shadows faintly stuck to my psyche. Until finally. With relief, with humiliation, with terror, I realise that I, too, am nothing but appearance. And that someone is dreaming me.
This piece was loosely inspired by two quotes from John Irving’s, The Cider House Rules. Both quotes offered me starting points for the piece you just read. The quotes: “What is hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the people who once mattered the most to us wind up in parentheses.” and also, “When time passes, it's the people who knew you whom you want to see; they're the ones you can talk to.” became strings that unravelled themselves.
Every month, I’m creating and sharing a film for my paid community. This week, I have created a film on the tension between feeling distracted and desiring to be present.
If you want to receive/watch bluezone films, consider taking out a paid subscription. Or, if you really just want to see the film, send me a message and I can share it with you.
These bluezone videos are quite an experiment to me! So to avoid any hesitation or stalling within the process of creating these pieces, I have come up with the following rules for myself.
To document my life with intention (without it becoming obtrusive)
To record a (rambling) monologue on solitary walks or within quiet afternoons.
To edit this voiceover into something vaguely coherent as a way to capture my thought process, opinion or experience of the topic.
To edit and share my first cut without changes.
So far, it’s been quite freeing to create in such a simple way. To be able to create by moving forward has allowed me to throw off the weight of perfection and instead, to simply do my best.
If you’ve seen the video, I’d love to hear your thoughts.
All the best,
iL.
Omg…iL! Amazing footage. I love the wrap-around shot of you! Everything about this film is fantastic, eye-popping, and shot beautifully; you have an amazing voice and are gorgeous! 🙏❤️🎬
You captured the grief of lost time with nostalgic beauty - it stirred a deep urgency to live more mindfully. We only get one shot at this life.