Leaving

I am thinking;

thinking about the line that runs across my face, one of many now which were never there in my youth.  This one runs across the ridge of my nose forming a groove in which to place spectacles.  The line appeared in the mirror the day after I lost my mother.  The day after a massive heart attack brought an end to her massive personality.  I first saw the line – or wrinkle, if you like – in the lift as I left the hospital.  A young face then, with a solitary crack across its youthful sheen; a crack that indicated the increasingly hasty passing of time.

I am looking down;

down at the people peopling below, as I see them as they really should be seen: miniscule due to the distance between us.  I am thinking of my mother and all that she was.  She was taken away in a second, removed from this Earth as swiftly and as easily as a bug beneath a boot.

My face is all lines and wrinkles now.  My once smooth skin is segmented by cracks and furrows, each section a reminder of moments on life’s journey – not a trip I would recommend.

The bags which droop beneath my eyes like hippos in hammocks came to stay after Tom left.  I always expected him to go of course; even encouraged it.  After the children had gone he had no reason to stay.  I was a bucket for sperm, an incubator of offspring, and a maker of nests.  The bags were a stamp of disapproval.  I may as well have been branded with the words:

Past its use-by date

At least three of my chins arrived when Jake moved away.  I am well aware that “it’s only a few hours on an aeroplane”, but he has still gone.  I cannot feel him near me.  I have done all I can as far as he is concerned.  I popped him out of a hole far too small and brought him into a world which is too large for us to be together. 

With a son in Italy, a mother in the afterlife and an ex-husband in court my hair was bound to turn grey.  My crow’s feet began to resemble dinosaur footprints and my eyelids receded into their sockets as if to drag my eyes away from what was left to be seen.

Now Katie will soon be gone.  I can’t be the mother I want to be.  I can’t tell her the things she needs to hear.  I can’t take away the pain.  She’s only thirty three, with a face as smooth as mine once was.  Even with a shaved head, she is beautiful.  She should be staying around.  Bless my beautiful daughter, with a mother like me.

My cheek bones disappeared on May the 13^th 1987.  A blotched and cracked terrain appeared in their place right in the middle of a party.  There was champagne and I was surrounded by good people gathered to celebrate my retirement.  They were all smiles and jealousy whilst I stood at the centre of the room knowing that I was but a few hours from leaving behind the last supporting column holding up my very existence.

May’s face is always cheerful, hopeful, radiant.  She is older than me of course but she shines like the sun – the rest of us making up her solar system, revolving, around her at a respectful distance.  But then no-one ever left May.  No-one ever wanted to.

I never had a day off work due to stress or illness.  Cancer is cruel enough to have bypassed me on its way to one of my children.  But greater than stress, depression or insanity, more harmful than high blood pressure, angina, or the mighty cancer, greater than all of these is loneliness.  This is the true epidemic sweeping the world.  No-one lives in family-units any more.  No-one speaks to their neighbours over the garden fence. 

Leaving is now a part of the human life cycle:  After you leave the home of your childhood, an adulthood of leaving and being left lies ahead of you.

I am crying;

just a solitary tear which is making its break for freedom.  It is making its journey over hill and down dale, and it is dripping from my chin, slowly, taking pleasure in making its choice to slip down and down to the ground below.

I am thinking;

Thinking of swimming lessons at Junior school.  I am remembering how I used to jump into the pool.  I can see the different ways of jumping in: bomb, straddle-jump, jack-knife.  Then I can see me diving at the age of ten – straight arms and legs as you enter the water.

I wonder if the tear has reached the floor yet.

I am jumping;

with straight arms and legs, feet first, jack-knife style.  I am sinking down to the street below.

This time, I am leaving