loss
The third day of September has a softer light. I wake up without alarm nor getting out of bed and pull my tablet closer. I must have fallen asleep reading The Last Girl, My Story of Captivity, and My Fight Against the Islamic State, A memoir by Nadia Murad. Last night pages rolled on the screen and I was telling myself: This is a dejavu of the worst of humanity. Yet everything again sounds horrendously unprecedented. In August 2014 Nadia […]
Baby Zahra was just 11 months old when a bomb killed her along with other eight tourists. It happened and you might have never heard of them In the summer, it gets hot in Iraq. So scorching your clothes are on fire. One with your skin. You just want to escape. It gets so hot the pavement in Baghdad is like chewed bubblegum underneath your soles. The weather in 2022 became anarchic to the extent nine sandstorms afflicted the […]
though your dress conforms, your manners comport, though the offences you give, may be measured at naught, though in society’s net, you are inevitably caught, may your garlic wild heart, question all that it’s taught though your surface be steady, placid and still, may your lungs stretch to bursting, may you feel your own fill, and when dubious duties beset and make fraught, may your star-burst heart drive waves of sharp thought may your days be full of […]
At around 3:00pm each day, 5 year old Thomasina gathered her dolls, a small blanket, her tea set and laid them down, among the daisies, in the increasingly overgrown garden. Her small hands moved with a large confidence. Each of her treasures had their precise place, which she innately knew. Thomasina poured the tea – ‘just how he likes it’ – tucked ‘Handsome’, her large stuffed cat, under her arm, and waited. Thomasina waited. She waited. And waited. It […]
We are programmed to reach for a person who makes us feel safe, loved, affirmed. This is human. Instinctual. Universal. It is in a toddler’s reaching arms. It powers decisions which we make deep into adulthood. During our years, this yearning will lead us into situations that can feel the most damaging of our lives. That can feel as if they are the end of us. Demolished. Standing alone. Then, we are forced to reach into ourselves. To consider […]
Polly dealt with the news of her husband’s illness as she had dealt with most things that threatened to blow her life off course. She did not think of her ship sinking. Just that the voyage had become more challenging. She knew that it was too late to avoid this storm, and hugging her knees, rocking in tears in the small hull of her life’s boat would not help, either. She must draw further strengths from that hidden place inside […]
Would you like to visit us in Hamilton? I have a cottage I do not use. I know this place is expensive: you can stay there. Our last conversation. A few months later, while I was contemplating booking the flight, your body was found in that same cottage. Just 48 years old. I had not heard from you in a while, something told me a bad star was over us. Let’s say you had no money issue: what would you do? […]
The people in this photograph are neither me nor my mother. My mother was diagnosed with cyclothymia. All the family was dragged along in cycles of depression and fits of anger whose heights could last for days. The disease lasted years and its cycles too. I learnt the pain of objects which break on the skin, the sound of body against body, the fear of slammed doors and obscene words. I understood that life had to be the hard way, the […]
Each Autumn, your tuberous roots stretch their arms after their long summer sleep. Your wooded stems become rich and strong with purples and green, with new life. And each year, as naked trees stand against darkening skies and evenings drawing in, your blooms rise above your heart-shaped leaves, bringing a bold defiant cheer to the leaking conservatory of my aging grandmother’s house. These past years, her arthritic fingers, in last vestige of their nimble past, deftly trimmed you of fading […]
