“The places we are born come back. They disguise themselves as migraines, stomach aches, insomnia. They are the way we sometimes wake falling, fumbling for the bedside lamp, certain everything we’ve built has gone in the night. We become strangers to the places we are born. They would not recognize us but we will always recognize them. They are marrow to us; they are bred into us. If we were turned inside out there would be maps cut into the wrong side of our skin. Just so we could find our way back. Except, cut wrong side into my skin are not canals and train tracks and a boat, but always: you.”
“If I really still loved you I would have left you where you were, not carted you here, where the days are so short they are barely worth talking about and where we endlessly, excavate, exhume what should remain buried.”
“You have an aggressive stamina that carries us through whole nights with barely a pause. Occasionally you’ll say, I’m going to the bathroom and rise out of your chair like a mourner from the side of a grave, your hands brushing invisible dust from the front of your trousers I lent you. I’m going now, you’ll say and approach the stairs with gravitas, turning back to glare at me as if to say that I cannot continue without you, it is not my story and I must wait until you have returned. Halfway up the stairs you tell me that a person has to own their mistakes, live with them. I open one of the notebooks I’ve bought and write down everything I can remember. Your words are almost peaceful on the page, somehow disarmed.”
“Dread was a word that could be used also to describe flocks of birds taking off into the sky. The mass of birds rose up my throat, flooded out through my cracked jaw.”
“When I looked back you had sidled closer, weed wrapped in the drags of black hair either side of your face, your old cigarette smell filling the kitchen from top to bottom. I could feel you examining my life. Even in my imagination you were opinionated, critical.”
“I’d always understood that the past did not die just because we wanted it to. The past signed to us: clicks and cracks in the night, misspelled words, the jargon of adverts, the bodies that attracted us or did not, the sounds that reminded us of this or that. The past was not a thread trailing behind us but an anchor. That was why I looked for you all those years, Sarah. Not for answers, condolences, not to ply you with guilt or set you up for a fall. But because –a long time ago – you were my mother and you left.”
“There are more beginnings than there are ends to contain them.”
“Forgiveness, Laura said, was not something she could give. Forgiveness didn’t come until a person was so tired they couldn’t do anything else.”
“I went to the same shop to buy a sandwich every lunchtime and –standing in the queue one day—I understood suddenly what you had done by creating your own language and teaching it to me. We were aliens. We were like the last people on earth. If –in any sense—language determined how we thought then I could never have been any other way than the way I am. And the language I grew up speaking was one no one else spoke. So I was always going to be isolated, lonely, uncomfortable in the presence of others. It was in my language. It was in the language you gave me.”
“But I love you, you say to me in the supermarket, and I want to say it back but I can’t, not yet; I can’t give you that. And I want to tell you that I think we made it. Whatever it was that pressed through the calm, cold waters that winter, that wrapped itself around our dreams and left its clawed footprints in our hearts. I want to tell you that it might never have been there if we hadn’t thought it up.”
