See me, an old solitary cocooned at my desk between walls book-shelved with alphabetically aligned authors in my haven, a room sheltered in a garden canopied by trees like a haunted wood. Composing a letter to my adult daughter following her divorce I pause, stare out the window recalling my own pierced young heart crying, delete or insert words as if shaping a formal poem. Time seeping away, I take another clean sheet, begin again, frowning in uncertainty.
What if I had lived an alternative life, one without the chronic gothic memories whistling around my mind so late now? It could start with my fantasy parents’ belief in the value of art’s integrity, their understanding of love’s kindness, children’s jeopardy, and the sanctification of education in lieu of lucre’s rat trap. Mapped undergraduate days begin in my teens instead of my late thirties. I read poetry, crash in and out of love and lust socialising on campus eschewing student jobs. No gruelling night hours toiling on low pay to complete my yearned-for full-time education. When qualified I start serious work in my twenties, not at fourteen when I wore my jacket sleeves scrunched up to hide a worn out elbow. I enjoy lunches easily afforded at a redolent hip deli, desk left tidy at day’s end, my hands clean.
In this other life marriage to a woman who treasures books delights despite autumnal affairs because we take care to touch other with a You OK? ‘sorry’ a word that fails to daunt us. Our relationship has quality, stitched to last long-term. Her people, friends whose approval I value, love our crumbling inner-city street, its old elms. My vicissitudes, until older, few, I rarely convey hurt, bodily or otherwise. Enjoying quotidian hedonism, sadness never eclipses me, betrayal’s burns resulting from minor let-downs only. Friendship balances seclusion. Beauty is all, my ready smile an advertisement for orthodontists, wrong moves mostly trivial in this wistful life with no need to avoid stepping on the cracks of a broken world.
An obsessive-compulsive in thrall to numbers, I don’t count my disastrous mistakes, but other odd things including written words and lines claim me. Thirteen lines so far. Unlucky. I estimate the years since we were last in touch. Also thirteen. The ship of the past sounds its long bleak foghorn. From the opposite direction death steals towards us no matter which life we lived. I plunge ahead, edit dread concerning our circle of blood, manage to write that strange word ‘love,’ shall go one better, post this awkward letter.
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