Epilogue

It was a difficult time economically.  It was a difficult time certainly aspirationally.  And I was just sitting on the couch, not getting famous.  Meanwhile in Odessa mama lay sprawled across the table, watermelon-ripe and iconic, the telephone cable still around her neck.  Fabulous.  Truly.  But we were fresh out of fables.  And besides, the washing up wasn't doing itself.

You talked gender politics while I scrubbed three-month-old lentils from the pan.  Pidgin misogyny with the comrade amigo who was missing the eye teeth to his leer.  Las brujas may be loca, honey, but they still check the milk before they put it in your tea, retreat to the step so the two of you can smokescreen the feminine out of revolucion.

Still waiting for word on that missing plane.  And the girls in Nigeria are conspicuous by their absence, football scores making better programming than yet more dead muslims.  I check in with the boys in Aden to make sure they didn't miss their fifteen minutes of fame, wonder whose faces have been added to the posters on the streets of Tawahi.  Remember the scar on someone's arm where he'd carved the initial of the first girl he'd ever loved.  Wonder if I should have married him anyway, formed my own International Solidarity Movement.

Postcards from Palestine.  The Dump stretches on forever.  And the sticker on the window still calling for a hung parliament, Never Mind the Bollocks, the back of your head still playing on repeat: Maggie, Maggie, Maggie, die die die!  After the fact.  After the storm.  The politics of the personal is the proverbial pachyderm in the room, and permaculture is just a middle class First Wives Club: it is no longer our garden, Monsieur Voltaire le Bourgeois.

I wonder if God still resides in the sunrise over Chesterton, or if that too was just a trick of the light in our stolen summer, when it seemed the sun would be forever in my eyes, lying crucified by the morning after while you read to me stories of your lost days.  We traced back those ley-lines, from the Mill road chippy to the place where the sun rose, from the valley to the stars.  But it was never my kiss that was going to wake you.  Thursday's child has far to go.

The starter motor is still in pieces in the corner.  Very Derridean: I could take it apart but not put it back together, the process of deconstruction failing to find that which was always already just out of reach.  Talk about the passion.  Talk about a spark, but the hot-wiring trick that they taught me in Yemen does nothing to bring it back to life.  Broken connections.  Too obvious a metaphor to make it to the final cut, but worth a short paragraph, to prove the point that sometimes verisimilitude has nothing on real life.

You couldn't script it better, really.  Like the man who jumped off the bridge that night.  Pure melodrama.  Like the pictures of mama in Odessa.  In the land of gods and monsters, life imitates art.  We were born to be superstars, but we were always already broken, the fairytale that ended with our first kiss.  This consciousness does not go back in the bottle, however hard I try to drink it down.  And I will always raise a glass for you, in the sadness of the present perfect: you have been the love of my life.

Last words, last rites as I commit our memory to a page that the wind is already turning at the corners, as I run my fingers over the place where you are carved forever under my skin.  Let this wind be a herald to carry me on to other summers, where the tears that will not fall now may water the ground in which I grow my dreams.  Let the world turn, and turn for the better, and carry you to another sunrise where you can see the face of God in the clouds.  Let me finally lay our story to rest.