Rememberance

Today I have found myself remembering the recent past. It is 21 years today since Les took his life. I have contemplated what it would have been like if we had had a child which was something I wanted very much. They would have been 20+ by now. This makes me think how time has passed. Sometimes I feel as though I have lived several lives. My time as a young and righteous activist. My middle years of trying to understand people who didn't think like me and my early ageing when I am completely uncertain about everything. I notice that the young are frustrated and impatient with the generation I am now becoming a part of. They want certainty. They do think they know everything as I did. When I did my PHD I remember saying that the smarter I got the dumber I felt. I wonder if that is what experience gives you, the knowledge that you don't know.

Today I long for a time when I felt so resolved. I found this piece of writing, to Les, written in 1997, four years after his death.

'It's evenings like this that I miss you. When the sky behind my back bleeds in the window and catches the stray hairs from my head in a frizz of electric golden lines. When I have red lipstick on and its nearly worn off from eating passionfruit in one hungry mouthful. When I know that I am sexy and I'm full of loving life. Walking back from the 7/11 with the paper and I'm grinning all over, just at the juicy beauty of everything. I'm in Balaclava for gods sake. How can it be that beautiful, but it is. From the direction of the sea, purple spears of light shoot inland, solar furrows that break into sensitive finger stroking cloudlets as the colour dulls to a dark mud purple. From the city the sky revolts, with clouds the size of ships that billow as though the wind was in their sails. The yellow light that sneaks under the cloud before the sun dips from sight, feathers everything in a warm glaze. Colours come close, in this light. The red rose which tempts me over a neighbours fence is so matt, its almost a fluted hole in the surface of the real world. I want to put my finger in its fold to see where it would go. The night really does live in the trumpet of a darkly purple lilly that................'

And the printer ran out.

Life is so full of loss and beauty and love. I am grateful for the people I have known and the people who have nurtured me..., sometimes by fire I have annealed into the person I am today. Uncertain and curious.

Les at the Highlands

Me painting Jane Gitar and Jay Bird on the Women's Mural in 1984