writing_shadows

When I was four years old, we stood on this very spot, my father and I.

I sat upon his shoulders, his warm hands with a firm grip around my ankles as I gazed across at the spectre of Big Ben and the towering fortress of gold that was Westminster Palace that looked to me like a fairytale castle. I had never seen the world so transformed before; the city by night was utterly new and it was more magical than my wildest imaginings. That night I fell in love with the stars, the moon, the ripples on the water, the buzz of traffic, and everything around me that the glittering amber lights touched. I even half thought I might fall in love with the shadows too.

At that moment I glimpsed, I think, the beginnings of a dream of how vast and how magnificent the world was, at what treasures I might some day inherit, what promise, what potential there was in this one dazzling vision, and I couldn’t even comprehend what that might mean for me; only that it was right there and I could touch it, and walk in amongst it, and be a part of it. It was New Year’s Eve. I didn’t know what that meant either, but my father whispered the words to me like they themselves were things of magic and wonder, and to me they absolutely were.

One year on, my father was gone, dead I was told, but I didn’t know what dead was. My mother wouldn’t talk about it; she couldn’t. She became tired and vague, sharp-voiced, heavy-handed, hard to get a soft word from, or any word at all that made sense. I turned to books, teachers, television. I learned all I could about death and with each day, each new thing I learned, a piece of the magic was snuffed out until all the light in me seemed to be gone.

I once made Johnny bring me back here; back to this very spot. We stood here together, his warm hands on my shoulders and my fingers curled over his and I felt tears stinging at my eyes at the overwhelming sense of loss, the weight of half-remembered hope that I felt in returning. I was thirteen. I tilted my head up to look at him, the soft browns of his eyes caught in that same amber light and I fell in love with him as I had with the stars all those years ago.

Tonight the light is not the same. It’s gaudier somehow; less lustrous, more banal. No magic, no wonder. Perhaps, though, it is as much me that has changed, as it. The tears come easily, but they’ve been coming for an hour and in the rain you lose track. Looking out at this same skyline, all that promise and potential that I once sensed hangs about my shoulders like a weight; the opportunities missed, the possibilities squandered, the dreams bitten away by the cold. I lift my hand at the memory of his but there is no warmth there, or anywhere, anymore.

“Did you know?” I had asked. In eight years not a word between us, but that silence told me more than I had dared to ask.

I heard him breathe; and part of me thought I heard him break, but I think that’s just what I wanted to hear. He sighed my name and I could almost feel the heat of his breath against my cheek.

“Darcy…”

I listen to myself sobbing as my throat closes up in a rough, sore swell of pain and humiliation and longing until finally he speaks again, and it feels like it’s been forever.

“Please… don’t call again.”

My head spins as if he’d struck me himself. At the click of the receiver, my knees buckle and I’m grateful to be on the floor because suddenly my head is swimming again and I think I’m going to be sick. The tracks in my arm are throbbing and I sway in a dumb stupor for a moment as the world turns until a sharp bang overhead makes me near jump out of my skin and a blue light fills the sky.

It’s beginning.

And suddenly the panic grips me. The world is on the cusp of a new millennium, a time if ever there were a time to start again, to wipe the slate clean. No mother, no father, no child, no lover, no lifeline, no hope. How many more years of struggling against the tide, how many decades of devastation and disappointment, brushed aside, left outside, shunned and ashamed, blood on my hands, skin scarred, heart-torn, veins thick with vile sap sucking the life out of me hit by hit by hit and a thudding in my head so loud I can barely feel my heartbeat to remind me I’m still alive even if it’s only out of spite. Fingernails bitten back to bleeding fumble uselessly at the wet cobbles, ankle turned awkwardly underneath me as another bang up high like a gunshot knocks me down with a cry of fright and the world turns red to gold to white and then plunges me back into darkness, rain pounding on my face and my bare arms and my chest, bruising at bruised flesh as my fingers catch a razor’s edge and flood with heat, and suddenly the world slows almost to a stop as I reach the eye of the storm.

Sound muted.

Light dimmed.

Pain dulled.

I pull the blade from my pocket and feel a quietness fill the air around me like a fog.

A sense of peace.

And there I have my answer.

And for the first time I can remember since I was four years old; I am not afraid.