seeing though a glass darkly
A messenger call from the Angel Girl. I remember at the time I was easing off my shoes, the kettle singing in the quiet of my room. The soft whirring ring persisted as I sat thinking about where my bag, the phone was, exactly? Stupified, I guess after a day in the sun, in the city with her. A bit reluctant to bestir myself although I did. "Mum?... Mother? (heightened) and she was straight into it, some unlikely story about a crow attack?
"Yeah, I was like minding my own business? waiting, on my bike, when he, when something hit me hard, on the back of my head... so...so, it was a crow? a big black crow, and he hit me, hard?"
"Oh...um, a... a bird?"
"yeah yeah, a Crow! I saw him flying back unto the sign above the bins, after. Sitting there, staring at me."
"oh...well isn't that kinda strange and..."
"It hurt! It really, really hurt. He meant it to hurt? Like I don't mean that he...I mean he probably has a nest or something in the bins, and babies that he has to, he has to, you know, feed? protect? He has...he has to... to guard the food. And I was, I was standing in his...like his food source, so he had to..."
"Oh. Well... anyways (the Angel Girl puts all her felt experiences through a sort of conscientious, analytical wringer of logic and gives you the politically correct fully analysed version on sharing ) are you, you know, all right?
"I mean he hit me hard.? My head's... still... So what should I do."
"Oh well, right, (Angel's fears of damage/danger are an undercurrent to her cognitive analysis in these kind of situations. She wants to understand, she wants you to understand, she wants to cry her a river of tears. But she will not)
"I mean, you know, why not have a little lie down... to get over the...I mean shock, sounds shocking (I know so little about crow attacks really, but it does sound that. And I try) Shocking!"
"Oh well, It's not actually the crow's fault? if he, I mean, had to protect his territory? I mean Crow Attacks are becoming common, I've been looking it up. (Sternly) ( Had I been, in sympathising, in fact judging the crow?)
"Well, yeah, but still and all we can't have crows going around attacking..."
"Reports of Crows Attacks are increasing, online? Look it up! Cos birds are I mean, they are driven out of their habitats. By humans? Left with no option but to defend, like, their food sources?"
"Right. Good to know know (mea culpa) So hey, kettle's boiled here and I want to make some...I mean make some..."
"So what about my head! Infection! from it's you know, claws?"
"Oh well (robustly) my darling, I daresay you can hold your own against bird germs? Sure we'd all be dead long ago if it was that easy for...birds. Sure they'd all be at it. (I think the sun had worked on me like cannabis resin here)
A wave of exhaustion then. I assure her glibly that birds are harmless entirely, to apply a damp cloth to the affected area, update me tomorrow.
(I heard the underlying note, the pain, the panic without words, but I'd kinda run out of road on this one, to be truthful)
in fact I'm actually bleeding...
Next evening she comes and sweeping back the hair, shows me her wound. A bloody cut where Mr Crow has scraped her skull.
"But...you didn't say he had cut you?" I protest, feeling that I had less than kind.
"But I didn't know! only felt it. There was no one to look at it, then." she wails "Is it bad!"
Her friends had had a look while drinking in the park I discover (sprawled under the kindly sheltering trees, toasted by the sun, knocking back cheap wine from Albert Heijn). They had located the wound. It was in fact a super cool story necking wine, laughing at your war wounds. Anaesthetised to any consequences.
We look at ways of cleaning the cut, discuss infection. I notice her pallor, her forehead clammy. She wants to talk, to process. She describes the blow's force when the crow swooped, behind, how she didn't see it coming, how she was unaware of what it was. I listen. I see that I haven't understood this properly, if at all. Somewhere between her hurt and her indomitable logic, and my shrinking from her inconvenient need, I failed her here. Failed to grasp the gravity of the situation. I am more culpable really than the Crow.
Facebook death notification
Unsettling days, that one and the one that followed. I learn that a very good friend has died by suicide some months before. I learn of this on the day after the crow attack via a FB notification that it is his birthday! Wish him happy birthday! facebook thrills. His page, still up, contains one message, wishing him a happy birthday in heaven. Right. Heaven. I knew something was up. He had not contacted me at Christmas as he always would. I message the Facebook poster who messages back to tell me that he has died, a few weeks after we, he and I, last met in fact.
The realisation then that I knew, some instinct told me, he was gone (which I had dismissed), got me to thinking about our last meeting. Recalling the meal, (last supper), our interaction, looking for clues. Wondering, not about what I didn't know but rather what I knew and did not acknowledge, swerving maybe to avoid.
Thinking long hard on this one, wanting to understand if and how I'd failed him on that night, at least.
Thinking about him...
oh, I remember you
He was a good friend, same age. He fought the good fight and was functional in the world, at some cost to himself (I see) ( No, I always knew that)
you started here, you ended over here
He worked, had worked from when he was 16 years old. His father showed him how to sell things and that's what he did. He sold, bibles at first, really well. He progressed to Life Insurance. On the road, touching base with people, persuading, advancing, serving people. Good at it. So good he got promotions, more and more of it, hours and hours of it. And then he stopped. He had to stop. He had the health insurance, a pension fund to stop, you might say. He started a new self help group which seemed to work, people were sent to him, OCD sufferers, people tormented with panic. He began a Masters as a therapist. He hadn't finished that. It was his first experience of third level education. He took it on, puzzling over assignment referencing, memory sticks, continual and unrelenting assessments.
He had distracting demons. He had to travel miles to and from the college, negotiate with college tutors, explain his methods, persist in his self belief. Sometimes his demons ruled. Mostly he wrestled with them, carried on. He never would let go.
you lived for this
He was gregarious, a drinker, who denied himself that solace when unwell. He was a talker, loving pub talk, connection. He lived to connect, to fellow sufferers, to all the people hobbled by OCD, panic, to his many and varied friends and acquaintances, to me. He was passionate, a passionate man. He lived for his GAA, the matches, the players, the dissections afterwards. And Leonard Cohen. He came with me to see Leonard in Dublin, and to Lisadell where he sang the songs all through that magical night, while ferrying drinks for us, chatting with randomers, surrendering happily to every good thing. He came to Seville with me one fine summer, happy as any child with the city, the people, our dinners in the warm evenings, walks in the shadow of the Alhambra, sucking on an ice-pop in the heat of the afternoon. The warmest, sweetest of companions.
you suffered, died, for this...
He suffered, always, all his life. In his forties, when I met him, he was a slight, open faced man walking crookedly, from backache. Meetings with him involved an exhaustive search for suitable seating. I, never having suffered that, indulged him (I felt)
In time he told me why he spend so long in toilets. Washing his hands over and over. Never having suffered that, I listened patiently (I felt) He went to therapists, messeuses, doctors seeking alleviation, with energy, purpose. And this is true, he never ever allowed his torments ruin a good night out. Nor did I (allow his torments ruin a...). He lived, like a marathon runner, keeping on keeping on, pushing through the burn, until one day he was fished out, extracted, from the ocean. A bottle of whiskey in him, having, as he told me later, made up his mind.
He went patiently, afterward, back to the drawing board. Starting an actually effective OCD group, applying for his course, and always and ever seeking love, a woman, a life. His lifelong quest. The road he travelled (never to arrive). I was not she, although it would have suited him and me if I had been. I was his friend and there were times when I relied on him and he on me.
Before our last supper, he had fallen again into a black hole of depression. He didn't see me for a year or so...and that last night, he told me about it. He had crawled back doggedly from the brink, was planning things again, deciding to stop the meds, to resume his course. Because, he told me, he was better, yes, he was, and did not want to heed the warnings to hold up, wait up. All the cautions to take the meds and keep to the shallows in the future, hereinafter. And I, I told him what he wanted me to, agreed with what he said he wanted to do. Understanding, I thought, his need to live his life, if life was to be worth living.
We eat and drank, talked, listened, happy for that night at least. I'm sure of it.
He was not his suffering?
wanting to live wanting to die
But when he didn't call, or sent his inevitable Xmas card, his new year's text, I knew. I didn't heed my knowing, didn't actively grieve. Aware, if it were true, I might not actually be told. Not knowing anyone, really, knowing him. I housed an elusive ghost of loss regardless, and on this year, on his birthday, he managed, I think ( maybe) to let me know his ending. At last.
I recalled that last time we met, re-called and again re-called it. And I see oh yes I see how sad he was, how depleted, how eager to get past it, to connect, with food and talk, with me, I was always good for that, for talk and fanciful forward planning.
I wonder if I'd asked him, how he actually felt ( he didn't seem to want to go there though he would have gone anywhere I asked him to...) (but if I'd asked, would he have said?) He and I so busy, busy, there, sailing into the mystic, having raucous craic, while all the while his poor sad child was sitting numbly on the restaurant seat, awaiting him. I see it now, I see myself unwilling to connect to pain, his sorrow. Least it took me too, maybe. (and what good would I have been to him then?) It took him, anyway.
so don't be bothering me with all that now (I CAN'T?)
I think about that, about gliding over peoples dreadful sorrow, taking them to other places, they eager for it as you yourself, wanting only to be transported. I think of a girl attacked by crows, who could not say the words 'I'm wounded', whose wound I could not/would not see. I would not look. There, but for fortune.... Sometimes you will not look at suffering humanity, lest they drag you down there with them, or, blindsided, hobble you, so that you cannot haul them out? A polite refusal to connect with suffering, drowning, begging humanity, the dreadful inability to connect.
The knowledge is heavy in me, when I find the painting in the Van Gogh Museum, The Cornfield. I stand before it drowning in the vibrant corn, his shimmering blues, the colours pinned and pinched to canvas by the crows. So many of them. Hovering, poised against the deep blue sky to fall on, to devour, the harvest of a life.
(Note to Angel:I do not mean to blame the crows. Also, what doesn't kill you makes you laugh))
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