Crudo

We’re a monstrous pair of crows, devoted to a singular being.

Kathy always claimed she wanted a home, but actually she had a mania a genuine addiction for dividing her life between two places, she couldn’t help it, it was how she was built. A migrant bird, she was compelled to fly from town to town, wheelie case in tow, always lacking one or another essential implement, a charger, jacket, umbrella, scarf.

What she knew about illness was that it went on mostly beneath the waterline, you didn’t really know the extent of damage until it was too late.

She’d never known exactly what she wanted, but now, 3 September 2017, it seemed clear that peace was the only thing. She put the china on the shelf. Just let it all go on. Don’t die. Just let me learn that love is more than me.

This was the problem with history, it was too easy to provide the furnishings but forget the attitudes, the way you became a different person according to what knowledge was available, what experiences were fresh and what had not yet arisen in a personal or global frame.

You think you know yourself inside out when you live alone, but you don’t, you believe you are a calm untroubled or at worst melancholic person, you do not realise how irritable you are, how any little thing, the wrong kind of touch or tone, a lack of speed in answering a question, a particular cast of expression will send you into apoplexy because you are unchill, because you have not learnt how to soften your borders, how to make room. You’re selfish and rigid and absorbed, you’re like an infant.

Human relations, how. It was never easy to know how close to situate yourself, how open to be.

Maybe you’re dying and you don’t care anymore.

The reason she liked tattoos was that she liked something getting under her skin and staying there, it was pretty much the only experience of permanence she had.