I Keep Looking For Your Hand

Do you feel it too in the grey passage of a winter day, as the sky hangs dang south your streets like a tattered shroud, leaden, indifferent, quelling out of all the light do you feel it, too? This gradual, red-taped suffocation of the lack that means that the sun has long since quit its station, and that all that is left is an attenuated kind of bruised-pallor, pulling the hours onward like a doomed man towards the gallows. The air is so thin and metallic which cuts your lungs with each breath, with that slight, unbearable phantom of woodsmoke and decay. We’ve all stood here, haven’t we? Snowflakes melt down not in vows but in the small, heartless sentences one, two, three, a hundred thousand each a sharp needle in the naked flesh piling themselves up in a tremendous, damaging silence blotting footprints, blotting lives, stifling hope before it could be born all smothering the noise of their own wings. And that bone-deep cold that cuts both wool and flesh to the quick, the machinery of desire stirs into motion: a cold tedious pangs of which the one who has died was once able to warm you, and whose presence is everywhere now in seeking to find a hand that is not there.

Think of them, your now departed sculptor, of little, holy pleasures fading traces of black in the yellow folios of recollection. Every breath you breathe out leaves, and goes away like a prayer not answered, your lips being numb, only knowing the iron of future, coming tears. That heart of yours has become a desolate castle, spacious and confronting the ruin of Kafka facing the inaccessible Court, the ice dripping gradually along the hallways, the walls falling with snow. There is a mirror of halls, which are inhuman, unblinking, reflecting not yourself but their dismembered ghosts: their smile, suffocating its shadows, being not heard at all, a hindered hiss that caught the wind in an infinite wailing. When it is a windy afternoon, when you hear the wind make an awful noise on your windows, setting the thin, skeletal fingers of it to scraping glass, you wander through those inner chambers, do you? Feeling your way, by the description of them in the darkness, like the boards lamenting at the bottom of the grave. The cold leaks everywhere, insinuating, the same accusation: You allow them to go. Into the fog of hum drum days, into the gradual erosion of routine, where the dearest love is being audited, and makes too little, and again is drained off and sent into exile without a fuss.

The trees are on the outside bleak and dead, raking the sky with black stretching branches, the bark torn and bleeding frost. They are a reminder of the desperate kicking of Gregor Samsa, who has been metamorphosed, rendered unrecognisable, discarded. Even your own soul is denuded, alienated: an outsider imprisoned in your flesh, going through rites as tasteless as ashes. The coffee in your cup swells in a mocking puff of thin steam then fades, leaving only that steam to burn your tongue and the bad memory, of laughing together and of being naughty and irreverent, now wrapped up under sheets of ice. The words by Pablo Neruda are kind of bruising through: I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride; so I love you because I know no other way… But sincerity has become torture, has it? That innocent, helpless love now a sore that will never heal, and is throbbing with each beat of your heart in that deep abyss of your breast.

You move about in the airless cellars of your chambers you own, yourself, your own grave, you walk with socks passing over depressus, your radiator maintaining its hard labour, its coughing and clanking like chains tumbling over marble. It vomits lukewarm air, and smells of rust and despair, which never gets to the marrow where the cold actually resides. They were your sole fire, your fire of living and in their absence all is ashes. It is a clockwork of death in a careless way, though, with every second your brain circulates on some merciless rime, and the way their eyes look now, chilled forever by distance, forever by silence, by choices, which neither of you can take back. And those eyes were the window into a nation where the senselessness of the world took its healing in the mellow feeling of their kiss, in the sweet salt of their humor on your lips, in the gentle tuning of their laughter on your neck. You are haunted by Shakespeare pleading with you: If music be the food of love, play on… But the music is quieted down, and all that remains that one can hear is the echo of a particular melody that you can no more hum without its breaking.

And yet you are on trial in your own silent court Of pleading guilty to the crime unforgivable of loss. Snow falls like unquestionable testimony deep drifts, insurmountable, washing away all the roads upon which you had walked, all the foottracks with contempt. Winter does not turn into awfulness at once but gradual death: every falling snow is syllable of their name, every wind is sung severed execution by the wind, or ragged fragment of their voice that the snow dispels, so that your eyes would become watery. You pick up the phone its display freezes under frozen fingertips, then come to a halt, frozen in its grip. What are the words which can violate this glacier? All the messages seem to be forgeries and all the I miss you are confessions made too late and they have a copper and regrets touch.

Evening falls as the end of a sentence, absorbing the dying sickly light, and covering the angles with masses of thick and sticky pools. Treacle jaundice fades into streetlamps, to light no more than the sorrowful calculation of pavements before you, as the couples race on, their scarfs smothering their shared breath, and with their hands like two sticky fingers catching up the nightmares of the warm side of the window. Those, the one to whom you adjusted the beat of your heart, to whom you made the fraying likeness of things endurable exist now in some other exile, looking up or down, perhaps, at the same callous heaven, perhaps not. Your love was always not affection, it was out of the rebellious cry of despair, of the beautiful, against the ridiculous, of a promise breathed in whisper, against the clockwork of fate. But that highest and cruelest judge winter has decreed. Jane Austen hurts her own finger with her tiny truth: I cannot fix on the hour, or the spot, or the look, or the words, which laid the foundation. It is too long ago. I was in the middle before I knew that I had begun. And now you are with the ending, without your knowledge how to halt it.

This raggedous texture of ice and indelible recollection, each fibre of which can cut the throat the most cruel of all ironies flares and glimpses forth: we construct tent-like structures of interlocking with such skill, and have so painfully close connections, that we see them fenced and withered by the seasons that we can do nothing about. Hope glimpses here and there, faint and false promises of the distant relief of spring, of the melting snow into streamlets which could possibly turn you all back to each other. Tonight though the wind has fallen to a murmur and the first stars have broken through the veil like painfully shy pledges, cling firmly on a little longer. Wait your vision of that person, that one, who made chasms in your heart by being absent, is going to come true.