After you read the doctor’s letter, pretend it is a breakup letter to the illness ravaging your body and not a statement of irrefutable facts. The white envelope is a dove, torn to pieces, lying at your feet.
At sunset stand against the west wall of the house to feel the heat baked into the bricks warming your back as your face cools. At sunrise, stand against the wall and absorb the coldness into your back as your face warms. When you stand against the bricks, listen to the sound of your breathing in through your nose then out through your mouth. Clench your fists breathing in. Release them breathing out.
Sorrow is not unlike this.
Go into the garden and look for ladybugs. Search around the lemon tree behind the kids’ trampoline and around the garden shed where the parsley self-seeded and flourishes. You will find a stick insect instead.
Uncertainty is not unlike this.
Watch the bees in the flowers. Listen to them. See that the snails have climbed up the fence because rain is coming. When it does rain, count the drops of rain falling from the eaves and see if you can make it to one thousand.
Send a text to your best friend asking how he’s doing at the moment because you haven’t spoken in a while. Send a text to your sister for the same reason. Water the plants when you’re thirsty.
Go back inside and write out a shopping list of what you will need for the week and make it a hymn to the mundane. Include a treat for yourself. Respond to your best friend’s text and invite him over for dinner and ask him what his favourite food is and plan to make it. Add the ingredients to the shopping list you started.
Expectation is not unlike this.
When you go to the shops with your shopping list, tie your shoelaces with the perfect tightness you like. Let the swallows in the underground car park remind you of people scurrying about as the parentheses of your day because prophets have not forgotten how to read the signs.
On the way home from the shops, go to McDonald’s, and while waiting in the drive-thru, decide to order the burger you have never tried (the Filet-o-Fish) and know that this is what disappointment will taste like as you sit in the carpark, rinsing your mouth out with fries. This will remind you that breadcrumbs are for cooking, not for leaving a trail.
Read a book once you’ve unpacked the groceries; the one you said you always would but never get around to. Then read Hamlet and be certain you don’t know the way forward. Read The Road as the antidote.
Draw the flowers in the vase, a daguerreotype of death. Draw them after they have wilted as an act of preservation. Remember your first kiss and why it stays in your memory and not the last kiss you gave or received. Wait for the echo. As the sun sets, measure the distance the shadow travels in an hour as it pushes in like the rising tide. Create a playlist for your wake and make mixtapes to give to people now. Sort through your sock drawer and throw out the old pairs and the holey ones. Make pairs of mismatched socks. Later, consider learning macrame and wonder, when you’re done tying yourself in knots, will you have made something beautiful?
Clarity is not unlike this.
When you read the instructions, “Open Other End,” on the box, you know for certain you will flip the box over but you won’t trust yourself to follow your heart.
Regret is not unlike this.
Learn why the rod and staff were the shepherd’s tools. Wield them and master them for, and over, yourself.
Boundaries are not unlike this.
At dinner, light a candle (one of the good ones, the smelly ones you saved for special occasions) to see how far light travels in the dark because the night is a drawn curtain and limits your view. This is the measure of where you feel safe because of what you can see. You know what lies in the shadows behind the lemon tree and the garden shed: leftover bricks, roofing tiles and black plastic pots. The garden shed is a mausoleum of the lawnmower and garden tools, sundry odds and sods, bags of potting mix and stakes for the tomatoes you’ve been meaning to plant each season. The lemon tree produces fruit whether you tend to it or not. Befriend the certainty of doubt.
Let the shadow’s long fingers collect the cobwebs from the cornice in the ceiling and make fairy floss from it. The shadow offers it to you. You eat it.
Disappointment is not unlike this.
One day you will make friends with the weight of fear to step out the back door and turn on the light. Wait for the possum with its baby to scurry across the top of the fence.
Perception is not unlike this.
Finally, take a shower to experience baptism in the ordinary act of bathing. You will remember the valley and the mountain top are both places of vision. One is a mirror. The other is a lens. Circumstances will teach you how and when to apply the lens, and when and how to use the mirror in order to see clearly. Clarity will come through seeing yourself correctly.
Death is not unlike this.
This is a reworking of a couple of pieces from earlier in the year. Using second person perspective is a very hard sell to market so I am putting it up here for you. I hope you enjoy it.
A Fullness in Brevity - Adam Byatt 