A new poem. Missing my sweetheart and Arles. These photos are from a recent visit where I was fixed on seeing what has remained instead of changed. Yes, I am not only dramatic, but a nostalgic girl as well.
As Summer slipped by I sat in my room and thought. My arm was heavy in my lap, my right wrist broken. The heat didn’t help. “Do they even still make casts like that anymore?” my Mom would ask. I didn’t know what to reply, having had no experience with broken bones before, only one severely ravaged heart.
As Summer slipped by all I wanted to do was write. Slate out the feelings and the lingering hurt. Ironic, then, that I could not beyond a one finger jab of a type that eased nothing, only reminded; at night I would lie awake with the ceiling rolling out poems that would fall into fluff by morning.
It felt like I was responsible for this Summer gone by and nothing earned, no joy for winter stockpiled no rabid dips into the sea.
Then arrived a long-awaited Monday in Nîmes to finally pick up the plastic card that lets me be an expat, an outsider Provençale. Hungry and celebratory, I gathered up all of the textures with my one good arm. Yet it exhausted me. The exhilaration no match for quotidian physicality.
So back to my room I went, trailing bits of Summer like crumbs from last years picnic. The taste of what never realised a too bland almost, memories to be had.
Those who said that they would stop by or take me shopping, didn’t. Which meant it was an expedition to be invited to a lunch, delicious save that, wine in, forceful words were launched (albeit with good intentions) by someone who had once meant the entire world to me.
Shocked and angry, I pulled back yet again.
As Summer slipped by, it often felt like another COVID lockdown with far too much room to question things like, “Is he right?” I would ask such things out loud. The ceiling was usually silent.
But the Time did pass, did what it needed to and so last Friday, with the work of a whirring saw, my cast was broken open. The skin underneath it was slightly yellow, the hairs on my forearm like prairie grass. All, all things unattended to, a physical translation of his voiced disappointments.
Despite my nervous over-chatting in that surgical office, bright as the sun, I couldn’t help but delight in a tentative wrist wiggle, to remember the much that such freedom brings.
Yesterday, I made one last stab at Summer.
Officially, it had gone but nonetheless I tried. Sitting on the oldest stone steps of a familiar church – ones worn down in the middle from those seeking faith – I held a cup of sorbet. Three flavours. Savouring, I watched the last of the tourists gaggle at that which they knew nothing about; yet how they had the right to be just there, just like that. It is what we all do, really, I understand. My thoughts bustled up amongst the leaves of the trees and those claims of his that had hurt were clamped down by the coldness on my tongue.
“I still have beauty, despite weight gained inside and outwards. I also have much to give that has been buried in everyday struggle. If I am not arriving as I once did, I am trying.”
And then, all of those ideas became quiet like a benediction. With a whispering joy this season of perpetual promise arrived. Summer was finally in me.
If you would like to hear my voice recording of this poem, please click above.
I hope that you are all well. Finding the diamonds amidst the rough.
As always, I am sending much Love from Provence,
Heather
Ps. I hope that you will forgive me for not responding to all of your lovely comments on my previous post. They made me so happy and touched me enormously. Hopefully with physical therapy started, it will eventually get easier to type!
