Dawn Broke... And I Didn't. in And The Rest.

Dawn light, the sky a pale pastel palette of rosé blush seeping slow into dusty forget-me-not blue, fading ethereal in soft suspended swirls. Icy cold, frost shimmers drifting in the morning haze and dances pinprick footsteps on the nerves of my fingers. Sat in the doorway with the warm wall of indoor heat a thick glow behind me, the muscles between my ribs and across my midriff ache dull. The striation beneath my sleeves bites a sharper pain and my heartbeat skitters nervous like a skipping song, but I’m breathing shallow and careful, gently drinking sips of oxygen on ice.

I’m here, I’m still here. It’s almost a discovery.

These have been dark days in the shadows of the cliff face, shaking and hurting and lost. Nothing changes, darkness is a part of me, a half of me, a harlequin in monochrome. Sometimes it wins, sometimes it holds the reins, but the fury burned itself, and today the embers gleam amber in the afterglow. Staring into the sky in the moments before the world wakes, a truth, of sorts, flickers elusive in weak winter sun.

Living is creating patchwork, the moments worth holding on to sewn together in memory, creating something bigger than themselves. A patchwork blanket of protection to fold around ourselves like an embrace against the cold.

The uncomplicated, unconditional happiness that ripples through mum’s voice when I call her unexpectedly, running through it effervescent like the bubbles in champagne. The bright-burning wide-eyed wonder of drunken laughter so all-consuming it bends you double, it squeezes your heart like a rubber ball, it bursts uncontrollable and you’re dancing down the high street singing at 4am, arms entangled, wobbly on graceless coltish legs. Family around the table in the warm wrap of mum’s hearth, the adults we have somehow become, are still becoming, tied tight together by the familiar punchlines of the childhood we shared. The energy of movement, the physical grace of muscles stretching and bunching and reaching and gathering, the powerful bouncing kick of a breathless heartbeat, walking or working or dancing; to move is to live. The hillside rolling into the lake in frost-marbled green, the sun still low and lazy on a hazy horizon, a moment suspended like my breath in cold air.

The moments worth holding on to, sewn together with the cadence of the songs that bring each one back to my fingertips like touch. Fleeting snowflake moments that together make my patchwork.

I don’t know any answers, I don’t know about tomorrow. I don’t know if trying to immortalise ephemera is enough to be the answer, enough to make a future. I don’t know if finding a love in the snapshot stills of warm memory is enough to fill the holes in a heart that can not love itself.

I don’t know anything, and today it doesn’t matter.

Today I will rebandage my wrists and repaint my face and dance cautious with the dawn,
and have yet another go
at living.