Cecilia

On the day that Cecilia was born, the earth stood still. Silence was found in the most unusual places, and for the first seconds of her life, there was no sound. We know now how difficult it is to find real silence, true silence. Truly, to this day, it has been seen as an impossibility, except in those few moments at her birth. The whole world paused, without knowing why. The silence filled their ears and their eyes and their hearts and took over their whole being. This unusual feeling caused each person to stop what they were doing, and search the room for those eyes and the depths of which they so deeply desired to explore, and to take the hands belonging to that person, and just for a moment, feel both everything and nothing, all at once.

Later, when friends would gather together, they would each say to each other that they had had the most peculiar experience that day, ‘Almost as if the world stopped turning, and everything in it stood still. Like time forgot to move forwards, or else, I was left behind as it continued. I’m not sure how to explain it properly though, it was like nothing I’ve ever felt before.’
And the person to whom this was said would nod in silent understanding, because they too had felt a sensation completely unfamiliar to them, one which had seemed to change the composition of their lives, the beating of their heart, almost as if the connections in their brain had all been made and un-made in the same moment. A sense of some sort of vu had occurred, one man concluded. Though Déjà vu it was not, for he had no sense of recollection of such a moment ever happening before, and Jamais vu it could not be, for what he felt was in no way familiar nor unfamiliar, it simply was. However, being a man who liked to resolve things, he put it down to Presque vu, and continued with his day, although in his heart he knew, he had never felt that way before, so there was nothing to almost, but not quite remember.

It was this indescribable feeling that overcame each person as they dealt with the silence that seemed to be more felt than heard. Although a few spoke freely about such an unusual situation, most felt a need to keep it to themselves, to lock their piece of silence up in the cage of bones within their chest, where it would lie in wait with one’s heart, and every now and then, whisper about the days when they almost merged into one. And years later, some would find themselves waking up in the deep of the night, or else becoming unexplainably breathless in familiar and commonplace situations, not fully understanding that their hearts were yearning to feel that way again, to understand what it meant to know real silence, true silence.

Such was the beginning of Cecilia’s life. From that moment, from the starting second of her life on earth, Cecilia was found to carry around with her a silence that was at once both silent and still; musical and alive. You saw this, or rather, heard this; the first time you met her. For anyone in the world, it could have been in a busy mall, bustling with people, full of the noise and echoes of human life, of conversation, of laughter and movement. It could have been anyone in the world to look up at the moment that she moved past, and perhaps many people did that, raising their heads and looking up, but what they saw, they did not understand. You, however, looked up to notice the melodic beat of her step, the way in which her atmosphere could have the sensation of stripping people back to their hearts desires, and had done so since the moment she was born. You saw this and felt this and heard this all at once, and instead of lowering your eyes from what your heart told you was something far above you, something so immensely majestic, you continued to look. She could have been walking towards anyone, yet she was walking towards you, consumed by her thoughts, as you were moments before by your book, and now so by this complete stranger that was at once more familiar than your closest friends.

The first thing she said could have been directed at anyone, yet it was you who heard her say that “we're all on our way somewhere, but some of the time, it's never where we think”.
That was all, nothing more. For all you know, she could have just read that from a travel insurance advertisement, which she did, moments before. You would stand dumbfounded by her eyes, the sort that you had been looking for all your life, but never knew until the moment you found them, and she would walk passively away. That was the effect of her presence. It broke your heart and made you whole, it calmed you to stillness, and it stirred within you a desire to run at a mountain, to jump over seas and oceans, to soar through the cities and towns that you and she would spend the rest of your lives in, to write books and books filled with your admiration and love for her. And you knew, without doubt or questioning from that moment that you would search the world over to find her again, you would knock on every door to find the one that opened to her standing in front of you, smiling because she and you both know that your quest was over, and you could look into those eyes once more.

And at the moment you resolved in yourself to seek after her silence, to pursue her to the ends of the universe, you felt a tap on your shoulder. You would turn, expecting to find the face of some acquaintance, your heart ready to drop at the sight of them for it was not her. Instead, with some strange act of serendipity, you turned your eyes to meet hers. She would apologise for saying something so peculiar to a complete stranger, that sometimes she gets lost in her own world and she needs the help of another to get her out, and while she speaks, you begin to feel what men and women felt at the beginning of her life, and that you also felt, at your own tender age, and an unusual feeling of at last, after all these years, you were coming home. You wouldn’t tell her that you found something about her as familiar as your own skin, nor of your resolution to be with her for the rest of your life. Instead, you begin to speak of the sky, of the universe that is bigger than you both, yet can be contained in each person’s consciousness. Later, you wondered at your reasoning, wondered why of all the things on the earth, in the face of social convention and conversation etiquette you chose elsewhere to hold her attention. Maybe it was because you felt that she somehow holds the whole earth within her, and that to speak of such things with an intimacy that residents of this planet usually acquire would be reaching out of your depth, for looking into Cecilia’s eyes, you found you knew nothing.

She stayed with you, however, and listened, talked, laughed, sighed. You began to fall under the influence of her atmosphere. She carried this atmosphere with her everywhere she went. Like her scent, of lavender and the sea after a storm; it trailed after her, leaving even the most hard-hearted in awe. It was into this atmosphere, this silence that you could always step, and be alone together. Even in the most crowded places, you would find in her an oasis, a respite from all else. You would look into her eyes and see everything you once had longed for, you could feel her blood, pulsing through her veins, feel the inadequate nature of each and every word and sentence and comma and full stop in the presence of such concentrated feeling. You could become overwhelmed by the slightest touch, as when she would take your hand and kiss the tips of your fingers, and the very core of you would melt away, leaving your heart, alone in the chasm of your chest and she, only she could fill it. And alone together, you could dwell in the peace that only one who knew silence such as she could hold.

With Cecilia, silence made time into a notion. An existential idiom. A forgotten memory. Time would stop for you both, and each second could feel like a lifetime, a lifetime filled to the brim with each other, where you could see in her eyes and her hands and her future, of you both growing old, the faces of your great-grandchildren playing at your feet. You would smell cooking plums, roast lamb, rosemary, the soft, clean hair of children and warm bed-sheets, fireplaces and old chairs that you would buy brand new three years from now. Together you would feel the stars above your head, in this moment and in a similar one, fifty years from now. You would feel these things, become intimate with them without fear, for you know, as well as she, that beyond a doubt that you are going to marry this girl. And yet still, with all the histories that you both would live over and over again, you would find that this time together would never be enough, that what imagination and the absence of time gave you still fell hopelessly and pitifully short of all the seconds and minutes and hours that you wished to devote to her.

Years later, when together you had walked through heartache and atonement, through wilderness and fire, through wooden doors, through renaissance and eternity, through all the ages of the world and had arrived at a place few have ever been, you heard in full the heart shatteringly beautiful symphony that was her silence. When your heartstrings were more tangled inextricably amongst rather than tied neatly to hers, and she looked into your eyes and you heard what she could say without words, you knew that she was yours completely. When heartache and youth were long gone, when the things Keats called Negative Capabilities were through and you were beyond ever thinking of a life without her, you would find out that she had never loved another such as she loved you. In the moments before she fell asleep she would watch you dream peacefully, and though you never saw this, you could feel the intensity of her love surround you. Her love was like the wind, you thought once, though you could thought you could never see it, you could feel it, you could see the influence it had on those who surrounded her. You learned to see it, eventually. Like eyes becoming accustomed to extreme light or darkness, your soul took time adjusting to her frequency. And when it had, you found you could see clearer than ever before.

You would laugh together in the tiny kitchen of your first house, you would grab her waist and move her slight frame to one side so you could reach the sink, and she would lean across you for the teabags and mugs. She would squeal as you jumped into bed on a cold night, wrapping your legs around her and freezing her warm skin with your icy feet. You would sit with her out on your tiny back veranda, watching the dappled golden light dance over her olive features, and you would squeeze her hand, knowing that although you have as many moments as the stars, you are still the happiest you have ever been in this moment, in her silence, the melodic atmosphere that she held, in every character of each word that she had ever spoken or thought. And although the life you had was fuller than most, each spring still passed with alarming alacricity, turning to autumn before you had fully appreciated the freshness in the air and the smell of jasmine.

And you would soon begin to notice life etching your joy into each others familiar features, finding new lines to mark each moment you shared, like adding new highways and train lines and alleys to the map of your lives. You found her at first like a map of a new city, full of places you’ve yet to explore. And she, she would take you by the hand and pull you along streets you never even knew existed; she would open your eyes to the mountains and fjords and glaciers hidden just beneath her skin. And when you had slowly learnt about her, about what lay underneath the delicate layer of silence that she was inherently clothed in, she looked into your eyes and saw in them places larger than the universe. She showed you that she too could see the galaxies, the supernovas and black holes, the different types of aurora borealis that the planets sung about. And the things that you had told her about all those years ago were reborn. Living with Cecilia in her silences was like experiencing the rebirth of everything in history, over and over again. But still, as time groped his spindly fingers over your lives to take back what you had stolen, you would soon start to feel him whisper finalities, his enchanting pulse echoing through the mornings that you now wake earlier to, feel it thundering in your veins, gripping your heart in the time it takes to climb up stairs.

The stairs of the house that you built for her, for your children to run through on Christmas mornings, for lazy Sunday afternoons, for sunsets on winter evenings. The house became as etched with the memory of life as your faces, yet in a way, all the more beautiful from it. Like the ground on which your home stood, Cecilia was the foundations holding you to this earth. It happened quietly, you never fully realised until she was no longer, in her absence you found with a holy epiphany that hers and your hearts had already begun the attachment from the moment you spoke the universe into being in her mind, in the middle of the crowded shopping centre in the city where you both grew up. The silence which she carried strung above and around her became as familiar to you as the scent of her skin, as the sight of your palms. And although her silence became like an old friend, it never lost its potency. You would feel it as she kissed you goodbye and when she ran to greet you with an excited and joyous embrace, in moments of extreme passion, in days where the thin sunlight would shine in her hair and through the trees, dappling on the floor, creating a garden of light in which whole worlds, entire universes could begin and end, all without anyone’s knowledge.

And after she left, to wait for you in the place where each moment would indeed be a lifetime, you would wake up in the deepest hours of the night to hear the silence that was once hers, tainted and imperfect, far away, coming from your innards. You would feel the absence of her silence, of her. It would weigh heavily on your spleen, dwelling, weighing down your whole being from a point beneath your heart and lowest rib. You would remember her eyes that held every single moment you and she ever spent together, her eyelashes, darker than the night, fluttering about in your stomach.  The memory of her skin, her lower back, her neck, would lie heavily across your lungs. The aching loneliness of her absence was unsuccessfully contained by your rib cage, and it swelled throughout your limbs and throbbed, seizing your joints in its cold fingers and sticking pins in your extremities. And worst of all, you would find the distance between you and your heart was growing, that blood had stopped flowing as efficiently, and you would have ceased to hear much of anything at all now that she, Cecilia, had departed.

Though you would accept that at your age, hearing nothing but the harshest and abrupt of sounds is expected, that in a way, it is almost like life as you knew it before Cecilia. You will never forget what life was like with her, for life with her was completion, was beyond anything you could have ever dreamed of, was home. You will never forget her, her nuances, her expressions, nor will you forget the life you held without her, merely for its emptiness, seeming like a novel without punctuation, without pauses, commas, periods. You would conclude that you almost deserved this deterioration of the physical, taking it as the collated vengeance for years upon years of happiness in hearing her voice, in feeling her skin, her memories, her silences. Deep down however, you would know that the silence you hear now could never compare to hers. So slowly, you begin to live, or at least attempt to live once more. Though time and your heart have other intentions, which you are powerless to control. Long ago, you breathed into Cecilia’s lungs your own life, so that yours and hers became inseparable. The strings that tie your heart to hers begin to pull from the grave, tugging at stiff, aged joints and calling sweet promises of reunion. And you, you are powerless to resist. And at the moment of your last breath, you see her. The years that have separated the two of you suddenly disappear, dissolved into eternity. Exhaling, you release all stings that tie yourself to this life, to be swept up in the universal silence that Cecilia has held in wait for you.

Matters of the Heart

Our hearts beat at seventy two beats per minute

Our fingers throb with the weight of the hearts we were never meant to hold

Given to us by youth, before he learned

That our hands can break anything that they want to.

And as we grew older, older than the earth.

Our bodies become cathedrals of truth

A container with an inside and an outside

To hold in both ways the history of everything

And the honesty of the only heart we knew: the sun rising.

In the great river of silence

You will find the history of secrets

The origin of darkness,

And the place particles go when they’ve finished with this dimension.

Bodies once gathered around to drink here, remember.

Families and tribes came to live at the only well they knew

To sit in silence because all the words they could have said were drowned underneath the weight of the stars.

In those days, people would have complained about a certain heaviness of the heart

If only they had words to say so.

During the great romance, like the great war.

The poetic resistance of the heart grew weak.

We learned how to use words, then forsook them

Forgetting that words are a commodity of breathing

That will fade if you neglect them.

And love left those hearts, dripping with wine

Slurring their way through the shallow emotions of the skin.

And so the great romance ended,

Because people forgot how to tell others what their hearts were saying.

Now.

This is a breath of exhaustion.

The exhalation of love, battered and worn through the millennia of the heart,

Now I carry it softly.

I place it down to breathe, because somewhere along the line,

We forgot how to use love to aid it in our breath, to fix it to our lungs.

Now it lies on the dresser as we say of our beloved, that he took my breath away.

The residue of love, we leave on the tips of fingers and the backs of chairs.

But always wash ourselves clean,

Because we are not sure if, like Pilate, we really want to own it.

And so love faces once more the battle of the only life it has ever known.

Now this is the age of the word

That battle has brought to the sea

The formation of feeling into a sound
In the hollows of our mouths, our beings

An expanse in which to hold and to carry.

The carrying of love on ones breath,

To rest in the lungs of another.

In the lungs of trees that dwell in the woods between the worlds

Where to love is to live

So this is not poetry,

This is breathing.

This is the love that forces life into your lungs

That denies the expectation of history

In favour for the truth our ancestors once sought.

Before the great wars and romances

Before the silences that froze

Back to the fire of the heart

That knocks breath into every part of you, that teaches of the affair between the tongue and the heart.

So speak.

When people push away, saying they need space: give them the universe.

I don’t know what it was like in those days,

But I do know the feeling of echoes,

The hollow portions of my body that seem to be made to hold something

Something that has been left out.

And when I walk home in the evenings, with the cold wind rushing over all the skin I try to hide from it,

I look up at the stars, millions of light years away

Past the wind that sweeps sorrowfully across the surface of the earth

Past the magnetosphere that causes light to dance,

The ionosphere where the electricity from the sun calls out to the planet, asking if its okay to stay here

(It is shy and won’t know what to say)

And I look for the parts of me that have been left out,

Floating somewhere, lost in the cosmos

Or else lost in every part of every being that has ever lived

Every rock and tree, every second, every heartbeat.

I seem to find in the grooves of each fingerprint

A whisper of how we used to be.

We were once all in the same place

Back before the world started.

Back before the uncontrollable space came and pressed itself between us

Back before we felt too much.

I can’t tell you what it was like in those days

Although days weren’t so much days

As moments of existence

Back before the word existence had any meaning.

I can’t tell you what it looked like

But I know that each part of my being

In the hollow space between the neutrons and electrons

That fill up each atom

Reverberates with the memory of being there

Back with its kinsmen; the stone, the star, the heart, the fish

Swimming in the wide expanses of the point of neutrality

The point where everything and nothing was the same

The point where you and I met for the first time.

And after that, noise.

Because you don’t think that all of this happened silently, do you?

And then the space, pressing in around us, pulling us apart and re-forming us

It’s a wonder we didn’t all scream out, ‘Ouch!

This is too much, all this space! It is too close for comfort, let me go back.’

Back to the point of nothing, where everything was and so was nothing

Back where all the space we needed was a part of everything we were.

Remember, you were there too?

Do you feel the memory of it in the hollow places of your own being?

Now and then I wonder if we have really forgotten the feeling

Of each point of ourselves on top and inside and outside of each point of everybody else

And the movements of each person are really

The act of searching for that long lost home.

And when people say to you that they need space

What more can you give them apart from the universe

The widening expanses of space

That holds the first part of themselves

Because aren’t all of us really searching for that,

The re-acquaintance with our first home.

Walking through Central Station at dusk, realism and something about time and location

A man walks past me, crossing Elizabeth Street on the flashing red man, the word ‘HATE’ emblazoned on his chest.

On his arms, the tattoo of love, he holds his girl like she’s the most fragile thing in the world, like if he lets go he’ll lose her forever.

His girl looks at his feet as they walk down a step, he pulls her closer and she, for one moment, seems to hold the whole solar system in her heart.

A man sits and holds his dog by the door, he smiles like that dog is the most important life in the universe, and he, the guardian of such, is radiant with pride at being the one to hold him.

The dog looks past at all the rushing people. Remembers what time felt like when he was younger, when the world seemed much bigger than this concrete world he lives in, but he wouldn’t give up for all the bottoms and tails and bones in the world, all because of the joy and pride in the way his man looks at him.

People rush past the man selling roses, eager to get home to the ones they love, yet only one passer-by thought that love might be better shown differently tonight.

His wife will be at home thirteen minutes before him. She will take off her shoes by the door because she’s so tired, stare into the fridge for two and a half minutes and boil the kettle. When he gets home, he will give her the rose he bought her, a tiny symbol that shows that he still loves her, even though he tripped over her shoes on the way in and stubbed his toe, even though her nails are chipped and she seems to be putting on a bit of weight.

That bit of weight is the secret neither of them know yet, though she suspects: that they are pregnant. The baby will be a girl, they’ll dress her in yellow and she’ll change the world in some way.

By the country trains, the orchestra of old men and old women are set up under the old ceiling, playing old songs to an old day. The night is still young, but the day is elderly, slow and wheezing its last breaths.

Smokers alley is silent, the bells from the church next door begin to ring, like the phones of people oblivious to sky, melting onto the buildings.

At the bus stop, a bus drives up onto the curb. The lady next to me turns and says ‘How about that, hey!’ as I grin like an idiot at what could have been.

For Intentions and Meaning

If you think you are a writer, then stop.

Stop for a year, a month, a day.

And when all the words inside you begin to burn,

Marking themselves on your organs and on your breath, refrain.

Hold yourself steady, do not put pen to paper.

Do not write until an inferno rages inside your chest, until the moon threatens to burst through your skin, and you would swallow the solar system if it meant something.

Do not write until your nose begins to bleed with all the words you haven’t said,

And your fingernails break under the pressure of all the lives you are still carrying.

Do not write until you mean it, until your very existence depends on it,

When you cannot breathe, nor dream past the worlds beneath your eyelids

That haunt you with the screams of desire to be released.

Stop for as long as it takes

For that passion in your fingertips to grab you by the throat and demand your attention.

Do not write for the glory, for there is none here

None but the glory of the toiling, sweaty, sticky, smelling, agonized heart

Of one caught in the gravitational pull of the worlds they ache to capture.

This is not pretty.

But if you write, you will see the beauty of heartbreak, you will know of the gold that is formed in the hearts of dying stars.

And you will know

What the world wouldn’t be if that pain did not exist.

The pain that comes not merely from broken hearts and failed romance,

But from the broken chalice of a human soul

The agony of a joy too large to be felt in full

The fragments, fragments of life too large and too small to piece together by anything but our lungs

So if you think you are a writer, stop until you know.

Until you know that the dogs crying out are howling your agony

Sending it into the atmosphere where it will rain down on the unknowing

Their ears perked at the intonation of the silent worlds that surround you.

Until you feel the echoes of broken and mending hearts

And it shakes you, where it will resound in your bones for years to come.

Until nothing else matters, until everything you are longs for nothing else stop.

For it is only then that you will know what to write really means.