Joe Hammond - A Short History of Falling - Everything I Observed About Love Whilst Dying

Over the Portuguese winter it rained continuously in the mountains, and the eucalyptus that burnt all summer now smelt green. Descending the mountain, we’d wind down through these forests and the warm microclimate inside the car created ideal conditions for precipitation. Any thought or awareness or reflection simply switched it on. The road snaked and seemed to further dislodge all the salty snotty liquid within. I could have leant forward and found the button on the dashboard. And it would come, rising up through the pipes pooling inside my head. Then I’d hit the button again and it would stop.

During those days it felt like some figure was cutting around me with a pair of scissors; moving me with the blades to cut close and accurately. And as the paper turned, more of me would drop down and I knew that it wouldn’t take long for the scissors to have made their whole way round. I would be imagining the boys and Gill. Living in a place I might not know – a life that worked but which was alien to me. The boys older. Life happening. And I was looking at all of this from the outside. I clung to Gill, but I saw her and Tom and Jimmy connected by something that I wasn’t. They seemed somehow in place and as they should be. And though I was holding on, I wasn’t connected in the same way. Until this time I’d just assumed that we were formed from a single piece. That something like this could never happen. A little family of four pinched into human form and then hardened. Set. Finished. So that one figure could never be the person outside observing all these parts. That it would necessarily become a complete form made up of three figures is one of the things I discovered in this cavernous place. This is a concept that I looked at and looked at and looked at and looked at again and again, and I could not understand it. And all the moments that had upset me in the past were in one place. And this moment of upset was in another place. It was an entire physical feeling. And when it came my body curled inwards like a fortune-telling fish on a hot palm.

*

When the five days of tears came they filled the spaces I had never known. Unused rooms. Forgotten rooms. The places where I might have been. It crashed through barriers and washed away impediments like they were blades of grass. It carried me away – it carried everything away. I bobbed on the surface of this rising, moving water, my arms outstretched – a little man being carried away. There was no need to call out; there was no other way to travel; only water. Nothing was left behind. No selves in tiny corners, no scary thoughts left buried. A bowl of chocolate ice cream, which I ate when I was five, went by upon the surface of the flood. A teacher half remembered, a scrap of brown carpet, the car I crashed when I was seventeen, a painted wooden block – all bobbing in the water along with me.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.