Faith

"I miss you;
I miss being overwhelmed by you,
and I need rescue.
I think I'm fading away,
but I keep thinking that you'll wake me up with a whisper in my ear,
I keep hoping that you'll sneak in my room.

I miss you;
I miss talking all night long with you,
and I need this to find a way to your home.
My love can you hear me?
Have I been hoping loud enough, wishing hard enough,
can you see me when I'm asleep all alone - alone.

So I wait and I wait,
and I run myself in the same old circles,
and I sit and I stare,
and I run old scenes through my tired head,
of the days that we laid on our backs and said 'forever';
Was that the best I'll ever be?"
-- Sister Hazel, Best I'll Ever Be


A time ago, I promised a friend that oneday I would write a relaxed story; that is, one that I didn't push or struggle to write, one I didn't agonize over or worry about, but just let flow if and when it felt like being written. No pressure, no stress, just the pure joy of creating.
I promised a very, very large amount of things at that time, virtually all of which I have broken; this is something to do with the desire to fix that. And, yes, I realise that you can never really fix that past, that isn't the point - it's more to do with fixing the balance of things. I think perhaps that when you break a promise, you're forced to carry it with you until you deal with it, redress the wrong. Not that leaves much room for grace, of course; do I believe in grace?

I suppose I write to find out.


FAITH
Chapter -

I broke faith on a grey and gold Tuesday night at the end of June; despite my best efforts, I have never quite been able to fix it.

My great uncle, quiet and kind with a stump where one leg used to be, had a saying: just because it ain’t broke doesn’t mean it’s working, he would say, clumping his thick wooden leg through meticulous rows of cabbages and sprouts. We would meander on our way with destructive joy, knocking poles and cold frames over at random down to where the garden met the road, and more slowly back up to the house, straightening and tidying as we went. Only once did he elaborate: when a person’s too happy with what they’ve got, they’re apt to let it alone until it rots, he said slowly, as I lay on my back under the enormous sunflowers and thought of ice-cream; how it dripped down you hands and onto your shoes unless you ate it as quickly as possible. There’s a time for enjoying, and a time for tearing down, just so things are better. I took it to heart, and it never failed me, save once – as always, it is the exception that haunts you.

The French countryside filled my summers with spiders and earthworms and sun on sun on sun; I was a little brown savage, to be found running along dried-out ditch beds and through the June-tall field of wheat and barley, if I was to be found at all. Bezons-sur-Beuvron was like the playhouse of a very strange child, stuffed to the top with the wonderful and the strange and miracles to marvel and disgust and lead a teenage boy a long, long way from home. It’s a dangerous business, going out your garden gate, the old patriarchs sitting by the square would tell me, laughing at their own wit. Take the road one way and you’ll be home for dinner; take it the other, and you’ll dine with strange folk among columns and fountains and music. I spent weeks and months in the furthest nooks and crannies of the abandoned quarries and ghost-ridden old castle ruins further and further from home, but I never did find them; later, much later, when I finally got around to reading Tolkien, I was surprised that I still had enough innocence to feel cheated. There are ghosts of comfortable old men in the square now too, still chattering amiably, their aimless talk and wheezing laughter stirring up dust on the war memorial. I might consider going back and challenging them, demanding answers and reasons; thinking about it, they’d probably just tell me I haven’t been looking hard enough.

Thinking about it, they’d probably be right.

There were no elves or faeries in my story then, but by the time I was fourteen I could walk to the next town and make it down the garden path with the sinking sun at my back; before my fifteenth birthday I had ranged all the countryside for miles and miles, often wandering back in just as the birds were waking up. It was the idyll, the life that people write books about, the one they spend all their lives wishing they could get back to. For me, the spell was much more distant; twenty, fifty, a hundred years on there are no sun-drenched afternoons or green and gold sunsets down country lanes the haunt my memories – only people have that right, and they have made sure they exercised it to the full.

Solitude in those days was a habit and a joy. I was not a lonely child, but the French of a adolescent English boy was never going to help me make friends; every summer for years I was someone to play football with in the street, someone that girls giggled at behind their hands and boys clapped on the back every now and again. How can I describe the infinite pleasure of not being forced to socialise? Nowadays the langauage barrier is a weapon, a tool I can use to distract, attract, tantalise, but even then it was my crutch, my excuse and my refuge. How many times during the school year in the rainy suburbs of south London I wished I could merely shrug blankly and let smalltalk and pleasantries slide over me like the sun or the rain; only background noise. Je ne pas parle beaucoup de Francais became my anthem of self-reliance; they say that a person, especially a young child, needs as much social activity as possible to keep them healthy, but to this day I wish I had kept my anthem closer to my heart. Perhaps the two are linked; perhaps they have always been linked.