Unreasonable Silence

You called my hair plush. Did you mean luxurious? Did you bury your face in it so that your eyelashes disappeared in its congruence? Did its silkiness mark your skin? And did you have to close your eyes to protect them from the dazzle of its glossiness? And did your nose delight in its fragrance? And every time you felt my hair on your face and smelled my apple shampoo did it connect immediately to those memories of the beginning? That was the time when senses and experience and memory were inextricably linked. Now our senses are numb and our experience is jaded and our memory is whimsical in its recollection.

And as I sit here on this bench and look out onto the water, it's not the childhood summer smell of sea air that drifts into my nostrils but the smell of you and the meaning it attached to my life. It's true, I had been on a quest, and rarely had I ventured down a path which promised more than the day my footsteps took me towards you, and as I dropped my mobile phone in the fluster of hearing it ring and trying to answer it and clashed heads with you on the way down to pick it up, and my face reddened as your eyes penetrated me, something both confused and cleared in my head. Or maybe, I think, my head was confused but my heart opened up and was clear; but not with emptiness.

Love at first sight I think they call it.

I just want to rise from this bench and walk into the sea. The goalkeeper is stopping me. And of course, I'm too afraid to do it in such a manner. I'm afraid to do it in any manner really, just in case I change my mind half way through. But I won't even get half way because I have a child and what if my child were that little goalkeeper watching me stride into the sea and not understanding and crying out? I am wondering about this little goalkeeper: does he not need a partner whose goals he can save?

It's kind of hard playing a team game on your own.

The little goalkeeper sits down between the crumpled jumpers of his goal posts. He stares out to sea as if awaiting the arrival of his team mates on a passing ship. Perhaps his ozone-fuelled imagination is awaiting his pirate comrades to help him dig up treasure, or perhaps he is simply waiting patiently for someone to kick his football. It's a yellow ball and it looks like the sun has dropped from the sky and landed on the beach beside him. I don't recognise him but I think he lives here. He looks at home, though maybe it's just the solitude that is familiar. And if I were to rise from my bench and walk past him into the sea would he look at me, puzzled, his eyes squinting in the sun, thinking that because I'm an adult I probably know what I'm doing? This makes me laugh out loud (too loud) and the little goalkeeper looks in my direction and I smile at him because I like him and really, instead of walking into the sea, I'd like to walk down to where he is on the beach and kick his ball for him. Because I have a child I want to do this. And because I once was a child I want to do this. But I won't kick his ball. Nor will I walk into the sea: not today. And I guess not tomorrow. And if I say that to myself every day I'll get through this. And if I keep writing down all these thoughts and transforming them into words and if these words make sense and I don't think that what I've written is shit, as I think everything I do is shit, then ...

...fuck
I can't think of a phrase that rolls off the tongue; that encapsulates in a poignant and evocative way what I think might happen if this miracle occurs: if I manage to do something that isn't a complete and utter heap of crap. Jesus, I can't even think of something that encapsulates what I want to say in a bland and inane way. Hey ho, my friend the little goalkeeper is lying on his belly staring intently at the surface of his yellow ball, the sand on the back of his legs glistening in the sunlight. A dog is running up the beach. It circles the boy, kicking the sand around him, panting furiously as dogs do when they are excited and out of breath. The boy smiles widely and jumps up. He knows this dog: they are friends. There is spontaneity in the interaction between the little goalkeeper and the dog. Their friendship is instinctual and without expedience. It's the lack of expectation that makes their relationship so easy. Boys want nothing from dogs and dogs want nothing from boys but a playmate. Whatever is between them is tacit and understood and requires no contracts or conditions or restrictions. I have drawn the dog here, at the side of my page. It isn't very good, hence the reason why I am a writer (if I am even that) and not an artist. It looks like someone has taken a hatchet to its nose and set its tail on fire. I've given it the title, ‘not quite a border collie'.

I remember when we lived in that isolated place and because that isolated place had sheep we decided to acquire a border collie. Not that we had any sheep. And so the dog saw the sheep of others but since we had none it didn't know what to do with them - so it chased them. We failed that dog. We had to give it away to a city, where ordinarily there aren't any sheep. The city swallowed it and spat it out into a town where, I believe, it is living out its days quite contentedly.

It's really beautiful here. Only the outline of the islands on the horizon separates the sky from the sea, their blueness cloned - the one from the other. The sun hangs in the sky like a pat of melting butter dripping idly onto the soft curves of the waves. Such beauty is assault. To dissect beauty is to rob it of its immediacy and therefore its meaning. Beauty is GBH to the senses. It is a forceful assault on the heart.

Generations of people have sat on this bench I'm sure. And if they all sat here in a row I wonder if I could pick out the ones who were happy. I guess you'd think they would be the ones who are smiling, but sometimes the ones with the biggest grins are hiding the greatest pain. A smile can be like armour sometimes. There's this guy on TV who smiles all the time. I mentioned this to a friend of mine and she said that people are paid to be happy on TV. I guess this is true but this guy I'm talking about is really abnormally happy. I can imagine him receiving some bad news and bursting out laughing.

This is just stuff I'm thinking so if it doesn't make sense there's no reason why you have to try to make sense of it. Accept it - or don't - whatever you wish. I thought I could take these ideas and transplant them into some historical setting full of period detail acquired through painstaking research and immerse them in some gripping story - but I couldn't be bothered. It's not what I'm writing this stuff down for. It's going from my head to the page and the intervening keyboard is enough distraction. Putting in a load of irrelevant stuff in the guise of a plot and a few limp characters is not what I'm about. Anyway, I'm not that accomplished.

The voice from the other end of the bench penetrates my helical thoughts as they twist and meet then part and come together again in what may appear to be order but is, in fact, pure chaos (or the reverse). At first I ignored the insults. Some people just have no conception of politeness - no talent for it. I have no talent for singing but I have joined someone on a bench and sang a song - some random thing - so I can't complain when someone tries to be polite but has no aptitude for it. When they criticise my clothes I smile. When they disapprove of the way I cross my legs I nod my head in acquiescence. When they call me a moron for sitting on a bench alone I burst out laughing, just like that bloke on the TV who is way too happy. In fact, I get a sense of him now. The man I went to see the other week told me that I should ignore people who demean me from ends of benches or corners of rooms.

What of the little goalkeeper? As I sit and reflect - in a way that is probably too melancholic for some - I see him plod his way down the beach, his trailing jumper leaving a wake in the glistening sand like the path of an innocent, carefree snail. A woman is smiling and waving to him.

In another life I was that woman.