Live Encounters Poetry & Writing Volume Three November-December 2024
Aotearoa Poets and Writers Special Edition
Vision one, story by Barbara Peterson.
Today isn’t a day of motivation to get things done. Today is a drink-coffee-in-bed, play games on your phone until 1pm, languish in comfortable pyjamas under a cave of comfortable blankets sort of day. I remember when my cat used to nudge her way under said blankets, more than two winters ago, and curl up in warm ecstasy, paws twitching in blissful dreaming. The “cave of warm sits”, I used to call it. Her cave is one of cold, contemplative sits now. I buried her on a windswept beachfront where she could observe the beauty of the sunset night after night. (A strange concept, for with what eyes do we see once we’re dead and buried? Finally-wide-open ones, I like to think. We can finally see the world and everything in it as it is, aloft a wave of perpetual rest and well-being; our reward for having lived at all.)
So, then, today is also a day to contemplate loss in all her beautiful forms. Loss appears to me today as a lithe young woman in a dress, smiling, flirting, dancing the night away, but never to be mine. She’s my disappeared youth in which I spent too much time trying to understand trauma and not enough time loving the traumatised person who was me. She’s a slender future in which tough choices need to be made, and yet it is tougher to even make them. She’s the regret of a relationship I tried to hold onto that would not hold still for me, like ribbon slipping through my fingers. I no longer curse the bane of feeling unloved. She smiles at me, Loss, and it’s not unkind. She knows how things really are, and most importantly, how they need to be. And I stand, and I understand, but she also says, in that singular glance, that if I should collapse on this dance floor, if I should fail to hold myself upright, I’ll be understood. I’ll be forgiven, if I can’t bring myself to see underneath the skin of things, deep down to the pulse.
In my head sometimes is still the child clutching blankets, fearing the vision of the red monster in front of her terrified eyes, longing for a relief that would never come until the discovery of the magical cassette-tape player; for music soothes the savage beast, as surely as King David played the harp to quell the evil spirit tormenting Saul. In those days the fear crippled me as surely as a net cast over a fragile moth that might crumble to dark dust, but these days it’s welcome to sit in my virtual living room, next to my virtual turntable which circles and circles endlessly playing the same song.
“Why are you here?” I ask. “What do you have to tell me?”
Fear is a storyteller after all, a dramatic mouthpiece to tell us what’s killing us by not being released; the tamped-down poisonous gas that silently steals our years, if not literally then metaphorically.
Fear perches at the end of my bed, gargoyle-style. Fear is a misjudged protector. He’s the pet companion of Loss and trails her everywhere, afraid to let go. We keep him on his leash, afraid of what might happen if he were let loose. The only place he roams at liberty is our dreams.
And yet, and yet… If we released him he might finally find his peace. And so, I do. I unfetter him from his tight collar. Be free, I say. Free in my mind, free in my writing, free in my heart and soul. In your freedom, I find mine from you.
And I let him go, like an exhale.
He leaves me as if he was a tightly pulled-back catapult, flinging himself away to roam the world and come back to me with mind broadened, with stories of open hearts and survival.
He comes back in my sleep, refreshed. Whispers in my ear: “You don’t have to be perfect.”
Snuggles in, sleeps beside my neck, like my cat once slept in the Cave of Warm Sits.
It is easy to be fearless inside the Warm Sits, but it is harder to be fearless on a windswept coast, buried beneath sand and rocks, where the ground might be cold and the stars might feel too far away to care.
And it’s there that I know I’ll find my fearlessness as I watch Loss dance out among the waves and beyond.
And so I lift up the blankets, lift up my legs and step out of the bed and into the world again at last.
© Barbara Peterson
Barbs Peterson lives in the suburb of Māngere Bridge, on the cusp of South Auckland, where much of her poetry has been inspired by the beautiful, diverse surroundings. She has been published in the Auckland Writers anthologies Tales of the Domain and Tales from Dominion Road as well as Ramble On: A celebration of walking in New Zealand by Z.R. Southcombe. Her writing aims to encompass an introspective journey through the experiences of loss, love, heartbreak, joy, bleakness, whimsy and hope.