The days pass sunny and bright. The diary is slowly filling with further thoughts, and the calendar with colourful dates. Green for marketing. Grey for the gym. Blue for swimming. Banana for dog sitting. Skin for life modelling.
In the ten days that Jess is back in her home, settled among the orchard with ripe apple trees, there have been several cats and dogs looked after, battles with resistant blinds fought to let more light in, lips kissed, unwanted clothes sold, mysterious facts learned and systems fixed.
But in the evenings, Jess sits in her armchair contemplating. Does silence breed silence? Or is it an answer to a question never asked?
Perhaps Nietzsche is never a wise bedfellow, especially not at a time when the mind should come to a rest.
But these days, not all parts of Jess’ being are quite with her. A deep ache tells her that something isn’t just longing. It is confusingly waiting to be reclaimed by her.
Now and then she wanders busy school buildings in her dreams, and the next moment, sits among a crowd in a circus tent falling in love with the clown. She wakes with her breath racing, knowing that the sweat of other men on her skin can’t wipe away the memories of H. However brief the time together when they were made.
Then, the church bell strikes, six times at 5am, as usual.
The draft of a letter in her diary appears:
“Sometimes I turn to face the postcards I had selected for you in the dark. Unwritten. Unsent.
It took a while for the silence to stop hurting, knowing that your daily routine swallowed you.
I wrote and deleted. Wrote, erased. But I knew, as I know still, no amount of freedom can bring you out of this place. Your own freedom living in a small space. A space I sometimes dream of when I still want to enter you, when I want you to enter me.”
While the words don’t find their way into a letter, she wonders why some things simply have to be written in ink, even without hope for a response, like an artist with an audience of one. We write to be heard, to be seen, to be understood, don’t we?
Or is it rather that sometimes we dance to remember, sometimes we dance to forget.