Took a paragraph from the December one (is that cheating?) but here you go.
The absence of raindrops on a pool, or how I wrote about masturbating and anxiety under the guise of a swimming pool pieceā¦
I watched as the bite of cold devoured patches of the lawn, a silver pelt of ice crystals where it once was green. I stepped onto the lawn in those places just to feel the tsunami of minute crunches crash beneath me, and my daughter, too light to make those same devastating waves, ran back and forth across the lawn and when she reached the furthest corner she shouted: āMummy! I love youā just to hear her echo. In winter the garden canāt show us love so we summon our own and it bounces off the walls into the night.
I didnāt make the neighbourhood tree planting day. Afterwards, the new saplings in their test tube casing winked at me through the kitchen window, light playing on their protective coats in triumph. They tried to coax a jealousy from me that the garden grows without my help, that it is hardy and sufficient and when it is frozen it is its truest, sharpest form. It noted my absence on the tree planting day and withdrew from me. It never saw me tame its weeds in the kindest possible way, or tend the rhubarb when it was thin and spindly, or plant the teasels in its borders to bring goldfinches, or castrate the raspberries down to raw stubs in February. I feel like it saw us decimate the ghost berries though, picking them to crush just to hear their pop. I think it felt as I needlessly drove a stake into the earth to support a ladybird shelter which remains devoid of life, and it watched as I took its conkers into the flat but never saw me return them in the dark, away from my daughterās magpie eye.
I have tried to make the garden my saviour, and often times it obliges, but it bears a grudge and in winter it leaves me loveless.
It rained for days. When the rain landed on my face it was a barely registered prickle, I felt numb, I had stopped looking when I crossed the road, and as if inside a perpetual grey cloud I drifted over dark pavements. I have been disappearing for some time. Rather than cocoon myself from the freezing mizzle, often I lift my face to the sky. I threatened the moon that met my gaze during those times: show me something I can feel.
And she did. There was a sea change in me. Anger which had swelled like waves took over the calmer waters too, it fizzed at the surface with ever-increasing ferocity and the thin shell that had contained the expanding mass beneath now became infected by it. The rain, the sea, the tide inside. I fled to still waters, submerged in a pool, dolphining silently above the tiles. In the pool, there is no weather.
There is a time the pool and the garden co-exist within me and when the rain and the sea seem not to.
Lying on the bed, I see a tall drooping branch of the raspberry bush bowing at my window. Where it bends I see shoulders, the curved section that bobs under the weight of the arc like a head makes slow and small moves, swaying from side to side, and its movements are that of a lover between my legs and when my eyes close I see bright flashes like the neverending white pits in a jam jar, and blood rushes to my skin and makes me the colour of the just-reddening fruit. I invite the garden into my bedroom then.
I am untethered, my phone slips from the duvet. I listen. I listen to the air pass over my lips, then to the absence of sound like the black space between stars. Quiet sighs oscillate across the heavy bedroom air. Again I sigh, I gasp, on my bed I float on my back, and the pool and the bed fight for reality beneath me. I push off from the wall, pulling myself across the water in a fast backstroke. The only sound I hear is my straining breath and with my ears submerged I hear it only from within. As my breath escapes into the space above me I am on the bed, in the clutches of the raspberry bush, my face to the sky looking for a feeling and finding one. I push my body through the pool with an urgency. Around me people race, crawl, tread water, swim laps, track their speed, count their lengths, submerge, but none of them hear the noises I make when I try to quietly orgasm. When I pull myself out of the pool the spell is broken. I am just a mass of chlorinated body parts that wobble and goosebump as I walk to the showers.