In Huddersfield, Love Is Colder Than Death
Mousing through the long grass with the sense of something on your tail. This stillness makes a limpid pool of memory. Without propellers churning up the sediment, you catch glimpses of stuff that slipped through your fingers years ago, stuff you stopped thinking about, assuming it lost forever. I woke on the high board at Huddersfield baths. So high, you thought you’d miss the pool or hit your head on the roof in the swanning arc of your triumph. Me, Jona, Steve Sweet. How can that be? We weren’t together then. Memory grabs bottles from different shelves, makes a cocktail of its own choosing. “Dunno what this is, but I think it’ll taste good.” Seeking a second opinion, I buzz Jona for the first time in a decade. Yup, he confirms, a single visit, 35 years ago. None of us had ever dived off the high board, not there, not anywhere; never before, nor since. But we dived ourselves stupid then, like seals, like herring. So much now known was nothing then, just bubbles troubling the mantle of the preconscious. It’s hard not to ache across the broad table of a life, back towards such innocence. What kind of brute wouldn’t risk a little of everything to taste, once again, such sweet nothing? I get a leg over the side of the bed. Sleep will unshell us. But not yet.
Then I’m thinking; what if you just vanished in all of this? What if the next time I called, you weren’t there? And all I had to go on, since this gentle blizzard made a sheet of the world, was 48 pictures on two rolls of film. Not 48 breadcrumbs dropped in the forest to illuminate a path back to you; but 48 random glimpses of an unwitnessed narrative I must now string like beads into a chronicle recounting the pale fire that consumed you, raptured you into the firmament. Like a broken window. A few shards, emblems of damage. But mostly thin air.
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As the one who made the pictures, you are by definition an unreliable protagonist. But you’re all I’ve got. So in viewing these fragments in your absence, I apply the forensic wash which (if you were still here, sharing whisky sours at this table) would be called memory, and which grows more fallible the further it retreats from the event horizon. The anatomy of a crime, which I agree to call history. The history of You. The epiphany of your vanishing. Alchemized from nothing but 48 pictures, your residue. ‘History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation’. The powdered yellow bonbons in a paper bag. The fish held high by the gills. The way blood hits water. ‘O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.’
Love rarely dies alone and what kills it is infectious. Of the mourners at the graveside, the next to go is honest recall; its filigree delicacy crumbles under the heel of an ending. The past has always spooled away from the unobserved present, each tiny, glittering miracle of the now sheering off in the rear view mirror, cartwheeling down the road into blur and blot. The siren of love startles as it passes, slides as it recedes. The reason it slides is because it doesn’t hit you. If it did, it would stop. We met at nine. We met at eight. I slip my hand inside the velvet rattlebag of memory, thumb familiar burrs and crenellations. I was on time. No you were late. But this process cannot be done by touch. What I saw was her face, luminous in profile, the big sunglasses, the innocent oscillation of her hair in the breeze from the window. What she saw was the curve in the road.
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