Conversations With My Body

Someone kissed you when I was fourteen,
And I felt too young to feel that way.
Too young to deal with the excitement.
Next I was sliding a razorblade over your pale, soft skin, willing for something to grow.
How time passes…
As now I catch a glimpse of you or see you in old photos, 
And wonder where the grey came from.
I still rarely put a tie around you.

You tapped and tiptoed.
Climbed and ached.
You wore things that once felt important 
But the next year would be replaced.

You make a sound reserved only for kittens,
And as time has gone on, I’ve learnt to keep you shut.
I was told I should put braces on you but you said no.
You do try to be good but if there are Pringles in the house, 
Well, that’s a different story…

You sped up when things got crazy, 
through nerves and adrenaline.
Once I got so high I thought I’d lost you.
Once I heard another you,
But that stopped,
And you broke,
But that’s also another story…

Maybe you matter more than the others.
So much has gone through you.
Stories, songs, jokes, good news and bad, hard things to deal with, but reassurance too.
Just recently you’ve been treated to daily yelps of “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy, Daddy!”, and that gets me more anything.
God knows why I ever put an earring on you. 

We’ve schemed together.
We’ve created and hesitated.
We’ve imagined scenarios and tried to find solutions.
In my worst moments, you’ve been to blame, but we never truly separate.
I’ve tried to shape you, to remove your defects.
You do make me laugh.

You drew patterns when I should’ve been listening.
You made music that, to me, mattered more than time,
Or, you made music that, at least, felt forever mine.
You wore a ring that reminded me why I do things, 
And don’t do others.
You showed them the way when words needed help.

Then there’s you…

There are several of you guys, and you appeared like a flash. 
Though your locations vary, that’s what binds us together. 
You each started as nothing but a moment in time. 

You’re the oldest and the smallest, and you’re hidden away.
Your story began in a garden in Moredon, with a soundtrack of Nan’s lilting Irish melodies telling tales in the background. Weatherbeaten fences - some shattered, some sun-stained; a gnome called Paddy; a mysterious outhouse - Inside was Grandad’s toolbox, covered with stickers that I never really understood. 
Faced with the clunky garden steps, I stumbled and fell. 
A pool of sticky red formed on the greyish concrete and dripped delicately onto a t-shirt that told its own tales of surfers on beaches I’d never visit.
You’re hidden by a beard now, but surrounded by more.

Avian footprints creep out from my eyes.
The mood changes, or I need to make out the words on a sign or a phone waved in front of me. You jump to the surface and cause rifts in my skin.
Squinting harder brings back the laughter that caused you,
or that’s what I tell myself: that just the good times left their mark.

But we know that’s not true, and I hope you’re the last.
You dwarf all the others, spanning length and concern.
Whereas others were borne out of moments or have appeared over time, you tell a story of sickness and fear—final chapters and too much time alone in hospital beds, collecting memories, ordering and ranking, revisiting thoughts, confused about the present and not knowing of a future.

You tell the tale of surgeons’ hands and their years of experience, of nurses’ reassurance as they ask me my weight and if I have any false teeth before pumping me with anaesthetic and me floating into a haze, of being wheeled around in metal beds clanking into lift doors, of corridors used for shortcuts, of faces of pity from passing patients, and my own sad reflection I might catch—a radioactive yellow exterior hanging off my protruding bones.

Your story began with a spiral of feeling more and more tired, and less and less alive; of my skin changing colour and my eyes retreating inside; of first days, and then weeks, and then months spent apart from the life that I knew and the faces I needed; of conversations not in my language but with terminology I learnt, detailing all of our downfall and the possible solutions; of days and nights and more days and more nights spent on Spanish wards, forming friendships with caring faces often hidden behind masks, sharing tales of our children from our lives outside, looking past our own collections of tubes and wires keeping us alive.

Your story peaked in a dark room with blinding surgical lights, rotating to meet me amidst panic and hush. A phone call had been made with details of a match, and the eight hours that followed are eight that I missed. You were drawn and then cut, and then worked through with a blade, then held open in a way that hands could pass through.

You formed the exit and the entry point of goodbye and hello: goodbye to the old one who’d been with me so long, had grown tired and useless, cantankerous and forlorn. Out with the old and in with the new, with its own intricate backstory, and with its own conversations too. More chapters unfold as you were stitched closed. 

A line drawn on me.

The line cut open.

A lifeline extended. 

A line drawn under it. 

A new page to write on.

A new conversation every day.

Al Bridges

Writer of poems, stories, and far too many lists.

Influenced by experience and irrelevance; driven by the indecisive trapeze artist in his brain, always wobbling between the urge to spill every thought onto paper or let them mingle like half-forgotten treasures at a never-ending jumble sale.