lucyshena's photostream  

Today was a low day. It frightened me, the force and blankness of it. I don't know where it came from. Just when I think I'm getting better, that dark little thing in me pulls down with a closed fist.

It's hard and wonderful to be at home again. Sydney is more beautiful than I remember.

This was taken on one of my last nights in Durham, while the city was hosting Lumiere, its annual festival of lights.

Plucked from the banks of the Wear on a summer afternoon.

Last summer

It is a year since I took this photo, but snow is again falling in Durham. I leave London the day after tomorrow. I leave England the day after that. Time has passed, fifteen months to be exact. What a strange thing that is to say, but what a stranger thing it is to watch this winter settle now so similarly and know myself so changed.

I lit a light for you at Brompton Oratory late yesterday afternoon. Inside, it was dusky, incensed, the chapels candle-eyed. A fine sinewy man in bottle glasses changed the Virgin and child while I watched. A man from Belfast with stale breath and a lazy eye asked for change. I think I sat for an hour. A year, Kerry, a whole hideous year of being so strangely without you. We were half a world apart, but distance was in the detail and could not touch us. A year, and it’s not an exaggeration to say I think of you every day. The hole doesn’t get smaller, but some things do change. The anger has passed. The guilt at the anger has passed. Now my grief is a weariness, and a hurt that you didn’t want more of what we had so fervently promised each other. My dear girl, I’ve saved all the love you asked me to, and it grows, and it pains, and it makes the best and the worst of all this mess worth living if only because it’s in such complete memory of you. I miss you, kindred thing.