‘Losing a person could make more of us. Make two,’ writes Ocean Vuong when he reflects on the death of his loved one. Is this true? Could it be so? When you lose a person you have the person you once knew or you have a new someone, a person now dead. Is this what Vuong means? Or something else altogether. There is the actual person and then there is the person no more. A memory.
Memory offers us a second chance. Vuong again. This makes sense. Memory as a second chance to have a stab at something we once lived through that changes almost every time we remember. The curves and cadences shift ever so slightly along with our emotions about this memory, they soften. The way reading a book can introduce us to characters with whom we might have little affinity but with whom we begin to experience with lashes of empathy because the writer has taken us into the shoes of this person and for once, if only briefly, we see through their eyes.
Even if they are a person filled with self-loathing because of life’s cruelties, we do not despise them the way they hate themselves. If anything, we can urge them to be kinder to themselves in the theatres of our imaginations where anything is possible.
Weather, too, gives us second chances. It’s April in Australia and the seasons are turning with the red leaves about to drop brown and crinkled on the ground. I gather my woollen jumpers and shake them from their summer sleep.
I have a day of visitors mapped out today. A small grandson who will doubtless play along with whatever toys he can find. We might go to the movies and later, a sister who is troubled as one of her children is seriously ill. Different people and different moods and I will adapt to each as required.
My husband and all four daughters are attending a ceramics class in Fitzroy today. Each wanting to try their hand at creativity of a different form. Each keen to experiment with clay. One son in law reminds me, when he was a school kid he despised art classes involving cay. He hated the feel on his hands. The way the stone drew moisture from his fingers and palms. The sensation of dryness as if friction on his skin.
I know what he was talking about. I have the same sensation in my mouth when eating scones. Something about the mixture of flour to moisture draws moisture from my mouth. My teeth grow sticky and the taste, however pleasurable, is subsumed by the sensation.
There are those who might suggest such sensibilities be speak to a person who struggles with neurodiverse behaviours but these are the thin edge of diversity. We all have our peccadilloes. Not always problems but sources of great joy.
And possibility. A second chance.
