I watched a documentary on Christmas day about
Morecambe and Wise. They met when they were eleven. Did you know that? And on
the day Eric Morecambe died, Ernie Wise, his friend for forty seven years, went
on television to talk about how it felt losing him. Did you know that?
Yesterday I watched a documentary about Joan Didion.
It seems shallow to mention how her face has aged. Her husband died
after all. And her daughter died.
I wondered how it must feel to have seen so many endings. So many
neat piles of things undone. The autumns and summers and winters and springs
strewn across the floor like dress shirts and socks.
But her face, and the skin stretched transparent over her hands, veins
like liquorice laces up her arms. She made a sandwich and cut off the crusts.
Took small bites at the table in her kitchen.
She weighed seventy five pounds after her husband died. Did you know
that?
She talked about California and about a cave you could only get to
when the tide hit at a certain point in the day, and how her and her husband
and their young nephews would wait for the swell of the water and the great
heave of pressure that would lift them over across the rocks.
The eyes give you away don’t they. Even when you’re sleeping.
Four days ago the internet reminded me that in two thousand and
twelve somebody left a note on my car windscreen saying ‘You’re taking up two parking
spaces. Fucking cunt.’
I have thought about all of this today, standing at the start of a
new year. I don’t believe in time, at least not in the way I used to, and
January seems irrelevant somehow now. A train leaving the station.
And yet, I have begun to build a life here that I fit inside of
neatly, and this has all reminded me how quickly it will disappear, and how
important it is to build it anyway.
People will leave. Walls will come down. The books piled neatly in a
fireplace will belong to somebody else, somewhere else. And the giant shush of
waves will lift me over and push me on.
Thom Kofoed
