Wait. Build a woman.
Waiting. Waiting. It’s a refrain in Apeirogon, a novel by Colum McCann. I so rarely listen to audiobooks, but McCann reads his own novel and his accent is captivating. Apeirogon is the story of two fathers – one Israeli, one Palestinian – who both lose their young daughters in the conflict on their doorsteps. It is about an unlikely friendship. And it is about waiting, whilst those many facets of grief do their work. Grief is that most subtle of forces. We say that time heals, but who really wants the wound of catastrophic loss to close up? We wait, in grief, to feel something else, for the pain to be less acute. And that does happen, though at a pace feels unnoticeable, like shedding skin cells. We don’t even have layers of dust to show for it. Still, we wait.
The Taj Mahal is a monument to grief. Built by a Mughal Emperor to honour his dearly beloved wife, Mumtaz, it bears a passage in arabic about grief from the Qur’an at its entry way. All that pass here must know of this loss. In Agra, Zahid accompanied me and my three companions, as much photographer as tour guide. ‘Wait. Wait.’ was his catchphrase, said many times over the course of two days, as he had us posing for shots on multiple cameras. I’ve never been photographed so much as that time in India. What is most memorable about that trip is how much I surprised myself. The bookish woman, rapt audience for every tour guide. The serene traveller that withstood heat, potholes, and Delhi belly. The self-satisfied squatter on the banks of the Ganges. I was insatiably curious and wanted for so little. I drank wonder and was sustained on awe. I was content.
I recently cracked the spine of Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth, a poetry collection by Alice Walker. In the preface, she locates the collection inside grief (written in the aftermath of the attack on the World Trade Centre), and physically inside an interior room, that the bright sunlight of Mexico couldn’t penetrate. The grief begins, in some ways, as melancholia – melancholy associated with her dismay at ‘our children’s’ dependence on drug-taking. Instead of dwelling in this melancholy, she undertakes to investigate: ‘I was particularly interested in discovering what our children are seeking when they turn to drugs and alcohol.’ She says, ‘As I see it, this is the work of the apprentice elder: to travel to those realms from which might come new (or ancient) visions of how humans might live peacefully and more lovingly upon earth.’ The vehicle for this particular travel was ayuascha. What she learns is a sense that taking addictive drugs is partly to allay fears about a severely compromised future full of hatred and war, partly to feel less lonely, and partly out of a desire to have a ‘religious or spiritual or ecstatic or transformative experience’. That there is a reaching for substances to enable that seems something of a short-cut to me, one I suspect will never be ultimately fulfilling because it is externally produced rather than internally discovered. The poems in this collection are strange, on the page almost staccato. They seem to express a stymied spirit, each line break a punctum, another skin cell of grief.
Some weeks after a full moon head shave, I applied to rent a flat. Of my very own. I am waiting to hear. In all these years of existence I have never lived alone, never carved a space for one. I am noticing new sensations derived from recognising what I want, independent of all other forces, and then going after it. It feels like weightlessness. It’s like holding hands with air, that subtle and almighty friend. I wonder why this has been so difficult for me in the past: that I’ve spent so much time with dominant people whose own desires are focal; that it’s taken a long time to cultivate the practise of listening to myself; or something in that working class mentality you can’t always get what you wa-ant?
Though my parents made a girl on that instant explosion of sperm and ovum meeting, it has taken nearly forty years to make this woman. I don’t regret a second of that becoming.
What are you waiting for?