Queenie’s back, sorry for the lapse in posting. She had to live her life with huge intensity for the last couple of weeks. People coming and going and talking and discussing and phoning and thinking and spending precious time with each other and saying hello and goodbye and giving stuff away and taking stuff in and spending more precious time and making decisions and plans and then thinking some more.
But the rush is over now. Everything's done and decided and all we have to do now is wait for life to work itself out as it knows best. And to try to let that happen.
Himself is gone. Left on a jet plane this afternoon. For Grassland Alberta. Which is actually on Google Earth. That was important. To be able to spy on the place.
We circled the globe a few times last night and I showed Himself where I was born and where I lived and worked in Dublin and where all my friends lived. And we looked at the Rockies and the Andes and the Himalayas and Baghdad and Kandahar and Africa (which is covered in pop ups!!!!) and Venezuela and India and BC and where Himself is from and where he's gone now.
Queenie came back to an empty house tonight and let herself in quietly. Walked around feeling his imprint everywhere. He had put the dishwasher on. He had washed the saucepans. He had put her phone back on its charger. He had found her cigarettes and put them in her room. He had fixed her keyboard (which was one of the reasons why she wasn’t too pushed about blogging recently). He had fed the fish. He had bought new batteries for her clock, and glue for her scrapbooks.
He had put a new roll of toilet paper on the toilet paper holder (Queenie's hatred of doing which was the subject of a previous blog).
That’s when Queenie started to cry. What a picture she must have made, leaning against the little cistern (he had put the seat down of course) with her coat still on and her bag over her shoulder (her lovely, dusky blue, soft, thick, chamois leather, designer, French, hand-stitched shoulder bag, which she bought for two hundred euro even though she had no money, as an expensive reminder, on the day she swore she'd let herself be fucked over by a man for the last time in her life, the clasp of which broke irreversibly today) and her library books in her arms, eventually sitting there on her little en-suite, howling with grief over the absence of a man who would not believe that a shoulder bag could cost that much, but who would buy it for her anyway if she said she had to have it, which she never would of course because she doesn't need designer bags anymore. A man who would happily spend all afternoon figuring out how to fix the clasp if it was a wet Saturday and Queenie was doing something solitary and there was nothing else to be fixed or built or moved or painted or scraped or whatever. Who would have a piece of metal 2mm x 4mm somewhere in his universe that would do the job perfectly. Who would add some flourish of his own to improve the design or just make it beautiful. Who would decide to remove the stains in the leather caused by Queenie's complete disregard for her possessions and present it to her good as new just to see her reaction. A man who never remembers to make himself breakfast, but who remembers every like and dislike and phobia of the woman he loves.
Some things in life are no-brainers.
4 comments:
Ah. Easy choice then, Queenie?
I don't do e-hugs and that shit. But I can think it quietly to myself.
This post makes me sad.
But happy, because it is beautiful and well-written.
But still sad.
That was just gorgeous.
wow, the luxury. The luxury of thinking that what you write is so meaningful, so incisive, so ...important, that we should all want to read it.
This is what used to be contained on pages meant never to be read. But, instead, now, we are subjected to reams and reams and reamns of other people's angst.
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