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Published: October 19th 2009
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Altruism and a new day. 6am - monday
The night moves slowly because it is day.
My body searches for the right hour for a place to live and breathe
It wakes at the wrong hours - again.
London sleeps but I’m awake before the birds, my mind calculating 7 hours ahead.
I have the luxury of no anxiety from this. I have no work to be alive for. It’s just me time, again.
So, the hour wakes me and I look around to feel myself. It’s lunch time but the sun has not risen. I’m hungry but I have only just woken. I’m tired but I have just slept and the cat bumps me but it’s not my cat. People in London wear gloves and scarves but I just took my summer dress off. I wear jade and red thread but it doesn’t quite belong to a country with red buses and phone boxes.
In the dark English morning, I slip between two worlds. I know what my house looks like in China - the sun rising earlier, the chorus in the lane, everyone setting up their barrow stalls with quick
food for 1 kwai and now I know this place.
My life is fragmented but calm. Hopping continents from Europe to Asia and back again and I belong both here and there. No arms to read for me and no hands to play music.
Once again I am in limbo falling in love with old signs on old buildings and the new dawning day. But, when I read letters from Suzhou of movement and struggle and light and hope whilst I live in a place of plenty with those without thought or knowledge to these things, I know I am once again displaced and I cannot speak of China. I live in limbo knowing I can't change it, not today. I tell no one, there is no one who can hear.
Today is time for my daughter and shoes and looking at signs whilst occasionally wondering, but not yearning for, how the day is unfolding in my old home town.
I seek the quiet hours in a house of people and when I open the pack of polaroids onto the table, the lives and sounds and smells of China pour out next to the fake scented
candle, the three remotes and the drink I thought I wanted.
I know every image without examining it - the places are in my heart and mind. I know each place well and remember the second I took the image and what happend before and after. I reap the benefit of forethought knowing that in the dark of the split night some time in the future, in another country, I would look at my life’s connections in China through the Polaroid film. And here is it, the held back life opening tears, falling in the dark.
I allow myself to think of the life I had and to not understand what it is I want or need because that was not a holiday it was my life.
Every Polaroid holds a story of reality and truth. Lao Wang falls onto the table beside old wells, a master who moves with grace under the overpassing road, an old chair below the window facing the river with the late autumn sunshine falling across it, old vests and pants hanging beside drying noodles on makeshift bamboo washing lines beside the canal, my old puppy, my old Christmas dog, the singing
birds in the cages on the moulding walls, the many wells - three in my lane - some with women raising water - the rest dotted around Suzhou, a broken house window, the mop by the tin street name and Cai Gen Lin looking at me, the sound of the wood flute and the laughter of people I know.
I need to give it time because here are other possibilities of a future with others close, closer, closeness
Life is full of contradictions and love and I have a common thread running through me, from my eyes, through my fingers and my words easily connecting me with others with a smile, hand holding, laughter and given shared moments. These moments will not stop because it is time for new ones.
Give it time.
Sit with the Rothko’s, go to the portrait gallery to see the Bown’s, go to Dungeness to prospect cottage, walk with friends, watch the dance moves, listen to the bands at Shepherd’s Bush, just around the corner.
Give it time to surround my life in the new richness of what it has to give and take.
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