Meandering path
For some weeks now, when I have found myself waiting at sleep’s foggy borders, the idea for these small words has greeted me in the form of an unfurled, improbable winter bud gathered at my feet. The shy flower breaks open into an orchestra of petals when I take it in my hands. In fear of losing those silken sheets, I will try and write their fragile beauty.
Balanced on a shelf of your poetry, there is a small portrait of you both wearing raucous smiles that beam down onto my keyboard. You have on pearls; Papa wears a blue striped shirt that bounces against the yellow-striped wall behind. The picture is of no particular occasion – it was taken on a day, some twenty years ago, like any other day. A day, on which, like any other day, you both smile with smiles that feel too large for the coy noun.
The photograph is the perfect expression of how we know you both. Teddy, Mátyás, Ludo and I, your four children born and brought up in the sun of your smiles. Ever since I have known that I am in the world, I have known that my parents are best friends, partners, the two columns in the dappled bough above our heads. To live in your combined light is delight. Disagreements pucker and shrivel under your loud phosphorescence, and sneak out through the side door, humiliated. What is joy but to learn that happiness is an unyielding strength?
Recently, in the shade of too-soon change, you have both taught me what it means to love and be loved. You have taught me how to wield the reins of silliness to charge past the ghosts of slow decay that clamour at the wayside. You are too fast, too strong, too kind for their clammy grip. There is no easy way to be ill – so ill people arrive at our door with Tupperware containers of food flavoured with kind helplessness. There is no easy way to be so ill you can’t run and hold us when the tears are too big and come too fast to push back in. There is no easy way to rely on unpractised, practical love.
But you could fool us.
I don’t know how to write it so it is true, so it is you (both). How to tell you both that you have taught me love. The love of the everyday, the love of unwavering pride in each other, in everything. There are no words enough to write to you to tell you what I have learned, because you know it. What light you both are, always, even on cold nights when, beyond our front door, the world is shuttered and grey.
We walk beneath falling November leaves in the bright dark and we forget that the world was ever different
