You've got to let me go

(This post is part of a series exploring the synaesthesia of written word and music. Please press play before reading. If you're on a phone, select 'listen in browser' first.)

A whisper comes at dawn. The reverberations bring me up out of my dreams. I open my eyes, looking up at the ceiling. The ceiling is still there. But something has changed. Sometime during the night, a thread of the world has been tugged, and it's crinkled the soft tapestry of consciousness.

I stretch and stand up. The first step of the day: make myself a small espresso. It’s my routine. Always in the same cup. Damson purple, handmade pottery, with a smiling face engraved into the side. A fixed happiness, unfaltering. It smiles at me; I don’t feel like smiling back.

I run the filter under the tap and wait while the coffee grounds are fully scattered across the sink, until the water runs clear. Then I wait for the water to boil. The machine hums into action, the heated beans rising in drifts of heady aroma.

Small coffee in hand, I walk to the window. The rim of the sunrise is still lingering around the bowl of the sky, the world momentarily held in gold. ‘Nature’s hardest hue to hold.’

The to-do list is calling, the next step in the routine. But I don’t see the to-do list. I see you.

The memory plays behind my eyelids, like a GIF file I’ve played and forgot would loop, the jagged start coming again. And again.

It won’t let me go.

It never lets me go.

Your morning routine.

It starts with the the tea towel. You used it as a bread board. The bread was always unsliced, bought the day before. When you’d cut up what you wanted for breakfast, you’d gather up the crumbs in the towel, slowly carry it through to the conservatory.

The house would erupt in song as you’d open the glass doors. Birds turn their heads. Light shift from slants of reflection against the glass and fall unshackled, straight onto the carpet. Warmth. There must have been cold days, but the memory is always warm.

Sometimes you put them carefully on the bird table, but most time you flick the tea towel and let the crumbs scatter through the air. Sparrows patter down. Always the sparrows.

I watch the animation, but this time, in the dimpsy hallway between the kitchen and the conservatory, I stop walking. I watch as you continue to walk through the doorway with the patience of your slow-forming arthritis, and turn to the right. You’re there. I can hear the receding footsteps. Just out of sight.

The memories here are a little thicker. Over time, a fog has settled between the kitchen and the staircase. There is a gold-framed mirror and a chest of oak drawers. I think I see the old peacock feathers in a Chinese pot (were they from real peacocks?).

My hands stray to the drawer, but I stop. My memories are too unsure of what’s inside. The moment might break.

Instead, I look up to the picture above the drawers. I drew it. It’s a framed A4 page of cartoon eyes and arms and legs - dogs and cats, all shapes and sizes. And in the middle of the page, a poem.

I can’t read the words, but I know the outlines of them; written in ABAB stanza, some forced rhymes, too many exclamation marks. I gave it to you years ago, years before. Years later as a teenager, ageing with all the grace and self-certainty of a part-feathered duckling, I told you to take it down. The writing on it is so awful, I said.

You told me: well, write me something that replaces it.

I look at the picture. The gap between then and now.

The years of words, unsaid and half-said. The space, heavy with fear, where the pen was left on the side. Forgetting how it felt between my fingers.

I didn’t write your book before. Because I never knew what to say.

Please forgive me.

I write this book, now. For you.

I write this book, because of you.