#2 (This just doesn’t happen here … but it did)

I’m a bit afraid, and resistant, to go back to my essay. Though
that doesn’t mean I’m not constantly checking my emails –
hoping. Turned out the shooter had filmed it all with a
go-pro – like a first-person shooter game. Very often S will
tell me he loves me, and quite often I will ask him ‘Why?’ – or
sometimes ‘Why do you say that just now?’ That was where I
started reading Brighton Rock. The way forward is unknown –
we don’t even know if it’s a good idea. I had been sitting
reading on my phone – actually Paula Green’s interview with
Anne Michaels – I think I’d just read how for her poetry was
reaching out to hold another person – which is kind of
appropriate because I moved over in my seat – she was across
the aisle from me, and I touched her on her arm and looked
concerned and said ‘I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.’ The one
moment while we were talking and I felt a charge – and shied
away – was when he was talking about blu and azzurro, and
he said azzurro is used for sea and sky and eyes – and I looked
at his blue eyes and I think he looked at mine. Ah good, I’ve
got the fire blazing again. That was the Christmas S bought
me the Roboraptor, and I wondered if he really even knew
me, but I still have Fluffy and am actually very fond of him.
There are too many things and I am behind with all of them –
hence the panic. Thinking about why reading books can be so
calming compared to reading on the internet – and I think it’s
the linearity – a novel doesn’t have to be linear in terms of
chronological, but you know where you are with it. This isn’t
the kind of thing that happens here. We sat on the couch, we
hugged, we held hands, we cried a bit – but not enough. I
expect to be a bit inflamed and disrupted. I sent him a short
email on Tuesday night – after I’d seen him that morning –
telling him two alternative translations for my motto – Dignity
at all times (Dignità sempre and Dignità a ogni momento),
which are both nice. I went to bed worried that I would wake
up to find that there were more attacks around the world. V
said that in Greek the word for progress is connected to the
word for doubt – I’ve been thinking a lot about doubt and the
positive side of doubt – doubt that isn’t crippling, but that stops
you from thinking that you’re right about everything all the
time – the confidence to doubt. Anyway – today there are two
minutes of silence – a call for prayer at 1.30 and then two
minutes of silence at 1.32. The book we lost last time we were
here is still here – the travel guide to Sicily. Love to me, until
now, had not been a thing of wanting but of having.

Helen Rickerby
from My Bourgeois Apocalypse

Helen Rickerby lives in a cliff-top tower in Aro Valley, Te Whanganui-a-Tara (Wellington). She’s the author of four and a half collections of poetry, most recently How to Live (AUP, 2019), which won the poetry category in the 2020 New Zealand Ockham Book Awards. Her recently completed new poetry collection, My Bourgeois Apocalypse, (AUP, forthcoming) is part fragmentary poetic essay, part collage memoir, constructed from (mostly) randomly selected sentences from her journals between 2019 and 2024.