BITMAP A bitmap is a type of memory organisation or image file formatting used to store digital images. The term bitmap comes from the computer programming terminology, meaning just a map of bits, a spatially mapped array of bits. Wikipedia a representation in which each item corresponds to one or more bits of information, especially the information used to control the display of a computer screen. Oxford English Dictionary Siege I’m sitting at my MacBook and it’s night. If it were not for the light from the screen, or the adjustable lamp on my left, the dark would lacquer every surface in the room before colouring in the gaps with permanent marker. My face is one foot away from the screen. The screen is two feet away from the chair. The chair is three feet away from the bookshelf. The bookshelf is four feet away from the window. The window is five feet away from the wardrobe. The wardrobe is six feet away from the bed. You would have worked that out. You would have drawn a map of it. My bed is no longer in your home. We used to have a home together, didn’t we? Didn’t we used to have a home together? Now your home is millions of feet away. Hundreds of arms lengths. I have never seen it, but I imagine its stone battlements, its archers poised behind slitted windows, its boiling oil. I see myself riding towards the drawbridge as iron chains clank its doors shut and I know you see me. You could always see me. How could you not with my tangled hair and velvet cloak streaming behind me. I ask my horse politely… …asking politely, remember that? I ask my horse politely, to canter straight for the studded gates. Your defensive posturing no longer has any effect. I’ve come to tell you there’s a moat I’ve been swimming in for the last sixteen years. It goes round and I go round with it. Guppies and sewage have become my friends and sometimes people cheer me on. I think they see me as an asset; I’m more reliable than a sundial to set time by and, as you know, I always make a spectacle of myself. The thing is, lately with each circle, time has begun to wear thinner and thinner, and the moat is beginning to drain. I am frightened it will dry up altogether and I will lose the story, or the story will lose me: That somehow it might unravel into a different fairy tale where no one can understand where it came from, or what it might mean. I wouldn’t care, no, really, I wouldn’t, but there are 3 legacies to consider. Those three legacies are fast becoming adults and would like to know why I have chosen to raise them in a medieval narrative. Why I have taught them sword play, juggling and jousting instead of just letting them stay in their bedrooms with computers. Are you paying attention? Or are you filling your Trebuchet with rocks? Outside your castle I dismount from the horse. I wouldn’t want you to think I’m supported. This is a one-woman siege. ‘I’ve come to tell you that I’ve stopped going in circles, that I’ve put on my cloak and I’m going to tell the story.’ His head appears over the crenelated edge, and I expect to see sandy hair, freckles and grass green eyes but of course, there’s grey, glasses, lines of time. I’d forgotten we are older. ‘I’m going to tell the story.’ ‘What story?’ ‘The story of you and I.’ ‘Is that you? You’re soaking wet.’ ‘I’ve been in the moat.’ ‘Right.’ ‘So, are you ok with this?’ ‘Not really. Why am I living in medieval Britain?’ ‘Because there are no computers for you to hide behind.’ ‘These walls are pretty thick. I’d never get a signal here.’ ‘I think you’re missing the point.’ ‘It’s going to be one sided isn’t it, your story?’ ‘Yours was.’ He pauses, retreats, regathers his forces. I don’t want any break in the negotiations, don’t want time to reflect on how I used to look, on how I might look to him now. I shout up: ‘Are you there? I want to talk to you.’ ‘Why would you do this? Everything is already in bits and now you’re waging war?’ ‘No. I never wanted to fight.’ ‘Will you stop laying siege to my castle?’ ‘Eventually.’ ‘What do you want?’ ‘Just to tell my side of the story. It's time.’ ‘I won’t read it.’ ‘It’s not for you.’ ‘The story’s already been told. It’s come and gone.’ ‘That was just your side of it.’ ‘Well, whose fault was that.’ I don’t remember him ever listening before. He was always distracted by a screen. I look down at my fingers and toes before I begin. They’ve gone all wrinkly from being submerged for so long. NEC The National Exhibition Centre opened on the 2nd of February 1976, then waited twelve years for us to arrive and fall in love. During this wait the NEC steadily expanded, opening more interconnected halls and a new indoor music arena. It looked professional but was just a series of quickly built, jumped up sheds; nothing more than metal and breeze block; 190,000 square metres of dustless, soulless emptiness. The best the NEC could offer was ugly display podiums cheering up cheap cord carpet, along with garish business slogans promising success. But of course, I didn’t know that then. In 1988 the NEC seemed like science fiction. It was clean and modern, an utter rejection of Victorian sensibilities and post war frugality. The day before the conference opened, while the computers were being wired up, I walked from hall to hall feeling invincible. I wanted to sing Terence Trent D’Arby songs at the top of my lungs, to leap and dance right across the space. This was what my future looked like with its huge proportions, slick lines and ceilings reaching into the sky. I could feel my future growing like a giant to fill the space. I was Alice in Wonderland with a drink me bottle of possibility and no plan to return to normal size. Everything smelled of cherries and magic. No wonder I fell in love. Despite its enormity, a funny thing happened once the conference commenced: Everyone behaved like it was a tin of sardines. When we arrived, we had to form congas in order to push through the crowds and get anywhere as a group. We attached ourselves to each other so no one would get lost. I held the corner of your jacket, you held the shoulder of the marketing manager, the marketing manager gripped the sleeve of his personal assistant, the personal assistant’s eyes were glued to the arse of the director of communications, the arse of the director of communications carved a path through the multitudes, until it wiggled on to our stand which proclaimed; ‘Decisions Solutions: A New Way Forward’. It was professional teamwork. We were at the NEC to tout for business, enticing scaly old fish who had been hooked a hundred times while swimming their way to the free bars. We were fishers of men sporting company account bellies and wearing suits that smelled of Bensons and Hedges and loneliness. We were a new innovative company attempting to get noticed by trawling old nets and setting new bait. Decisions Solutions would find a new way forwards, even if it meant forming congas to get there. It was early in the evolution of telephony communications: Before you were held in a queue with the promise of being answered shortly, only to wait twenty minutes listening to Celine Dion, then answering overfriendly questions about your day, and failing the security checks because you couldn’t remember setting a password on the account. In 1988 a person just said hello and answered your question. Speaking to someone who behaved like a human was still important then. We were selling the packages that would end all that. We were touting the technology that invented the sweatshops of head-setted automatons, reading from sugar coated scripts, while crossing their legs desperate for a two-minute pee break. Am I being unfair? You did write the software that created uniformity and monitored all the call centre staff, didn’t you? But then again, I helped you sell it. I’d got a call asking if I wanted a temporary job sitting on a podium, looking pretty and pretending to make phone calls for a new tech company. Probably not. I was taking the occasional promotions job, but I wasn’t sure. Would I have to know anything about computers? No. Would they understand that my typing was slow at best, and I was normally employed to stand about in lots of makeup doing nothing at all? Yes. How much were they paying? A lot. The rate was ridiculously good and combined with a five-star hotel and first-class train travel I was sold. Literally. With two days training in Wimbledon, I had at least some idea of what they were selling so I could impersonate a member of their staff, and I found myself at the NEC, dressed all in black like an undertaker. Appropriate really. ‘Good morning, Decisions Services. How can I help?’ I even put on my special posh telephone voice. It was all a total act. You floated around like programming code, watching for potential clients. I began to think of you as some sort of satellite in my orbit, stepping in when someone asked a question. ‘So how exactly does the hub know which phone line is available?’ ‘It’s really quite simple. Let me explain...’ I didn’t realise the importance of understanding the way things worked then. Of knowing what I was getting myself into. I couldn’t explain anything. That continued for far too long. When things are explained it's rarely simple, is it? You held out your sleeve again, as a joke, at the end of the day. We reverse navigated the mornings journey, walking together away from the stand, through the sardine people, over the 190,000 square metres of cheap carpet, past the company Mondeos and into the promise of free gourmet dining with all the wine we could drink. Waiting for dinner, we swam in the mock Roman hotel pool with fake pillars and bizarre heads of Caesars dotted about on plinths. Their cement eyes watched our every move. In the hot tub we faced each other, sharing stories, until our fingers and toes started to wrinkle like raisins. You were from Liverpool which is why you said ‘bath’ so strangely. You loved football, predictable. You’d studied quantum mechanics at university, unexpected. You had a laugh that rumbled my lungs breathless. You had green eyes that offered my city heart open fields to run in. You smelled of desire. ‘Are you single?’ The chemicals in the hot tub made my eyes sting. Maybe you noticed. ‘Let’s get out of this giant puddle.’ You offered your hand for my ungraceful climb out of the bubbles. The brush of your fingers was hardly bearable. I was dissolving at your touch. ‘Yes, I’m single. How about you?’ Then you told me about your girlfriend, the opera singer. She was performing in Mozart’s The Magic Flute. Verstossen sei auf ewig und verlassen sei auf ewig. Verstossen, verlassen, und zertrummert. ‘So, you have a girlfriend then?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Tell me all about her.’ ‘What would you like to know?’ ‘Everything. Gotta size up the competition’ I remember you laughed at that. I loved to make you laugh. ‘She’s an opera singer.’ ‘Yes, you already said.’ ‘We haven’t been together long.’ ‘Excellent.’ I was so bold wasn’t I? Heartless really. Maybe you’d have been happier with your magic flute. Our return to London meant separation, but I was a quick learner. I set up a Local Area Network just for us. The cable ran directly from my heart, between the wooden planks of my bedroom floor, out the Victorian front door, along Wimbledon High Street, through the revolving door of Decisions Solutions, above the skirting board in reception, into the lift to the fifth floor, past the security locks of the development suite, under your door, up your leg and plugged into a port that I had built in your gut at the NEC. The conversations started at the conference continued. I encrypted them. This new LAN couldn’t be detected. It was completely secure. Eventually you gave in and asked me out. ‘How about I skip work and take you to eat pizza in Brixton market? Would you like to?’ Of course, I’d like to. I wanted to devour you whole. ‘Literally the best pizza I’ve ever eaten.’ ‘Even better than Italy?’ ‘I don’t know. Never been.’ ‘I’ll take you.’ ‘To eat pizza?’ ‘Yeah. Just to eat pizza.’ ‘I think you’d probably take your girlfriend.’ ‘I’d never take her to Italy.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘She doesn’t like pizza.’ ‘What else doesn’t she like?’ ‘I’m not really sure.’ ‘I’d bet she wouldn’t like you sitting here with me.’ ‘Hmm.’ ‘Let’s go to Italy.’ By the end of the month you stopped talking about your opera singer girlfriend. By the following month I had scrawled that I loved you on every single graffiti toilet wall in London. Three months later we were planning to have children. Seven years on and I am eclipsed by my own choices. Hort der Mutter Schwur. I loved you for your unintelligible explanations of the Big Bang. I loved you for your vintage suits and impulsive plans. I loved you for your bath and fast and last. I loved you for your love of pizza. I loved you because you were rich moist soil I could plant myself in. We never got to Italy, did we? You took the children though. Eclipse The soles of my feet are burning despite the protection of a pair of mauve espadrilles. I can’t prevent my feet sinking down and forward into the sand with every step. The sand is fire. It’s had the whole day to heat to almost molten proportions under a cloudless sky. It's 28 degrees in the shade. I’m trying to step lightly but I have a cool box in my right hand, a sun umbrella in a liquifying plastic carry bag slung over my back, a bag of towels over my left shoulder, a baby in a sling suckling at my left breast and two children running at full pelt towards a sea they cannot yet swim in. How did their legs get so long and independent? The baby has dehydrated me to the point where I would stick a straw in the sea and drink it dry. You are walking along with a pop-up children’s sun tent tucked into your armpit and holding up a pair of square lensed cardboard and cellophane glasses, using them to look up at the sun. You’re ridiculously excited. It’s an hour until the eclipse begins. I’ve tried to work up some enthusiasm but really, I don’t give a shit. I just want to get to my children before they drown, then I want to keep them contained in an area small enough to police without having to hold their hands for the entire afternoon, and a nurse to set me up an intravenous drip of ice-cold Perrier. Did being a mother take the fun out of me? It takes twenty minutes for the moon to move in front of the sun. Through the solar viewing glasses, the moon moves in millimetres, nudging the sunlight behind its cold shoulder. The air of the beach darkens then cools. Skin that has been lightly braised throughout the day despite the rubbing of many factor sun creams, begins to goosepimple. The hairs on my forearms lift in an effort to keep me warm. I put t-shirts on the kids and wrap them in towels. They sit eating baguettes filled with cheese and tomatoes not asking why the light has changed, not looking up or noticing any difference in their day. Children are like that. It’s hot or it's cold. It’s light or it's dark. It's lunch or it’s not. The sun is daytime. The moon is night. I sit with them trying to absorb their absolutes. To accept how things are. You’ve put on a t-shirt too. It has a photograph of an audience sitting in a cinema on the front. They’re all wearing 3D glasses. You wearing this t-shirt, head tilted towards the sun in your eclipse glasses, along with everyone else on the beach doing the same, is hilarious. I cannot breathe for laughing. ‘You like the t-shirt?’ ‘I love the t-shirt. Hahahahaha. Look at Daddy’s t-shirt kids.’ They glance briefly then continue with the important business of sandwich time. I take a photograph of you to remember the moment. ‘Thought it’d make you laugh. I’d been checking out e-commerce and I found it on the internet. I’ve been planning it for weeks.’ It’s no longer funny. ‘I have been planning this holiday for weeks. I have been making lists of baby equipment, sorting travel insurance, emptying bins, watering plants, arranging neighbours to feed the cats. I have shared the driving despite being exhausted from feeding the baby. I have watched the kids tirelessly while you swam or cycled off to the internet cafe or watched the fucking eclipse. Did you not think I might have liked to have a holiday too? You have packed a t-shirt to make me laugh. You have packed a t shirt. You have packed a. You have. You’ I don’t say it of course, at least I don’t remember saying it, but my sense of humour returns. I laugh. I laugh until my sides ache and my chest hurts. Until there are tears washing the sun cream from my face and dripping it onto my bikini top, leaving cloudy marks. I laugh at the t-shirt you bought from the internet. I laugh at my children’s utter disregard at a beach full of holiday makers wearing strange square glasses. I laugh at the sunshine being eclipsed by the cold hard rock of the moon. I laugh at my own foolishness, at allowing you to eclipse me so absolutely. I laugh because this is what I think the end of the world might look like. I laugh because we haven’t reached that yet. The end of the world Skip to 1999 and it’s nearly the end of the world. And that’s not just because Prince says so. ‘What will happen if none of the computers can recognise that it’s a new millennium?’ ‘Probably nothing.’ ‘Probably? But what if it’s something?’ ‘I don’t know.’ ‘What d’you mean you don’t know. You work in this field. I need to know we’ll be safe.’ ‘What do you want me to tell you?’ ‘That we’ll be safe.’ ‘There’s risk mitigation.’ ‘What is that supposed to mean?’ ‘You’ll be safe.’ ‘Now I don’t believe you.’ The second hand will click from 11:59 to midnight. Time will shift from year close to year opening. The world’s computers will evaluate their choices. What fool makes a two-digit date? When did we stop having dates? I’d forgotten what you looked like without a ticking time bomb child attached to you. One computer choice is to revert to the beginning of computer time, to what’s known as epoch. Epoch was in the seventies for Unix, the operating system that spawned all others. Unix’s system clock began on the day it first turned on; 1st January 1970 at 00:00:00. If the computers revert to epoch, that means they simultaneously create a new epoch, doesn’t it? Time just starts again, and everything will be alright. I look up epoch in the dictionary, desperate for answers: - ‘A particular period of time in history or a person’s life, e.g. the Victorian epoch.’ The other choice is for the computers to search for 00. The only other 00 the programming will know of is 1900, the last full year of Queen Victoria’s reign. The computers might turn back time, either to 1970 or to the beginning of the last century before their invention. What if we become Victorians with Victorian choices? I wear a restrictive corset and model motherhood as a stately pastime, putting my burgeoning brood to good use as prime examples of healthy breeding, of fulfilling my duty to the empire. You stand in a frock coat with a ticking pocket watch that you wind every morning, dangling on a chain into your pocket. We are held motionless for a black and white photograph by neck braces positioned behind us out of shot, and I’m willing the grip of the metal to release me. I can’t breathe. I can’t stay still any longer. Panic fills me from the neck down. You remain calm and in profile, looking slightly off to the left as if picking a spot in the future that might be more tolerable. Maybe you’re braver than me, I don’t know. Perhaps holding still might get you back to a computer where the world makes sense for you. Where you can access your images in technicolour. Hold still now. Big flash. In 1999 it seems like every day we restart epochs, with good intentions, but we abandon them long before the clock strikes midnight. I say: ‘What will happen if it’s the end of the world?’ You say: ‘Life will go on.’ The second hand clicks from 11.58 to 11.59 and you’re standing there with a piece of paper held up above your head. I can tell by the curl of your lip that it’s something funny, but I can’t really see what’s on it as your hand is shaking the page. Nearly midnight. Is it mistletoe? Yes, it’s a printed picture of some mistletoe and you’re delighted with yourself. I remember before; your insistence on donning walking boots and tromping through mud into the woods to hunt mistletoe. Our faces were flushed with cold, noses berry red, our fingertips ice cubes by the time we finally found some. You took a brown paper parcel from the folds of your army surplus coat, and I unwrapped it to reveal a cherry red velvet cloak, so beautiful I couldn’t believe it was mine. It was warm from your body heat. You wrapped it about my shoulders under that mistletoe that was too high to reach, and we kissed until our tongues lolled, until we’d run out of saliva and it was nearly dark. Then you wanted to stay. ‘Let’s live in the woods forever skinning rabbits and making camps.’ ‘I can’t believe you’d skin the rabbits first and make the camps after. What are you thinking?’ ‘You know I wouldn’t.’ ‘We’d freeze to death.’ ‘I know. Camp first. Food after.’ ‘Well, I don’t know. I’m not sure I’ll have you on my team now.’ ‘Of course, you will. It’s only a team of two.’ ‘The entry requirements are more stringent now I have this cloak.’ ‘Is that right?’ ‘This cloak might now be my significant other.’ ‘It can’t kiss you though.’ ‘Well, you are quite a good kisser.’ ‘And we both know my kissing is essential for survival.’ How we loved making plans for sudden disasters, for the failure of technology, for the apocalypse and the end of the known world. We would survive anything; hunting, defending our territory and outwitting the elements. We would survive anything except each other, wouldn’t we? He stands with a printed picture of mistletoe held proudly above his head. A representation of something that used to be, history reduced to an A4 page. I want a version of now that matches my memory of the past, when things were still real, where I could breathe our smoke in freezing woodland and kiss lips to warm mine. I want my velvet cloak wrapped tightly around me by a man in an army surplus coat that smells of cherries and love. I’d rather not pretend. I turn to walk upstairs and check the children are still sleeping soundly and hear the mistletoe crumple into a ball, then hit the bin behind me. The second hand clicks from 11.59 to midnight: All the world’s computers fail, the defence systems malfunction and trigger mass attacks: Within moments missiles are launched from India to China, from Germany to Greece, from everywhere to North Korea, from America to everywhere. There is a sharp intake of breath when I begin to realise this has happened. There is nowhere to hide and nothing to be done. There should never have been only 2 digits. There is a need for more now. Surely someone should have realised so things could carry on. My heart stops beating. I long to return to a Victorian age when all I had to fear was the flash of phosphorus. I cannot protect my children from this. Bombs rain down on our heads. Boom. Boom. Boom. All that is left is dust. Dust I’m dusting my bookshelves. It’s an infrequent occurrence. I think dust is the mark of a loved and curated library. Dust belongs to books as books belong to dust: The one continually shedding outer layers and ideas, the other forming a new skin against mortality. Dust shows there was life, dust proves there still is. For me, dust hanging in the air as you open a front cover is the continuation of a cycle of life, death and rebirth. I see it, smell it, feel it. It has an irresistible allure. You never liked reading much did you? I wonder if you’ll read this. You said you wouldn’t. I don’t recognise one of the books on my bookshelf. Its title is a collection of words jumbling physics with quantum symbols I don’t understand, that I couldn’t replicate on a keyboard. It’s not intelligible in a conventional way. At least, not to me. Maybe the back cover will give me a clue. Perhaps it’s one of those books that I’ve picked up in a charity shop with every intention of expanding my horizons, but instead has waited self-consciously squeezed in amongst fantasy and feminist sci-fi. The back of the book is as black as cough syrup, as mysterious as a black hole. Opening the front cover, I am startled by the fluttering of a giant moth, or some other dead thing released at last and circling its way from page to floor. I nearly drop the book but recover my grasp and look down to see your face, framed in white, on my carpet. A photograph of you. Not taken by me. Taken by someone with a real camera, in the days before we learned to snap all our memories with mobile phones that automatically synchronise to our laptops. This is a photo that’s made a journey; from camera, to developing laboratory, to you, to this book, to me, passing from hand to hand, held carefully at the edges until it landed on my floor. Trust me to break the chain. You look as young as our oldest child. The unwanted memory of me leaving you rushes in. My meticulous bitmapping has failed to permanently lock it away: My right-hand grabs at books from the pine shelf, within my reach if I stand on tip toes. I hold as many as my handspan will allow, maybe five or six if the books aren’t too thick, shove them into a cardboard box at my feet, reach again. Speed is of the essence. My friends have said the more I take now, the less I must fight for later. All the books are mine anyway, aren’t they? The box is so full I can barely lift it, but self-righteous indignation gives me strength: The names you’d called me, the phone calls to my father, the threats to apply for single custody, the passive aggressive crying. I reverse the packing process with the same fervour. Hastily erected cheap Ikea shelves bought on credit cards with non-existent money would have to do. I was a mother foolishly trying to create some semblance of normality for her offspring. Why didn’t I realise that nothing I did could make it normal? How didn’t I see? Everything had changed for them, of course it had. I doubt they even noticed the books in their new home where every inch of wall proclaimed their father’s absence. The book, your book, the book that held the fluttered dead photo, burns my hands with guilt. I must have taken it by mistake. I hadn’t thought something of yours could coexist with something of mine. By the time I left you, the separateness was so pervasive, nothing of ours could have tolerated being side by side. I stare down at the image of you before we met. I hold the book you chose once upon a pre-me time. I feel an absence, of sorts. I don’t exist for you in this photograph. I haven’t happened yet. I’m just a very tiny, very dense point in your future, waiting to be activated. Waiting for you to add the energy that will tip me over the edge into the Big Bang. When you do, I will explode with unimaginable force, creating matter and propelling it outwards to make billions of galaxies, to make a new universe. A universe for us. For our children. But this is a photo of before me, before the Big Bang, before the beginning of time. This is a photo of a god. I used to think you were a god, didn’t I? I worshipped at your altar craving the numinosity of your presence. I endured the wrath of your displeasure and prayed for the strength to carry on. I waited for you to let me into the kingdom of heaven, but your heaven was too digital for me to understand. I couldn’t help it, but I stopped believing. Lost my faith. I learned the hard way just how human we both were. I didn’t know you when this photo was taken, I don’t really know you now, do I? I was just an in-between time. An explosive, busy, universe creating, in-between time. Maybe love is always an in-between time, something fluttering, like your photo, between remembering and death. Like life then really. Just an in-between time, between dust and dust. Sometimes, I worry that your face will be the last thing I see before I die. I think the more I worry about it, the more likely it is to happen but however hard I try, I can’t stop. Do you ever worry you’ll die and go to hell, and it will just be me? I’m not sure what to do with the photograph. I could turn your face over, tuck it back in your book, post it or give it to one of the kids to return. I could sweep you under the carpet, tread one foot slowly over your face, maybe just bin you, but I want to look. I haven’t kept any photos of you apart from the ones where your back is facing the lens as you swing our eldest in the air, where you’re sitting in profile at the high chair with a spoonful of carrot, where our son is on your shoulders with feet hooked under your armpits, and his arms wrapped around your face. This was you before us. I’d forgotten how beautiful you were. You’re sitting looking down with a pencil in your mouth, hair tousled and shorter than you usually wore it. There is an intense frown between your eyebrows. I know the look, thinking, calculating, decoding. Your computer mind at work. Maybe you are at work, but you have on your favourite jumper, the one I later washed too hot and despite it shrinking several sizes, you insisted on wearing anyway. You asked me if I minded once, and I showed you the tiny green and red pullover saved in a leather suitcase with all my childhood relics. I wore that jumper from age five to age ten despite my mother’s attempts to pass it on. In the end the sleeves only reached my elbows and began to unravel, and it looked like a poor attempt at a belly top, so I packed it away safely. I still have it. I dressed our daughter in it once, but it was too precious for further wear. Some things are so precious they belong in a box. Packed away in a box undisturbed. Or in a book covered in dust. In the end I knitted you a Dennis the Menace jumper to replace the shrunken one. How you laughed when you opened it. How my eyes wept at the weeks of red and black stripes. It took me ages; fingers click clacking away at the needles. It wasn’t the same though. You wore it a few times but there was nothing I could do to take back the shrinking. There is nothing you can do to take back the mistakes you’ve made, however hard you try. I study this image of you, young, intense, with a whole life ahead and I want to reconfigure those sky-blue eyes, so they don’t catch my attention. I want to fit you with a flashing sign that warns a younger me to stay clear. No. That’s not fair. I’ve learned not to try and change people. What’s the point? It only ends in heartbreak. I want to alter my younger self, yes, that’s it. I want to have the confidence to be my own deity, to activate my own Big Bang, to not find you so beautiful. To not find you at all. No. Not that either. Without us I would not be sitting at my MacBook, edged in forgetting and funerial black, typing this story. Without us there would be no them, no story that continues too far into the future for me to follow. What do I want then? It’s a wish. I wish I had been kinder. I slide the photo back in the book and place it back on the shelf until I can decide what to do. I’ll probably forget it’s there, shed an old skin and find it all over again. Life, death, rebirth. But for now, it can sit alongside my books and gather dust. Enough time has passed for them to tolerate each other’s company. Besides, it seemed they already did, without me even knowing it. A note to my children To protect you from the story that made you, I will first lay down a velvet cloak. It might cover the brackish puddle of rainwater beneath, but I warn you, it will not hold a child’s weight if you step on it. Your foot will be encased by the soft material, but it will still sink down. It will still get wet. There is no way of avoiding it. You might lollop along afterwards, cursing the one wet shoe, comparing it unfavourably to the dry one, but perhaps you will appreciate the gesture made by the person who lay the cloak. The one who attempted to shield you from the inevitable and soften the blow. At least I hope you will. P.S. You can keep the cloak.