I Never Learned to Dance Like This

Ways to remember and then forget, trying to hold all of the facts at once, and rescued birds

September has been a lot. Not too much, but a lot. As I alluded to in my No.217 list, it was largely defined by family happenings, most of which required my assistance in either practical or feeling ways. There are two grandmothers who, in their different ways, are likely in their last months, or weeks, of time on Earth—although possibly years in the case of one of them, and why is it so impossible to know—and I also became an aunt for the first time, though I feel this word doesn’t fit me in a completely comfortable way. Firsts and lasts have an unnerving habit of arriving together, or in quick succession, which is likely one of the ways in which the universe cares to remind us we are not in control of a single thing.

It has been strange to try and comprehend the facts: that any baby with fingernails smaller than the smallest currants could exist at the same time as groups of whales stranding themselves on beaches and dying of squashed hearts; that there are a huge number of things I will never know about my two grandmothers because they grew up during a war and were never told they had a choice to talk about or share any of it, or couldn’t bear to; that the Malagasy peoples of Madagascar see time in a completely different way, cyclically, with the future reaching out behind them or passing them from behind and becoming the past as it continues out in front, this being as the past is something which can be seen and learnt from—instead of explaining the time as, say, 6 or 6:30am, the Malagasy language would have maim-bohon-dravina, which means the leaves are now dry of dew from the night before, or at 5pm they would explain the time as tafapaka ny andro, or sun-touching of the eastern walls.