Magnificence

The Obsessive Diary

Photo by Casey Horner on Unsplash

He came to the door looking for the key to the electrics box. Actually I heard the ship’s bell clang on the gate and looked out through michaelmas daisies to see legs and a body moving through long grass so I went to the front door and waited. He was slight. Short hair gathered in a knot on the top of his head. I’ve been through this before with the key and I said so, inviting him in to search the rows of old and new collected on the dresser hooks. Maybe this one. Or this one. Next we searched the neighbour’s cupboards and shelves, places where it might be hung; friends who wouldn’t mind, who left their door open, whose electrics he was fixing. It was retracing our steps across my overgrown yard that the conversation began.

Who lives there? He pointed at the cabin.

And I told him a bit about B.

My son’s autistic, too. His mother left.

And out it came in the kitchen. How she’d planned it, asking him to take two days off work, fabricating a doctor's appointment, sending a text after a twenty-four hour silence, typing I can’t do this anymore.

He was five. He keeps asking “why can’t I speak to her” and I say “I don’t know where she is, baby.”

A glass of water. More.

I’m from Rwanda. I witnessed the genocide. I came here when I was nine. No child should have to see these things.

Standing in the kitchen.

I’ll never understand how you can kill for something. It’s such a small thing, empathy, but it’s missing.

Eyes direct.

She took his older brother but not him.

We were sitting by now at the table. I recalled the others I knew whose mothers left them, walked out taking some and leaving others, stumbling over they never recovered with the codicil of difference; the fathers left to care for them never talked about it.

Slight body, hair gathered in a plait, looking at his phone as we tried to figure out the key problem and the empathy problem and the how does a person be so present with all this contained within them? In France I had a row with AS about human leanings - she of the view that without work we slide into nothing while I banged the drum for the equally natural state of brilliance which doesn’t get half the attention it deserves; there’s no workshop for everyday kindness, human wisdom, a reconciliation of witness into love not hate. He and I at my kitchen table, two expressions of the same source come to the same conclusion from wildly brutal different paths. A moment in time before we diverged again in body only. When I experience it in another, this ability to ingest and recover enough to walk away through the michaelmas daisies, to witness and conclude love, to carry on caring despite the slamming I know we humans have magnificence.

Acts like this will never make the news but they’re happening all the time.

Eleanor