auden and rothko

The pupils of our teacher's eyes bored into my soul, the day she handed out Auden's poem. It was that poem most people know; 'Stop all the clocks'. Miss Holloway, her name was, and she asked the class what we thought of it. How the poem made us feel. It was those eyes again, when she spoke. They searched our faces like the rough hands of a blind-man. I wanted them to catch mine across the room. I craved a deep connection so much, one like Matilda and Miss Honey. My hands scrambled at the paper, still warm from the printer. I could barely read the words through my hunger for meaning, my elevated heart-rate.

But when I had finished, Auden's stanzas simply glared at me. I was disappointed. The first part resembled a line-drawing in wax crayon. A red dog and a yellow bone. A picture to be Cello-taped diagonally across each corner, to the surface of a mother's fridge. Another section was a sponge painting, of white clouds against blue sky and a wobbly aeroplane. There were a few clunky rhymes in the middle, and then a black watercolour at the end; a child's clumsy attempt at a night sky, made with a paintbrush too large to navigate around the tiny hand drawn stars. I didn’t want this.

I was young, and I wanted fresh things, ripe things. I wanted my heart to burst like a peach, I wanted my complex sadness to unfurl itself and make sense. I wanted an understanding hand on my lower back. I wanted love, not loss, I wanted to grow, not regress, I wanted to see the burgundy corners of my soul reflected back at me, not a reminder of what my ten year old hands could create.

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Ten years later, he left me, left the world, and so did some of my memories. They say it’s the first stage of grief; denial. At first I could only recall seeing the therapist’s patent brogues. I remember thinking; ''his shoes are just so shiny ’’. Part of me thought he was born like that, a fully grown therapist, suited and buffed up with thick shoulders ironed into his blazer. And part of me hurt, thinking of him kneeling down on the kitchen floor in a flannel dressing gown, with those shoes placed upon a single sheet of newspaper, polishing them.

I had twenty sessions with the therapist. I told him how everything feels like a sign when you’re that desperate. A forget-me-knot reflects the sky and tells me I should go there, a dead bee in a matchbox looks so comfortable that I want to curl up beside it. A book that knows me best makes me hesitate with the embroidered bookmark, until I realise that I am too tired to read. Always too tired.

Then one day I came across Auden’s poem for the first time since Miss Holloway’s year 6 English class. But this time it was completely different. It was everything, knew everything inside me. It embarrassed me with its honestly, like an x-ray of my bowels. That poem was suddenly sadder and deeper and truer than my favourite blue-grey Rothko painting. I understood, now, why Miss Holloway’s eyes were so deep and sad. I understood why I stopped eating, sleeping, speaking to friends after that day. Because how dare the world do that, how dare it just carry on, so simply, without you in it.