On Waiting For The Right Person
My mum was an astrologer and I spent my teens twisting my hands in my lap anxiously while she hunched over the ephemeris, tutting and shaking her head.
‘Will it be a long while?’ I asked her at age 15, gulping a little. When you are 15 the world seem so slow and life so long. Loving and finding and being held seems like it might take forever. I watched her face for clues, trusting her utterly. I didn’t know it but I had taken my heart out of my chest and placed it in her hands to do as she wished with.
‘Well, I think there are definitely a few windows’ — she called them windows, I imagined then like bars of sunlight striping over the land, whisking across to be jumped headlong into before they flitted away again — ‘there are a few windows, but the main time you’ll get married looks to be when you’re around 27 years old’
I slumped in my seat. The tick of the clock was loud. I wouldn’t cry.
‘No sooner than that?’ I ventured after a time. She hadn’t noticed my face and was still looking at the rows of numbers and figures, squiggles which denoted this planet, that month. It looked like a magical code that I would never unlock.
‘Not really’ she admitted, meeting my eyes finally with a rueful sigh. She patted my hand. ‘Never mind piglet, most relationships which you start at 15 don’t last anyway.’
I thought of the boy in the next house, and how he wouldn’t be mine, how it wouldn’t be alright. Twenty seven seemed a lifetime away.
I’m almost thirty five now. I am still not married and I have loved and lost to be sure, but never met a single person I would have married without hesitation, and with only love and gladness in my heart. Sometimes I dream of the daughter I will still have; her name is Rose, and in my dreams she twirls down to me from the sky on her umbilicus, which is glistening and blue grey, pulsing like a silky twisting rope. Her eyes are tight shut, she has so much hair — so much! — and pink cheeks. I love her with a simple uncomplicated of course.
Of course I can do this, of course I can love another child like my first. Of course I will have another child. And of course I will find someone to have this other child with. It all seems so simple, in my dreams.
I would like to go back to that forlorn 15 year old and take her face in my hands, cup it gently and whisper full of softness and love in her ear, so no-one else can hear: she is only doing it to hurt you. Do not give her your power. You will find your one, it may take longer than you think you can bear but you will bear it, it will be okay and you will find him.
I blink and look up, I find myself alone. How I can be so certain I don’t know, maybe my future self has already visited me, maybe she speaks those same words into my dreams, where my sleeping brain can receive them uncomplaining. Maybe these words that I whisper to my younger self are from her.
Maybe it will be alright.
