Acts of OmissionLast Tuesday she failed to finish the story she was writing, the day before she failed to finish the essay she had promised to submit. A week earlier she didn't turn up at an important meeting. Ten years ago she had failed to meet a deadline and it changed her life, though probably for the better. All her life she had been unable to get on with her mother, her father and all her aunts, and failed to see their point of view. Every day she forgets to water the plants, pay her bills, mend the tap, change the light bulb: it's a tight routine. Her days are full of writing lists, inviting acts that are never performed. Each day the list is transferred to a new one, and at the end of the month she tears the list up. Sometimes not-doing only undoes; sometimes not-doing scores over doing. Since the beginning of time she wastes it, because she is always asking herself what she has achieved. Frequently she counts the letters that she has written, the books that she has read, her publications. She finds her name on the internet. These counter indications suggest that she has produced work, though neither well nor often. Some people, she notices, thrive on not doing. Promotions and prizes are often given out to never-had-beens in the name of success. Honours are frequently conferred on those who flunked their examinations. Every day neglect piles higher until it's competing with the ceiling. The whiff of the unfinished permanently pollutes the air. It's enough to create havoc, suicide, recrimination. But instead, every day, at every moment, she toasts to the lack that fills her life, her acts of omission. Ten Fridays AgoTen Fridays ago was the day it happened, you'd been expecting it but that enlarged the shock. Suddenly Friday didn't seem a day and all the future Fridays couldn't find the end of weeks. So you fished for the Fridays that had gone, to catch them before they lost their watery skins. You needed to slide them once more through what was left of your hands. All the Fridays before that Friday you expected the worst to bite. But the calendar smiled and life became a series of bizarre reprieves. Sometimes it seemed as if time was an alphabet and you could turn it into any word. Sometimes it seemed as if words themselves could still fate's motile tongue. One Friday next year will be the day when you will be over it. You will speak out and you will be aware of a language other than yourself. There will be a Friday two or three years ahead that you will want to know about, and a poem which had to be written ten Fridays before which you will suddenly complete. And there will be other days, the non-Fridays, lining up to take their frail, unsteady, positions. But that Friday, the one ten Fridays ago, will never move. You will always see him boxed in and still. The longing to lift him out will retreat but it won't go to sleep. Supine, he will not respond to touch, though every other Friday will be juggled, tossed, renamed. |