Travel Shorts

My eyes scan amongst the reeds and scattered leaves. From this angle, if I strain my sockets, your reflection comes into my peripheral. A version of you in monochrome with projection of cine-film layered into my concentration. My heart skips a palpitation and I can’t help but wonder if you see me too.

Your return was like a movie. I’d been working on the soundtrack for months. Building up a collection of carefully selected chords and blending hand-picked, eclectic harmonies. Weather shot: the lighting was how I’d ordered it: low, broad clouds with deeply furrowed silver linings and smaller ominous shapes stretching as far as our lost horizons. Everything was in place for this dramatic opening scene. I wanted my world to perform to receive you. Perhaps it would be enough to persuade you to stay.

Very wide shot, cutting to wide shot: A unsought figure saunters on to the set, causing a surge of agitation. Things are getting out of my control. Like the long suffering words from a writer’s fingertips, the imposter is tortured into relocation, almost as a figure oozing from a quill. Sunlight filters a convincing spotlight on her dramatic exit as the orchestral opening to All is Full of Love begins echoing; the haunting harpsichord rising from the pit of a chasm.

Close Up: My face - an exaggerated mess of exaltation, exhaustion and excitement contorts in pain as, like a thief, my shifty eyes move side to side expecting to extract answers, exacting upon you; extra-diegetic in a thought bubble.

Your return was like a familiar movie. I’d played it in my head countless times from the music to the weather, and each cleverly orchestrated shot in between. Our faces twisted in misery until we saw each other and the pain of the last two years melted away. Like excited school children we chattered nervously over each other and flouted all the conventions of normal speech. Our film was 'gritty', unpretentious and emotional.

As it went, your return was like a movie: that passed me by. Another day bled into the next, and I’d listened to stories about 'your return' from people who'd seen it first. My arranged music faded to hoof and horn until eventually there was nothing.

I've been walking
new lines
to rewrite psychogeography.
Like the memories carved
in a child's
etch-a-sketch,
the new ones are discombobulated
by déjà vu.

Let's not pace in fissures
gathering salt for our wounds.

This week's collage assembled from tweets and experiences has the theme of transience; occupying space between rejection and replacement.

Museums are time machines
we step and wander in
transience questioning.
The hands hang in hunched
hooks of hasty hindrances.
Words expelled;
exhausted.

Lake is iced slush;
a pupitive space
not yet frozen over.
Blue bucket swirls in brackish bareness;
gathering debris and duplicity
of occupying two territories
and none at all.

Recalling topography of
forbidden location,
flamboyant flourishes
of graphology,
each scattered leaf.

Rejected from tree.

Two of my friends wrote a poignant song last week. They're both musicians I've respected for some time, but this new track did something different. Once I'd heard it I haven't been able to stop listening to it. It inspired me. In the one line 'It took silence to talk you round' I have started a WIP of a whole poem exploring the juxtaposition of my previous relationship. He was born into silence and believes in non-verbal communication. I was born into a thunderstorm ad have always fought to be heard. Words are my everything. Click to listen to silence

Here is the beginning of my Silence

It’s your silence that speaks to me,
Pragmatic necessity.
In all those unsaid words
Lie lessons you made me learn.

But your quiet can’t break me down.

You were inaudible when you were born;
Didn’t speak til you felt worn.
Didn’t need words to be in the room.

In your silence I glean bits,
Understand what you think fits.
In your silence I hear a sound.

It’s your words I never trusted
Artificial sounds
and their message.
It takes more than words
to make me hear.

Diegetic duplicity;
Your spirit lost but your soul free.
You entered earth in a thunderstorm
fought with noise since you were born -

It is silence that creates sound...

Ssons and Dóttirs

I have this disease that mimics love. I can recognise it in you. Synchronicity brought me here. Well I've certainly been in worse places. Holding my passport, tickets, mobile and a second hand copy of Diski's Skating to Antarctica, I shuffle my bag forward with my feet and secure my place one mini step ahead in the queue for flight FL105 to Reykjavík. Like Diski; I am seeking some sort of refuge in ice; clinical whiteness, isolation, clarity.

All day I've followed the trajectory of my 'luxury express' coach as it's wended its way along from Falmouth to Heathrow. Interesting use of the word 'Express'. Nine hours reminds me more of the chicken buses I travelled Guatemala in. The journey has provided time for reflection. First the familiar country roads of Cornwall littered with their plethora of memories and events from my twenty-nine years of living and sometimes just existing there. From Falmouth to Penryn we followed the river upstream passing the decaying form of Integrity the sunken Brixham trawler as she wallows in river mud. Something I did more than my fair share of when living aboard The Black Pig. Fingers up to the system: gathering water, collecting wood, shitting in a bucket; hardly the romantic dream, but a time in which I met many of the interesting characters I now call friends. I contemplated the sinking of my own integrity, silently wondering if it can ever be dragged up from the mud?

'While you are away/ my heart comes undone/ slowly unravels/ in a ball of yarn' sang Björk, which brings me round to remembering my mother's disappointed email from Portugal; 'Why Iceland?'. Well Björk is of course only a contributing factor, but why not Iceland? Northern lights, glaciers, geothermal spas and eternal night; sounds like exactly what I need right now. I have some preconceptions of this country largely gathered from my listening to Icelandic music; Sigur Rós, GusGus, FM Belfast, Emiliana Torrini, múm, Seabear and of course Björk make regular appearances on my playlist. I have arrived at the conclusion, through listening to them and having looked at other text, that the country moves at a slow pace; the landscape is dramatic, slow, empty, stark and dark, but with twinkles of light. Rather fitting for what I hope to experience.

The bus shuddered me awake upon reaching the Truro depot. I recalled my college years in the mid-nineties when we'd spend hours wandering about this city stoned. I was probably listening to Björk then. We gathered, among others here, a beautiful voluptuous woman who carries echoes of Nys in Miller's Quiet Days in Clichy. At St. Austell I watched the winter sun low in the sky and shrouded in cloud like the sun that stays late in the night in the Northern summer. Rows of pines point upwards framing the village of St. Blazey. Here I recall the Czech border and the endless security checks myself and my be-dreadlocked boyfriend had when inter railing from Amsterdam in 2001. My first proper failed love affair; we were good at playing house, but too young to negotiate our differences. I wondered what Chris would be doing right now? Still living the dream in New Zealand?

As the bus neared Heathrow I recognised the suburbia I lived in for six years before my parents split up and my mother moved us to Cornwall. The sprawling cityscape with its scattered reservoirs reminded me of trips back and forth to visit various relatives. Gasometers always make me chuckle as I recall my Dad telling me it was one of the first words I said as a child. First sentence; 'Daddy... Those sheep! They're moving'. Proclaimed on the way to Cornwall. I'd seemingly only seen pictures of still sheep prior to this revelation. During my acid years I'd developed this obsession with sheep moving when I came to the realisation that 'if we act like them, they'll think we're one of them' at a party on Exmoor. I've no idea how long Mel and I were crawling along on our hands and knees making sheep noises but have always wondered if a young child in the hot-air-balloon that passed overhead may have said 'Daddy... Those sheep look like people' or similar.

The Icelandair plane is spacious, efficient and boasts extensive in-flight entertainment as well as some Christmas goodies left for us by Stekkjastaur the first of the jólasveinarnir, or Icelandic Yuletide men. Icelandic folklore would have it that the children are not just visited by one jolly fat man at Christmas, but thirteen mischievous imps from the hills. Like the seven dwarfs, each has a name that discloses something about them, though rather than simply a personality trait, their names indicate their particular modus operandi. Stekkjastaur translates as sheepskin wearer, and he is the imp who harasses sheep trying to steal their coats. Each of the jólasveinarnir leave small gifts on the first night they visit if the children have been good. Otherwise they can expect potatoes left in their shoes! I am impressed with my hot chocolate and cinammon cookies and decide that I think I am going to like these yule lads.

I settle back, selecting Juno from the list of movies to watch. Excellent soundtrack and acid-tongued dialogue. I've seen it before; a quirky film about a teenager who gets pregnant and decides to give the baby up for adoption. I rub my stomach protectively and contemplate. The headrest displays advice on speaking Icelandic correctly. I usefully have 'elska is the verb 'to love' when addressing people, thus 'I love you' is Ég elska þú rather than Ég ást þú as is commonly thought.' Elska means to love. It's a pretty sounding name.

It is after midnight when we arrive at Keflavík airport amid some drizzle and nothing exciting to report in the sky. I'd had secret hopes to fly through a light show if the Aurora Borealis was playing ball. Sadly this is not to be. Nor is the land a blanket of white as I had hoped and actually I'm feeling a bit suffocated in my long coat, hat, scarf and gloves with sheepskin boots toasting my legs. I board the 'flybus' which is conveniently waiting for my flight and am slightly concerned to be moving at Iceberg pace throughout the “forty-minute” journey to my hotel. Something like two hours later I am deposited into the night with what could have been any city to my right. The ever present umlaut my only clue that we are perhaps not in Kansas anymore, in this darkness it is hard to make anything else out; except for the fact that the Icelanders love Christmas lights. Disappointed that I cannot see my reflection in the snow covered hills, but with Stevie's voice ringing in my head, 'well I've been afraid of changing, 'cause I've built my life around you...', I swing my rucksack onto my back and breathe in the cold sea air before checking-in to Hótel Cabin at Borgartúni.

I am given the key to room 520 – on the fifth floor – and take the lift to my sanctuary. The flight to Iceland only takes 3 hours, but what with the added journey from Cornwall and waiting around; I get to bed some 20 hours after getting up the previous morning. My twin room offers me two beds in which to sleep. One quickly becomes my wardrobe before I slide between the crisp white sheets of the other one and give a thought to Diski and her yearning for clinical purity. At last Iceland has delivered. I am surprised to find that despite it being mid-December I can sleep with the window open.

Around ten the next morning I am jerked awake by a low metallic grinding that wouldn't be out of place in a The Knife track. The Swedish dark electro duo are what started my obsession with Scandanavia and its rich music scene and so it seems rather apt that I should think of them on my first day in Reykjavík. 'I was looking for you/ When I'm glad I found me/ A special kind of personality'. I'm luckily in time for my free buffet breakfast and head downstairs to help myself to toast, coffee and cereal. Skyr is a kind of Icelandic natural yoghurt, which I add in mountainous peaks to my cereal and study some tourist information booklets I swiped from the reception desk.

At around 10.30 dawn is breaking as I walk along the bay towards the city. It is only as I am crossing the busy road from the hotel that I notice the large mountains in the background and see what a wonderful view I must have from room 520. There's snow in them there hills too and an icy wind blowing across the bay. It stings me into addressing this reality and my hands flutter across my tummy again as I pause to take a macro shot of the igneous rock with its tiny worlds inside it. Winter is everywhere on the twisted branches that grab at the sky, intercrossing each other with the same complexity as the bus map I tried to understand.

Nabokov says 'You can get nearer and nearer to reality; but you can never get near enough, because reality is an infinite succession of steps, levels of perception, false bottoms, and hence unquenchable, unattainable.' For this reason I try to avoid making plans when I travel, preferring to be carried where I'm carried and avoiding disappointment by searching for someone else's reality. That said I do want to visit the Blue Lagoon – one of Iceland's Geothermal Spas – and to go on a Northern Lights hunt, which I manage to book through Iceland Excursions; a sister company of the 'flybus' operators. I am travelling with a very limited budget and each of these trips costs 5-6000 kroner (about £25-30), which means I have very little left for anything else. So I spend this day getting a feel for Reykjavík; and taking quirky photos of trees and colourful houses. At 2pm I realise I am shivering almost permenantly when I walk and decide to stop for coffee in a bakery. I pay around £8 for a biscuit and a coffee and find myself marvelling at how people ever came to visit here before their economy crashed. “More coffee? Always more coffee.” Drawls the counter assistant gesturing towards the machine. I am relieved to discover I have paid for endless refills and stay a little longer allowing the warmth return to my bones.

The sun is sinking again as I get to Hallgrímskirkja, a modern church that resembles an organ to me, with its stepped sides reaching up to a pinnacle. It was designed by the architect Guðjón Samúelsson, who was inspired by the basalt columns of Iceland's geology. It provides many good photo opportunities inside and out – at 75m high it stands proudly over the city – and is the perfect place to watch the day wither into night at only 4pm. I begin my lonely walk back to Borgartúni; Reykjavík's centre of commerce. It is now dubbed Reykjavík's own Wall Street, which I hardly find surprising when I pass another busted neon sign and vacant office blocks surrounded by empty parking lots. There is a feel of desolation and starkness, even here in the city, which resonates with my mood.

Returning to room 520 I want to feel warm and this time get into the other bed. If I have to pay extra as a single occupant then I might as well get as much use out of the room as I can, right? I take the duvet from the unmade bed I slept in the previous night and snuggle up to watch some American cartoons. I have not had a TV in over five years and have come to associate it with hotel rooms. I am transported back to the town of Tenosique on the Mexico/Guatemala border where after a narrow escape from Cockroach Hotel I watched films on cable for the first time in the luxury of my air-conditioned room. The two scenes couldn't have been more different, and yet it strikes me how they inform one another. If landscape itself is text, then this is a form of intertextuality.

It's an early start the next morning in order to get to the Blue Lagoon. I want to see the sun rise over the volcanic landscape. I am the only passenger on the bus, although there are plenty of other vehicles on the road. Leaving Borgartúni and central Reykjavík we pass busy office blocks with glass fronts, calling to mind a Gursky exhibition I saw at the Modern Art Museum in Stockholm last year. Floors upon floors of people, each in their neat little box. The bottom floor with its gym; each individual running their own gauntlet. When birds look into houses, what impossible worlds they see. As we crawl across the lava fields dawn's not so much creeping in fresh and rosy fingered as rather seeping cooly round the edges; like the time my tent was flooded at Glastonbury. Mist rises across the lunar landscape, silhouettes emerge from the rocks and I congratulate myself on a good decision to get up early and experience this with a degree of solitude. The sight of warm steam hitting frost, revealing small islands from the milky waters, the crunch of frosty moss-covered lava underfoot and the vicissitudes in the colour of the sky combine to make this a magical morning and I've not yet got into the pool.



The water is a wonderful temperature and l feel privileged and relaxed to be one of the very few people at the spa so early. My belly feels weightless, and the water nourishing as I push my mental battle under the rug again and try to enjoy this treat. There are crates of silica mud positioned around the pool, so I treat my skin to a couple of full applications of this, and feel glowing for some time afterwards. Iceland has the biggest Geothermal system in the world and the water heats many homes as well as protecting the two main shopping streets in Reykjavík from ice. Protect their consumerism, keep people spending money; that's the Icelandic Government, I cynically think. After a couple of hours of luxuriating in the pool, sauna and steam room I get out and get dressed with the intention of walking down to nearby Grindavík to explore. It is absolutely freezing outside and the surrounding area is so beautiful now that the sun has properly come up and illuminated the land, I instead spend some time photographing the lava fields with their teletubby land hills and taking macro shots of ice crystals.

I am tired when I return to room 520 and crawl back into the alternate bed, with extra duvet again to watch more mindnumbing television. I pick up a few words of Icelandic by reading the translation, also noting that in Icelandic surnames are passed from the father to their child, including son or dóttir. Sóley Stefánsdóttir is Sóley, Stefán's daughter, Kjartan Bragi Bjarnason is Kjartan Bragi, Bjarn's son. Elskan means loved one or darling. Will I have enough love to be the only parent to this bunch of cells created under the wrong circumstances? I can't help but laugh at the irony in the fact that the man I love is named Edmondson, but this unborn child cruelly is not his son. Or dóttir.

That night I am booked for my Northern Lights tour. It largely depends on weather conditions and the tour won't operate unless the company feel there is a fair chance of seeing some activity. I wear all the clothes I have brought in my little rucksack and take a seat next to the window. I am later joined by a friendly Polish Jew en route from Boston to Germany for Christmas. She reminds me of Anja, Spiegelman's mother in Maus with her mild unassuming manner and delicate mousey features. We arrive into a forest in the middle of Iceland lined with firs. Icelanders seem to find their trees the source of much amusement. I'd read somewhere that the Christmas Tree outside the Town Hall was donated by Norway because the Icelandic ones were too small, and tonight 'Hussy' our tour guide cracked the joke 'If you ever find yourself lost in an Icelandic forest, just stand up and you'll be able to find your way out.' It was 11.30, it was very dark and the temperature was at least -5ºC and Hussy was urging us to be excited about the constellations. Don't get me wrong, Orion was looking stronger than ever and I could make out my little pisces kite above us, but I haven't paid £30 to freeze my ass off in a forest just to look at the stars. I grumble and sit back in the bus lamenting the GusGus and FM Belfast gig I turned down in favour of this tour.

The bus pulls into a different location for people to use the bathroom. I'm catatonic with cold and staring blankly ahead as a young couple shush their crying child by taking turns to walk the floor of the bus. Everyone is subdued with the disappointment of not having seen the Aurora Borealis and hostile eyes curse the parents. We are getting ready for the journey back into Reykjavík when an Australian voice pipes up “Is that it?”. How rude, the English are thinking. Hussy is not to blame if we can't see the lights, it's hardly as if the government can put a tax on them! “Over there... I mean is that it?” She points across to a green cloud. Everybody starts shouting to open the doors and turn off the lights and Hussy begins to get extremely excited. We all pile off the bus, and in our new, even more exposed, location shiver as we watch the sky do the same. The green cloud moves in ripples and undulates around the glittering stars; so crisp and beautiful in the night sky.

I was searching for answers in snow, in ice in solitude, but that night my decision came to me from those stars and I travelled back to England two days later with a heavy heart preparing to face the hardest decision of my life; alone. He takes his time like a Northern winter night. The darkest hour happens before it dawns. His eyes hold constellations, his heart a kaleidescope. Broken particles alone won't make pretty patterns.

We are intertextual.
Decisions I make have links to your pages.
Your brow and its furrows,
your ebb and my flow.

My narrative informs yours
and even if never we speak again
we're reacting to our intertextuality.

Your landscape of ice
laden lava fields are woven
by my fire that seared under
over
through
and still bubbles
underneath. The
flaws, he says,
provide context
for the bits you like.

So each cherry has a stone.

I had to break off a very new relationship recently. Considering what an abortion I have made of situations such as this in the past I approached the situation with logic. I did the honourable thing for one of the first times in my life; finished it early because it just wasn’t going to work. Watching the lines in his face crease up and hide his pain was hard, but won’t leave months of scarring and sleepless nights for me. He held his pain pretty well, and accepted my offer of dinner, which we ate in stilted silence. Why discuss feelings when they can be turned into facial topography? Who needs words when how we feel can be conveyed by passive aggressive slamming and avoidance of eye contact?

It occurred to me that at the end of a relationship the thing we mourn the most is the lost future; something which never really existed. It was constructed from words (those duplicitous bastards), hopes, and dreams. It was never tangible, and yet leaves a void that causes a physical pain. In short relationships these futures are almost exclusively made solely by the dumpee. The delusion of how well things are going informs their future.

In longer relationships the pain’s harder to bear as the lost future was shared in some way. The foundations were the shared hopes and dreams. The cement is the words spoken. Sometimes whispered, sometimes shouted, but always shared; even conflated. And the bricks were the shared experiences that began to mount up and make the future seem more real. For me, in the last year, the bricks have deconstructed the false future as they’ve fallen on my head; teaching me lessons as they tumble.
And some of the lessons I have learnt have been from mistakes I have made more than once. Hell, some of them I’ve made for 30 years, but finishing something that just wasn’t going to work in a mature way is the product of having learnt one of these lessons. The rest of my life is something of a derelict building site. There are days when excavations are revealing and days when the wind whistles through everything, whipping up a flurry of autumnal leaves which pirouette, curtsy and settle again around me; obscuring my way.

Sometimes we have to get lost to find ourselves.

I have a pain in my fingers. My skin is mottled under the crush of my cheap heavy wool knit cardigan. My thumb throbs from being temporarily squished under my anxious pressing. My joints are stiff and my eyes are wet. This evening I've been looking after my family; my sister and her girls. And I thank my uselessness at relationships, my fuck-ups and my pain for equipping me with the skills I need to offer her insight. I make mistakes so you don't have to...

She is falling apart. Her eyes are red and hollow, her throat crackling like the fire we used to polish brass beside when Mum was hysterical over a break-up with some unsuitable stepfather type. The children draw pictures of hearts ripped in two. They shouldn’t understand this pain at such a young age. Only... Well, only it prepares them for the world, right? They’ll know that nothing works out how you want it to. People leave and there’s nothing you can do about it. There’s no point in trusting people when people only let you down.

We were brought up believing this: Men will leave you. They will let you down. And we saw example after example of unsuitable characters making their grand exit. Leaving our mother depressed and in tears. We all sat by the fire and wrote poems of loss in an attempt to win affection from our broken mother. In her attempt to win them back with words: ‘Without you the stars are black’, ‘Without you dawn won’t rise’, ‘Without you I’m nothing.’

We became well versed at self-fulfilling prophecies because if the affirmation ‘they will leave you’ is repeated enough, it becomes the only way of life. A fissure so deeply carved into our own landscape that nothing can smooth it over.

So when someone comes and tries to love you wholly, see you for who you are and still stick around, the prophecy isn’t working. The fissure is hidden under a deep and complex ocean. And we panic. Everything we have ever known is beginning to come undone. We must stop this madness. So we push, and push them away until they must leave. They’d be stupid to stay. After all now we are breaking their heart. We have to; for their own protection. When they leave, the circle is complete. ‘They will leave you’ has become ‘they have left’ like it did so many times before and the only equilibrium we know is restored.

My only advice, then, is to try and break the cycle...

A new chapter has started in my life and I have Billie-cat back. My sister sent me this link about women and their cats. I've had a deep obsession with my pets since I was a kid. It was borderline sinsister how I would hug them so tight, and lock them in cupboards for fear they'd leave me...

I incurred a square shaped scar on my right knee in an attempt to deter Gizmo's escape when I was 6 years old. He was agile enough to miss the smouldering hob ring as he bounded for the window in a bid for freedom. I, fixated on his escape route, managed to overlook it until my knee began searing with white heat and resembled an over-toasted marshmallow.

I still bear the scars now at 30; perhaps rightly so.

I know that if you love something you're supposed to set it free, but what if it loses its way?

You forget
to remember
the quickening,
stiffening,
sickening
palpitations
and respirations
as you inhale
a memory.
Your cheeks burn
in anticipation
of the bobbing
head of the
coo cooing
at the pavement;
the margins between
you
and those before you
growing ever thin.
Thoughtful sidestep
avoiding the collide
of wing and face.
Her hair is moving
poetry. Like love
it won't be still.
It can't be tamed
and will never
behave.
It'll spit out on the tongues
of waves
and lift up into the
chorales of winds.
Unfettered
and alive.

I wrote love on my arms
to honour my feelings.
There were nights
I awoke
to traces on
my pillow
and creases on my
cheek that
mimic the
clefts tearing
the ocean bed.
Love spiralled through
the choir's song
echoing the
patterns dawn's rosy
fingers traced
creeping across the sky.
And scratching at my voice box
as it raked over my skin.

I felt love in my bones
on quiet days when I looked
at the river.
You could pick over
them like a carcass;
each one you
felt holding a story.
The clavicle he bit;
searing a bruise I'd not forget.
The clouds of weed smoke
danced tendrils in my olfactory hallucinations
and still conjure his broken eyes.

I slew love into my skin
The scratch of razor blades
atop the ulna
spoke of the one
who taught me the most
and cut me deepest.
He smelled of his mother's laundry
and grapefruit;
his fingers
tapped out rhythms as
he practised music
and shaped my future.

I gouged love in my eyes
trying to veil away my pain.
The scars of dirty needles
and a youth so misspent I can't even play pool.
The cigarettes he ground into my cheekbone
just below my eye socket.
His vitriolic words burnt a small hole in my heart
and left behind the scent of ash and blackened spoons.
He gave me stolen gold and blood stained sheets
but taught me forgiveness.

I smuggled love into prison.
Tasted salty blood in the back of my throat
with broken incisors and
cracked ribs. When I smell washing up liquid
and talcum powder it's him I see.
Scrubbing my skin red raw
and trying to turn his white.

I never wanted that trade.

I toured love around Europe.
We slept on railway platforms
and bathed in heavy rain.
I shattered my calcaneus
and he carried me;
never complaining
about his metallic navicular.
He learnt to dance with fire and
smelled of petrol and sawdust.
Our shattered ankles echoed
our fragile hearts and he taught me loss.

I etched love in the sand;
our angry walks on windy
days when the sea spelt out words
and in pathetic fallacy; raged against the rocks.
She has an infectious smile
and every word she says
is crafted like poetry
in the gentlest voice.

I tore love away from my soul.
He massaged my sore jaw bone
and watched me cry in pain
whilst he masked his under our blanket of lies.
My heart still fissured from
his emancipation
I tried to learn
life
and adulthood
and bled from my womb
whilst I wept into his tears
of Elska not being our baby,
but the cells of cracked hedonism
and delusion. I broke his heart
and he still fixed my broken body.
I saw a bright horizon,
I saw a northern sky
in the darkest depth of winter
in a country laden with larva and ice.
I missed the shattered tibula
and massaging his skull.
He filled me up with chorales
and facts about the universe.
I hoped that he'd forgive me
and I hoped he'd want to
try. But his love
meant more to me than
summertime
and I knew that for all the bones I've injured
I'd break a thousand more
to save his heart.
His face is etched in concrete
in chalky crumbling shores
in every time I pass the rhyme
of tides. In the whistle of the wind.
In every worn pebble of Serpentine
the scent of gorse on the cliff,
The chasing of dragonflies,
and all the words I write.

I stole love from myself
in the hope that he'd find his.

I committed my love to the sea
when the water was my shibboleth.
I chose to hide behind words
and he knew which ones would bruise me.
Sometimes on quiet days
by the river
I smell the woodsmoke
and diesel
and find those words in the mud.
Resting in the suture
where Integrity used to be.

I have this disease that mimics love. I can recognise it in you. Synchronicity, I reflect, is what's landed me in this situation; every situation that counts towards my being here. Here? Well I've certainly been in worse places. Holding my passport, tickets, mobile and a second hand copy of Diski's Skating to Antarctica, I shuffle my bag forward with my feet and secure my place one mini step ahead in the queue for flight FL105 to Reykjavík. Like Diski I am seeking some sort of refuge in ice; clinical whiteness, isolation, clarity.

All day I've followed the trajectory of my 'luxury express' coach as it's wended its way along from Falmouth to Heathrow. Interesting use of the word 'Express'. Nine hours reminds me more of the chicken buses I travelled Guatemala in. The journey has provided time for reflection. First the familiar country roads of Cornwall littered with their plethora of memories and events from my twenty-nine years of living and sometimes just existing there. From Falmouth to Penryn we followed the river upstream passing the decaying form of Integrity the sunken Brixham trawler as she wallows in river mud. Something I did more than my fair share of when living aboard The Black Pig. Fingers up to the system – gathering water, collecting wood, shitting in a bucket – hardly the romantic dream, but a time in which I met many of the interesting characters I now call friends. I contemplated the sinking of my own integrity, silently wondering if it can ever be dragged up from the mud?

'While you are away/ my heart comes undone/ slowly unravels/ in a ball of yarn' sang Björk, which brings me round to remembering my mother's disappointed email from Portugal; 'Why Iceland?'. Well Björk is of course only a contributing factor, but why not Iceland? Northern lights, glaciers, geothermal spas and eternal night; sounds like exactly what I need right now. I have some preconceptions of this country largely gathered from my listening to Icelandic music; Sigur Rós, GusGus, FM Belfast, Emiliana Torrini, múm, Seabear and of course Björk make regular appearances on my playlist. I have arrived at the conclusion, through listening to them and having looked at other text, that the country moves at a slow pace; the landscape is dramatic, slow, empty, stark and dark, but with twinkles of light. Rather fitting for what I hope to experience.

The bus shuddered me awake upon reaching the Truro depot. I recalled my college years in the mid-nineties when we'd spend hours wandering about this city stoned. I was probably listening to Björk then. We gathered, among others here, a beautiful voluptuous woman who carries echoes of Nys in Miller's Quiet Days in Clichy. At St. Austell I watched the winter sun low in the sky and shrouded in cloud like the sun that stays late in the night in the Northern summer. Rows of pines point upwards framing the village of St. Blazey. Here I recall the Czech border and the endless security checks myself and my be-dreadlocked boyfriend had when inter railing from Amsterdam in 2001. My first proper failed love affair; we were good at playing house, but too young to negotiate our differences. I wondered what Chris would be doing right now? Still living the dream in New Zealand?

As the bus neared Heathrow I recognised the suburbia I lived in for six years before my parents split up and my mother moved us to Cornwall. The sprawling cityscape with its scattered reservoirs reminded me of trips back and forth to visit various relatives. Gasometers always make me chuckle as I recall my Dad telling me it was one of the first words I said as a child. First sentence; 'Daddy... Those sheep! They're moving'. Proclaimed on the way to Cornwall. I'd seemingly only seen pictures of still sheep prior to this revelation. During my acid years I'd developed this obsession with sheep moving when I came to the realisation that 'if we act like them, they'll think we're one of them' at a party on Exmoor. I've no idea how long Mel and I were crawling along on our hands and knees making sheep noises but have always wondered if a young child in the hot-air-balloon that passed overhead may have said 'Daddy... Those sheep look like people' or similar.

The Icelandair plane is spacious, efficient and boasts extensive in-flight entertainment as well as some Christmas goodies left for us by Stekkjastaur the first of the jólasveinarnir, or Icelandic Yuletide men. Icelandic folklore would have it that the children are not just visited by one jolly fat man at Christmas, but thirteen mischievous imps from the hills. Like the seven dwarfs, each has a name that discloses something about them, though rather than simply a personality trait, their names indicate their particular modus operandi. Stekkjastaur translates as sheepskin wearer, and he is the imp who harasses sheep trying to steal their coats. Each of the jólasveinarnir leave small gifts on the first night they visit if the children have been good. Otherwise they can expect potatoes left in their shoes! I am impressed with my hot chocolate and cinammon cookies and decide that I think I am going to like these yule lads.

I settle back, selecting Juno from the list of movies to watch. Excellent soundtrack and acid-tongued dialogue. I've seen it before; a quirky film about a teenager who gets pregnant and decides to give the baby up for adoption. I rub my stomach protectively and contemplate. The headrest displays advice on speaking Icelandic correctly. I usefully have 'elska is the verb 'to love' when addressing people, thus 'I love you' is Ég elska þú rather than Ég ást þú as is commonly thought.' Elska means to love. It's a pretty sounding name.

It is after midnight when we arrive at Keflavík airport amid some drizzle and nothing exciting to report in the sky. I'd had secret hopes to fly through a light show if the Aurora Borealis was playing ball. Sadly this is not to be. Nor is the land a blanket of white as I had hoped and actually I'm feeling a bit suffocated in my long coat, hat, scarf and gloves with sheepskin boots toasting my legs. I board the 'flybus' which is conveniently waiting for my flight and am slightly concerned to be moving at Iceberg pace throughout the “forty-minute” journey to my hotel. Something like two hours later I am deposited into the night with what could have been any city to my right. The ever present umlaut my only clue that we are perhaps not in Kansas anymore, in this darkness it is hard to make anything else out; except for the fact that the Icelanders love Christmas lights. Disappointed that I cannot see my reflection in the snow covered hills, but with Stevie's voice ringing in my head, 'well I've been afraid of changing, 'cause I've built my life around you...', I swing my rucksack onto my back and breathe in the cold sea air before checking-in to Hótel Cabin at Borgartúni.

I am given the key to room 520 – on the fifth floor – and take the lift to my sanctuary. The flight to Iceland only takes 3 hours, but what with the added journey from Cornwall and waiting around; I get to bed some 20 hours after getting up the previous morning. My twin room offers me two beds in which to sleep. One quickly becomes my wardrobe before I slide between the crisp white sheets of the other one and give a thought to Diski and her yearning for clinical purity. At last Iceland has delivered. I am surprised to find that despite it being mid-December I can sleep with the window open.

Around ten the next morning I am jerked awake by a low metallic grinding that wouldn't be out of place in a The Knife track. The Swedish dark electro duo are what started my obsession with Scandanavia and its rich music scene and so it seems rather apt that I should think of them on my first day in Reykjavík. 'I was looking for you/ When I'm glad I found me/ A special kind of personality'. I'm luckily in time for my free buffet breakfast and head downstairs to help myself to toast, coffee and cereal. Skyr is a kind of Icelandic natural yoghurt, which I add in mountainous peaks to my cereal and study some tourist information booklets I swiped from the reception desk.

At around 10.30 dawn is breaking as I walk along the bay towards the city. It is only as I am crossing the busy road from the hotel that I notice the large mountains in the background and see what a wonderful view I must have from room 520. There's snow in them there hills too and an icy wind blowing across the bay. It stings me into addressing this reality and my hands flutter across my tummy again as I pause to take a macro shot of the igneous rock with its tiny worlds inside it. Winter is everywhere on the twisted branches that grab at the sky, intercrossing each other with the same complexity as the bus map I tried to understand.

Nabokov says 'You can get nearer and nearer to reality; but you can never get near enough, because reality is an infinite succession of steps, levels of perception, false bottoms, and hence unquenchable, unattainable.' 1 For this reason I try to avoid making plans when I travel, preferring to be carried where I'm carried and avoiding disappointment by searching for someone else's reality. That said I do want to visit the Blue Lagoon – one of Iceland's Geothermal Spas – and to go on a Northern Lights hunt, which I manage to book through Iceland Excursions; a sister company of the 'flybus' operators. I am travelling with a very limited budget and each of these trips costs 5-6000 kroner (about £25-30), which means I have very little left for anything else. So I spend this day getting a feel for Reykjavík; and taking quirky photos of trees and colourful houses. At 2pm I realise I am shivering almost permenantly when I walk and decide to stop for coffee in a bakery. I pay around £8 for a biscuit and a coffee and find myself marvelling at how people ever came to visit here before their economy crashed. “More coffee? Always more coffee.” Drawls the counter assistant gesturing towards the machine. I am relieved to discover I have paid for endless refills and stay a little longer allowing the warmth return to my bones.

The sun is sinking again as I get to Hallgrímskirkja, a modern church that resembles an organ to me, with its stepped sides reaching up to a pinnacle. It was designed by the architect Guðjón Samúelsson, who was inspired by the basalt columns of Iceland's geology. It provides many good photo opportunities inside and out – at 75m high it stands proudly over the city – and is the perfect place to watch the day wither into night at only 4pm. I begin my lonely walk back to Borgartúni; Reykjavík's centre of commerce. It is now dubbed Reykjavík's own Wall Street, which I hardly find surprising when I pass another busted neon sign and vacant office blocks surrounded by empty parking lots. There is a feel of desolation and starkness, even here in the city, which resonates with my mood.

Returning to room 520 I want to feel warm and this time get into the other bed. If I have to pay extra as a single occupant then I might as well get as much use out of the room as I can, right? I take the duvet from the unmade bed I slept in the previous night and snuggle up to watch some American cartoons. I have not had a TV in over five years and have come to associate it with hotel rooms. I am transported back to the town of Tenosique on the Mexico/Guatemala border where after a narrow escape from Cockroach Hotel I watched films on cable for the first time in the luxury of my air-conditioned room. The two scenes couldn't have been more different, and yet it strikes me how they inform one another. If landscape itself is text, then this is a form of intertextuality.

It's an early start the next morning in order to get to the Blue Lagoon. I want to see the sun rise over the volcanic landscape. I am the only passenger on the bus, although there are plenty of other vehicles on the road. Leaving Borgartúni and central Reykjavík we pass busy office blocks with glass fronts, calling to mind a Gursky exhibition I saw at the Modern Art Museum in Stockholm last year. Floors upon floors of people, each in their neat little box. The bottom floor with its gym; each individual running their own gauntlet. When birds look into houses, what impossible worlds they see. 2 As we crawl across the lava fields dawn's not so much creeping in fresh and rosy fingered as rather seeping cooly round the edges; like the time my tent was flooded at Glastonbury. Mist rises across the lunar landscape, silhouettes emerge from the rocks and I congratulate myself on a good decision to get up early and experience this with a degree of solitude. The sight of warm steam hitting frost, revealing small islands from the milky waters, the crunch of frosty moss-covered lava underfoot and the vicissitudes in the colour of the sky combine to make this a magical morning and I've not yet got into the pool.

The water is a wonderful temperature and l feel privileged and relaxed to be one of the very few people at the spa so early. My belly feels weightless, and the water nourishing as I push my mental battle under the rug again and try to enjoy this treat. There are crates of silica mud positioned around the pool, so I treat my skin to a couple of full applications of this, and feel glowing for some time afterwards. Iceland has the biggest Geothermal system in the world and the water heats many homes as well as protecting the two main shopping streets in Reykjavík from ice. Protect their consumerism, keep people spending money; that's the Icelandic Government, I cynically think. After a couple of hours of luxuriating in the pool, sauna and steam room I get out and get dressed with the intention of walking down to nearby Grindavík to explore. It is absolutely freezing outside and the surrounding area is so beautiful now that the sun has properly come up and illuminated the land, I instead spend some time photographing the lava fields with their teletubby land hills and taking macro shots of ice crystals.

I am tired when I return to room 520 and crawl back into the alternate bed, with extra duvet again to watch more mindnumbing television. I pick up a few words of Icelandic by reading the translation, also noting that in Icelandic surnames are passed from the father to their child, including son or dóttir. Sóley Stefánsdóttir is Sóley, Stefán's daughter, Kjartan Bragi Bjarnason is Kjartan Bragi, Bjarn's son. Elskan means loved one or darling. Will I have enough love to be the only parent to this bunch of cells created under the wrong circumstances? I can't help but laugh at the irony in the fact that the man I love is named Edmondson, but this unborn child cruelly is not his son. Or dóttir.

That night I am booked for my Northern Lights tour. It largely depends on weather conditions and the tour won't operate unless the company feel there is a fair chance of seeing some activity. I wear all the clothes I have brought in my little rucksack and take a seat next to the window. I am later joined by a friendly Polish Jew en route from Boston to Germany for Christmas. She reminds me of Anja, Spiegelman's mother in Maus with her mild unassuming manner and delicate mousey features. We arrive into a forest in the middle of Iceland lined with firs. Icelanders seem to find their trees the source of much amusement. I'd read somewhere that the Christmas Tree outside the Town Hall was donated by Norway because the Icelandic ones were too small, and tonight 'Hussy' our tour guide cracked the joke 'If you ever find yourself lost in an Icelandic forest, just stand up and you'll be able to find your way out.' It was 11.30, it was very dark and the temperature was at least -5ºC and Hussy was urging us to be excited about the constellations. Don't get me wrong, Orion was looking stronger than ever and I could make out my little pisces kite above us, but I haven't paid £30 to freeze my ass off in a forest just to look at the stars. I grumble and sit back in the bus lamenting the GusGus and FM Belfast gig I turned down in favour of this tour.

The bus pulls into a different location for people to use the bathroom. I'm catatonic with cold and staring blankly ahead as a young couple shush their crying child by taking turns to walk the floor of the bus. Everyone is subdued with the disappointment of not having seen the Aurora Borealis and hostile eyes curse the parents. We are getting ready for the journey back into Reykjavík when an Australian voice pipes up “Is that it?”. How rude, the English are thinking. Hussy is not to blame if we can't see the lights, it's hardly as if the government can put a tax on them! “Over there... I mean is that it?” She points across to a green cloud. Everybody starts shouting to open the doors and turn off the lights and Hussy begins to get extremely excited. We all pile off the bus, and in our new, even more exposed, location shiver as we watch the sky do the same. The green cloud moves in ripples and undulates around the glittering stars; so crisp and beautiful in the night sky.

I was searching for answers in snow, in ice in solitude, but that night my decision came to me from those stars and I travelled back to England two days later with a heavy heart preparing to face the hardest decision of my life; alone. He takes his time like a Northern winter night. The darkest hour happens before it dawns. His eyes hold constellations, his heart a kaleidescope. Broken particles alone won't make pretty patterns.

Sibilant sea coughed our stories into the chasm.
Its echoes carved out a new path.
Fissures expose the truth about us;
we are archipelago
in need of an isthmus.

His floating workshop; a place he remembers
times past.
The wind up bird
her mechanical wings
laden with words. She'll knock you
for six
she'll blow you away.
Quietly squeal queer bird,
her mechanical wings
clipped
and words pirouette
like feathers
or hard rain.
Chained to a tether she only
makes whirring circles
and bounces like
the sound
of a moth inside
a lampshade.
His bird was flown some
time ago.
Left behind no
scattered seeds.

Hiding in shaded gardens where
she tends
to her rich fantasies
and in grand houses
where she hides things under carpets
and worries about dust.

Her dissembled sentences rolling too quickly from the lips,
His arms; the archipelago of oil floating on skin.
Her fingers tacking side to side across his back;
His shoulders tensing, rippling under her touches.
Her consonants crashing against vowels, fricatives spraying
His face with its crags and boulders.

“I can't have children.”

Rowing out to an island,
clinging to a rock.
Words bend truth like
waves bend wood
splinters
into a thousand pieces
each with a story to tell.
A ghost ship,
a kraken.
a thunderstorm,
a night of a thousand fish.
The night she slipped away from him
and his lonely hours by the radio

Woke up; found my love gone.
Left in its place words
falling from the seams.
Many's the night I've walked this
land. I was trying to remember.
It felt like my mind
was being cast
out
to sea. Tiny
bits of brain nibbled
by phosphorescence. Are they
illuminating
the darkness or
is it
permeating
them?
Like the sunken
shell of integrity I
sit and wait.
I rise
with the tide.
This means I have to fall.
There were stains on the carpet where
He'd dropped his consonants.
All achin', shakin' and breakin'.
His hollow cheeks gulping down
apologies. Tired lies
and vinegar flies
carve mermaids on his eyes,
which look to the sky.
He said he knew science;
told me
'how you get pairs
of stars that pull
into orbit
forever unable to touch
or part' *
like how grains of sand
won't just dissolve into water.
Some words I collect
I have stars in my heart.

This is some of the work I am considering putting to music when I do my performance piece. I'm hoping to collaborate with Kath A Bit OF Cello Williams.
* From 'Years Later' by Lavinia Greenlaw

It's cold out there...

L = Loss

Your face screwed up when I told you I had
our baby.
You said you would run
away.
And I thought: so much for LOVE.