Saudade by Ian C. Smith

Image | Samet Burak Daglioglu

Saudade 

I moved from here, only several miles but long ago. Walking back where I once lived, I feel I am returning from exile, wondering why this neglect for so long. Breathing the tangy old neighbourhood – wood smoke, breakfast cooking, piled-up leaves – I try calculating sequences of various events and people in the clandestine past. The riverbank where those who lived rough got drunk seems unchanged. Unlike this and other town landmarks, some past people leave ghostly gaps in my retrospective. Diaries would be a treasure, but even these can lie. Though I’ve loved reading famous examples, I was too slack to be a diligent diarist. Scenes swarm slant in my labyrinthine recollection. Our first date, both of us fourteen. A Sabbath, past hushed factories, backed by church bells, she talks and talks. A boy ill-equipped for love, I hold her hand, want to kiss her, know I should but delay this. We could walk for miles along streets I would later run, timing myself with a stopwatch after quitting smoking. I’ve quit a lot of things. In the flour mills’ towering shadows near the edge of town, we stop to kiss. My relief matches that when I summoned the nerve to plunge into the pool from the terrifying high board to save face.

In thrall passing houses on once-familiar streets, I strain to reel in what led to my long estrangement, but my medication increased, chronological memory lurks darkly ravelled deep in my mind’s chambers. Details waver, some previously believed facts clashing. Lost seasons exist like islands in climate change drowned in a rising sea of forgetfulness, yet weighing like nagging sorrow. Sorrow for mistakes made? Because I abandoned people? The town’s pool, long superseded by a heated facility, lies eerily quiet. Its still, black water would make a great lingering camera pan for a movie about regret.

That walk culminating in a kiss was the second time we met, the first being at my sister’s wedding. While young adult guests danced hotly, we adolescents talked unobserved in a marquee’s dark corner. Was kissing on our minds then in fairy light glimmer? I remember lipstick, her intaglio brooch, and name, though many other details have drifted off. That Sabbath walk also peters out into memory’s black hole. I’d love to know what we discussed but our words, like most, are forever truant. Do we simply love that which is gone because of our remorseless deterioration until reaching our vanishing points?

Passing the fine house where my jealous sister lives, lonely, like me, I feel as black as that pool’s water thinking of the bitter discord in our family that would prompt a playwright to begin fervidly typing. I want to be back here embroiled in life again, but young.  Leaving the antiphony that disturbed my complacency, I short-cut to my car through quiet back lanes behind shabbier houses in narrow streets I knew where newcomers spend time they might have forgotten one distant future day.  My gaze resting on a fence so rickety-faded it could date from my elusive boyhood, I feel skittled by loss, a qualm of half-realized echoes.  I want that fence imbued with its original hue, straight, strong again. I also feel compelled to drive back while I am still able to my sister’s immaculate garden, where I thought I glimpsed her.

© Ian C. Smith

 

Ian C. Smith

Ian C Smith’s work has been published in BBC Radio 4 Sounds,Cable Street,The Dalhousie Review,Griffith Review, Honest Ulsterman, Offcourse, Stand,&,Westerly. His seventh book is wonder sadness madness joy, Ginninderra (Port Adelaide).  He writes in the Gippsland Lakes area of Victoria, and on Flinders Island.

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