August and Ghosts

or, what a horrible month.

I do not like August although I want to like August. I love summer, but give me May, June, July; give me blue nights, give me evenings sat up until dawn, give me the impossibility of sleep before the August light begins to turn; give me life over decline, give me beginnings over endings.

August comes and brings with it ghosts on the calendar; elders staring at me as I tell them everything they demand me to, my mother abandoning me, my marriage imploding; every year since, I have tried to overwrite these memories with festivals, parties, children’s holidays, but the past is a pernicious thing, without warning it arrives.

This August, I decided to turn and face the past, it was cropping up in various, unwanted, unhelpful ways and it is exhausting to always have to escape it; better to stare it down. I asked for help, and will soon start trauma rehab therapy - something I don’t want to do, but think I have to do. At the same time, I had a pain I’d been trying to ignore, but in the spirit of facing things I didn’t want to, I called the doctor about it, and they called back immediately about it and less than ten days later I found myself in a hospital room, needle punching my skin, a mass on the screen. I like bodies. I am not phased by blood or people in pain, I find the idea that so much is happening inside us all the time and we don’t even have to think about it for it to function, fascinating. I lay and looked at this tiny lump at the top of my right breast, something I’d not felt or known about until ten minutes before, and there it was and there she was, with a needle extracting parts of it and I’d done nothing to grow it; it was just there. They asked all the questions; family history (mother/second cousin), live births (four), years spent breast feeding (nine), and they took notes, and then I pulled on my velvet jumpsuit, caught a train into town, ate afternoon tea with friends, ran into a bar on the way home to see other friends quickly to feel the texture of other people; the absurdity of life and its continuance in sharp focus, and then, I waited.

I didn’t want to second guess. It was small, they said; it was unlikely, they said, and then they said, I’d surprised them already and it was this, the remarking on how surprising I was, that made me worried. I have had a surprising life. I have been called surprising often. I was not worried about being ill although I do not want to be ill. For nearly two years I was told every couple of weeks at best I was going to die. I was 16 at the time. I didn’t. Maybe this has made me laissez-faire, or maybe I’m old enough now to realise it’ll happen, it’s not like there’s any other way out. And yet, against logic, the idea of something happening, now, when life is finally, good, seemed impossible to entertain.

This morning, 22 years after the day of my first marriage, when my mother gave me away to a man who loved me for what I believed, and so didn’t love me at all, the phone rings. The doctor says, benign and I take a moment to remember which way round it goes, is benign good? It has a lazy ring to it, as if it’s something sitting around doing very little, yes! I want it to be doing little, BENIGN. This is good, I remember its antonym, malignant, yes, malignant would be bad. I am never sure how time can slow at moments like these; how it is possible for so many thoughts to be contained in such a short space of time. Last week, I took my son to the cinema, on the way a mother fell down the escalator, her young baby in her arms. It was awful to see. To hear. I still don’t know how it happened. It all happened in slow motion and as it was happening I was steering my son to the other escalator, telling him not to look in the same way my mother instructed me as we drove past traffic accidents, I was telling him the baby was fine at the same time as it was happening, only I couldn’t have been; time is only ever layers, and everything layers and layered as the doctor tells me this lump is nothing, is just something that has thought to grow in me, they will not need to operate, I do not need to do anything and so I go downstairs, on the first day of September, feel relief and guilt, somewhere, someone else does not get the good news, sometime, in the future, the news likely will not be good, but today the runs runs down the street, flinging itself so hard against the pavement it jumps back up again, I decide against going for a take away coffee, opt instead for deliveroo, outsourcing the inconvenience, and I hate how monstrous this makes me, how much my whole existence is predicated on someone else’s pain, but when my coffee arrives, and the cinnamon bun with it, I suck on the sugar, the dairy, the fat, and am satisfied as a baby would be and September is here and I have always liked September.