Good Friday Agreement

a new sort of thing

When I am born on Good Friday, my father crosses out the good, replacing it instead with excellent.

When I am born on Good Friday, my mother is not worried by either my blueness, limpness or the fact of the doctors rushing me from the room. Better that way, she said and says, you were meant to be a boy.

When I am born on Good Friday, my father is with his other other wife, his other wife pregnant with my brother although my father’s reason for not being at my birth is simply that he has chicken pox. Some people, they have a workable excuse for everything.

When I am born on Good Friday, half-Jewish, half-Christian, half Scottish, half South-African, unable to commit fully to anything even then, split instead into my divisible components, it is little surprise I later develop an unhealthy obsession with Jacques Derrida. Still, safer a dead Frenchman than the alternative.

When I am born on Good Friday, refusing to breathe my mother’s used up air, in the shadow of Jesus’s death, with my father elsewhere, is it any wonder the holy trinity of abstinence, absence and obeisance has stalked me ever since?

You always wanted the world, my mother said and says and will always be saying.

Lately I’ve been trying to work out how to write impressions more than story. In the rest of my work I’m very attached to story and structure and the maths of it, but at times this runs the risk of eating things at the sentence level, and I don’t want to lose my ability to write a beautiful sentence (if it’s ever one I possessed, maybe instead for the sake of accuracy I should say I’m trying to learn how to write one), and also to try and be impressionistic which is something I’ve been thinking about for a long time and especially since seeing Rachel Cusk talk about it in the summer. Basically a long way of saying I’ve been messing around writing different things. Probably procrastination. Here’s one. Also, it’s been a hot minute since I’ve written about god, my mother, my father, but we’re all trinities each of us. May as well suck it up.