Online, Unholy Assembly, 6.50pm

Choosing something over nothing over nothing over something.

All day rain, now, dark. The change of clocks, confusing. The children slept late, I woke early. I’m sitting on my bed, the only clear surface in the house. Everything packed now into boxes, in three days we will move. So many boxes, so many things, so much life. Downstairs, the children are all on devices, causing a significant time lag to the already slow internet. My laptop, precariously balanced on an upturned plastic toy box, keeps wobbling. I steady it. On the screen four faces freeze. Unfreeze. Continue to talk.

Four women. All who understand faith, the cost it comes at. The price of leaving. Women who by turns observed Islamic, Judaic, Hindu and Christian (me, although was it Christian or was the excuse of Christianity used to make money) faiths, scattered globally, streaming live, across time zones. I have just told the same story I have told for the last three years, about my mother, about not having words to fix to her loss, about the lack of vernacular for grief like this and where telling this story here differs from telling it elsewhere is that, unlike most of the times I tell it, when I feel like a fish in a bowl, with people watching but unable really to understand, the other women nod. They know how it feels. They know what it’s like to discover your mother’s love was only ever conditional. They nod when I speak, I nod when they speak. I am so used to telling this story that even as I am telling it I feel nothing. Maybe they’re right about time and the things it does. I find now I cannot bring her into my mind’s eye even when I try. And I try. I am pathologically attached to trying. Some days. Other days, not. Days when packing. Days when working. Days when it rains all day. Days when I’m busy. Days when I’m with people I love. Dangerous days are the ones when there’s a break in the activity. When there are new places. When there are new things. Days say, when newly moved home and feeling untethered. Easy to feel severed when the past is a different life. Days when there should be a happy new home card, or an excited phone call, or at least an exchange of a new address. Days to come. On the screen someone wipes their eyes. Freeze. Unfreeze. Swallow. Asked for closing remarks. Unmute. Pray the children stay quiet. Not pray, exactly.

Eyes can’t focus. Don’t think. Don’t think of her eyes. Or her smile. Or the soft wool feel of her as you climbed on her knee. Don’t think of the food you can’t make now because to smell it, to swallow it, would incant her back. Don’t think of her hands running the fabric through the sewing machine as if this is not what you are always thinking of. Don’t think. Don’t let your voice crack. Don’t let your face move. Think of language, think of its logic, apply its logic to this situation as you apply its logic to everything else. Salvation comes in its own guise. Think of faith, you open your mouth and you say that faith is the assured expectation of things not yet beheld, see, you remember this well. You parrot this out the way you were taught. See, this is how well you can still tell the truth. Because there is a certain irrefutable logic, you think, to what you are about to say next, something you have thought but never said in all the interviews, articles or in the book and you hope you can articulate it because you are always best on paper, and not at your best like this, not in a room piled with your life packed away and bad lighting and bad sound and maybe you are frozen on someone else’s screen as you are saying this, as you are saying, and if faith is the assured expectation of something not yet beheld, then essentially you are being asked to believe in nothing. It is a type of delusion. And I would rather choose to believe in something than nothing. I would rather choose to believe in what is real than what is not yet real. And as I am saying it I am also thinking that if I apply the same logic, then my mother chose to believe in nothing over me and it is this that is almost unbelievable, to choose the spirit over flesh, blood, bone.

I am too much of this earth to choose anything other than flesh, blood, bone; faces nod, freeze, unfreeze, say goodbye; and then it is over. I close the laptop.