'Cross the Wide Missouri

It is the sound of farewell. A farewell that started weeks ago, before disarray of clothing and the first reckoning of this tune. It is the sound of the farewell that started before hello even cracked its first syllable.

The moon, on its way to being full, stands behind her as she looks out from this silent place. The creaks and hums behind the melody now playing trick her ears into thinking she is not alone, and she turns her eyes, her head, her body from the endless sea and the distant mountains, blue beneath the mist and end of daylight. She turns to acknowledge the car that must be passing behind her, and sees nothing but the moon.

The moon confirms. This is farewell. Goodbye, she says out loud. Goodbye; naming names; speaking the twp syllables followed by two; the syllables that draw the line and end this.

She was hungry for something, and what she tasted had the flavour of it; but the first drink, or bite, or smell had told her, long ago: this was only synthesised. Only ever the flavour of it.

She turns back to look at the sea from this bend in the road, in the slielnt evening, almost damp with coolness, now the sun has left the sky, leaving the moon free to hang behind her.

She walks on, down the hill. She has climbed it to this tune, has crested as the music also crested, has felt the swell of melody echoed in her breathing, her inspiration. She walks back down the hill to the same tune, put on repeat. The smiles of memory that accompanied her upward striding have been replaced by this farewell.

It tucks away, into corners: the realisation that this is it. Not even present. Not even told. This is her own farewell, a goodbye not for speaking to anyone but the moon and the evening and the sea. She has no plan. Just the notion of slipping back into anonymity. No message sent by telegraph, letter, phone or email. No deliberate acknowledgement or informing.

She passes a gate. It leads to the field that lies opposite the house; the field that she sees from her bedroom window every morning. The bullocks who low into the evening and early in the day stand now at the gate, looking over it. They have heard her coming down the hill. They want to know the outcome. They are inscrutably black, their eyes seem full of the depths of wisdom, unreadable, but she knows (she understands) that their eyes only reveal their lack of intellect. She stands at the gate and woman and bullocks regard each other for a few moments. This is farewell. They know it, she knows it. He isn’t here to find out.

He will have had his own farewell. She thinks she might have been present. Perhaps not sharing space, breathing air together. But present nonetheless. It was the sharing of space, and the breathing of air, that hastened this farewell. Everything in between just added to it. The sideways looking at first meeting. Her untutored, “It had to be.”

Everything in between was process.

She shrugs off the memories. They are of no consequence. They are pointless. The process was the only thing that would bear romance. The memory of it serves only to throw this goodbye into relief and make it real.

She has reached the house again, this woman full of farewell, and she does not want to go in. Not with all this goodbye still hanging around her. There is no desire in her to acknowledge that life goes on, has all along been going on, without pause, without distraction, without stopping to see that she has finally tasted something with the flavour of what she hungers for.

Recognition and desire. For however short it was, for however much a lie or pretence it was (on either side, on either part), she has known what it is to be recognised. She has felt what it is to desire.

That moment’s pause in his heartbeat of existence. He has said his goodbye already, she heard it, not in words, not directly. But it has been said, made known. Now, finally, she has come to hers.

There will be no more, and everything that came with is might also fade, but expression and self-narration are expendable. Their flow is bound by limits. Goodbye is the dead end, full stop, dam.

She stands and listens a final time to this tune in this context. She stands across the line drawn that will not accept return; the underscore, the final statement and dawning truth. The moon is gone, lost behind the hill, looking down on someone else.

The moon is gone, and so is she.

© J R Hargreaves May 2006