Tales of the Borderlands

You sit on my bookshelf even after all these years.
You are worn; your cover lined and cracked and your pages thinning and drying out like aged skin.
You were nothing but a cheap paperback even then but somehow you’ve aged gracefully despite it.
Of all the books from my childhood you were the one I returned to again and again: each time I dove down was a new experience coloured by my extra years and experience.
Even now I see you for what you were and are; a cracking good yarn by a young and inexperienced writer. No wonder you spoke to me when I got you at the age of ten.
You were a post-apocalyptic young adult novel started a good 40 years before the Hunger Games existed and long before that was recognised as a genre. You were conceived even before I was and the years and years it took for you to be published show how long it took for the world to catch up to you.
You had the rawest of young adult themes; difference, alienation and a fear of how people would react when they saw the real you. Somebody is out there, you said, one day you will find your people.
You were the book I first thought of when the time came for me to buy novels for my nieces and nephews years later. But what a glorious realisation I had then! You had sequels! I had never known.
I bought you for each of them in turn, oldest to youngest, as soon as they reached their first decade. And they loved you just as much as I had. And hated me for introducing you to them. Your sequels were still being written, the series unfinished.
“How dare you, Aunt,” they cried, “Why introduce us to this wonder if the story is not yet done!”
“Mea culpa,” I said, “mea culpa. I DID NOT KNOW.”
I didn’t like the sequels anyway. When I finally sat down to read them I found them forced and contrived; sequels for the sake of sequels. Like Highlander, I will just pretend there was only one.
Because that is what you are.
The only one.
The one I still sit down and read again. The one book on my shelf that has been read almost to death. Read even more times than my collection of Terry Pratchett novels. Loved even more than my copy of The Name of the Rose.
I pulled you off the bookshelf again today.
I think I might read you again.
Thank you, Obernewtyn.
For being with me all these years.

Love, February

Mum calls to tell me about her dream
She’s trapped in a cage and phones are ringing outside it. She cannot reach them to answer them but they keep ringing and ringing and there’s nothing she can do about them.
She sees her doctor outside the cage and she begs him to let her out to answer the phones.
He says he doesn’t have a key. Only she has the key. Only she can get herself out.
But she knows the truth. She doesn’t have the key. There is no key, no way out. She’s trapped in that cage, bars between her and the rest of the world for life.
There is nothing anybody can do about it.
I remember the night she first had the stroke.
We went to the hospital. She’d had her clot busting drugs and we crowded around her in the emergency room.
She was awake, alert, bright, grateful to be there. She thanked everyone for getting her help so quickly.
The slurring was gone; her face normal. She was normal. She seemed normal.
Now I realise we were watching her brain die. That clot, unbroken, unmoved, killing off her cells as we watched unknowing.
A black wave washing over her brain as we were talking to her.
Strokes are quick. The effects take longer. What would have been if we’d removed the clot then? If the drugs had worked? If targeted removal had been rolled out through the system? If she’d had her stroke one month later. Two months?
If. If. If.
No. That way lies madness.
Blame was the first thing on everybody’s minds. Guilt and blame. But guilt and blame achieve nothing. They’re emotional dead ends.
Mum went off Warfarin for her overseas trip. But Mum also had the memory of that trip, her dream trip, the one she’d wanted since she was a child.
Which is more important for a life?
The things is, this was all four years ago now. Four long, painful years.
An accident or an illness – however stressful, painful or exhausting – ends. It ends. Things revert. Things settle. Things change but they also change back.
When someone you love dies, a hole is blasted in your life but then that hole fills in. Space abhors a vacuum. The hole will still be there: the edges clear even after your repair. You can see it out of the corner of your eye, feel it as you walk over it. It’s just that now you won’t fall in.
Grief after death, to extend this metaphor, is like earthworks. Done right, your foundation is secure. You know that the work is done: you can see the cracks around it, feel the place where the hole was dug and then filled in. But one day, eventually, you’ll walk over it and realise that you’re no longer in danger of falling in.
Strokes are the opposite of death.
Strokes dig the hole and then ask you to pretend there is no hole. Strokes take somebody you love and know and replace them with somebody else.Those changes can be small, they can be fine, they can be subtle. Impulsiveness. Candour. A new struggle with irony or missing social cues.
Or those changes can be gross, they can be large, they can be stark. Social inappropriateness. Lack of empathy. Self-absorption. Crassness.
As humans we have a great capacity for rationalisation. But trying to grieve and to celebrate at the same time? Trying to be happy a loved one is alive while grieving for the person that isn’t there any more? That is a cognitive dissonance at which even the most nimble of us fail. Strokes ask us to dance on the hole as though it isn’t there.
It’s Christmas and Mum is crying in the bedroom because she has so many things to do for Christmas Day and nobody will let her do them. Anosognosia is a symptom associated with a right hemisphere stroke. It’s a condition where a person who suffers a certain disability is seeming unaware of it. To this day, Mum insists that she can walk, it’s just that Doctors or her nasty family won’t let her. Over the years, her Anosognosia has gotten better but there are still days like this when she’s upset and confused as to why we won’t “let” her do the things she wants to do.
It’s heartbreaking.
It’s exhausting. I’m exhausted.
I love you, Mum
I miss you, Mum
I’m glad you’re alive
I’m sorry you’re gone
Love, February

I stood overlooking Machu Picchu at the top of the world. I saw the fog rolled back and the past revealed. I watched the sunrise over Angkor Wat and the Taj Mahal and climbed the Eiffel Tower.
I saw the remnants of civilisation buried at Easter Island, was shuffled around the enigma of Stonehenge and kicked Hadrian’s Wall. I saw the pyramids and the Sphinx and rode a donkey while guarded by boys with scary guns.
I climbed to the Acropolis and the Parthenon and sat writing my journal at Delphi before wandering through the preserved cemetery of Pompeii and the restored city of Ephesus. I took a bus through the Balkans and stood on the beach at Split and the mountains overlooking Dubrovnik and wandered at the beauty in the heart of human chaos.
I ate breakfast soup for 20 baht at Kanchanaburi and scooped Tagine with sopping bread in the Sahara desert. I ate guinea pig in Peru and cake and cake and cake in Hungary and Vienna. I rode camels in India and elephants in Thailand and only later wondered if I should have. I camped with the Berbers and shopped at the night markets in Luang Prabang and sailed in the polluted waters of Halong Bay.
I did karaoke drinking cheap Thai whisky in a dive somewhere near Chang Rai and danced to Come On, Eileen at London’s Walkabout. I had a DJ in a strange bar in the south of Ireland insist on playing Downunder ten times when he found out where I was from and was forced to participate in a magic show on a ferry to Wales. Wibbly! Wobbly!
I did Hogmanay and drank hot chocolate In Bruges and ate wurst in the Christmas market in Munchen. Took a train through the majestic beauty of Switzerland and skied in Andorra.
I lived in a four-bedroom house with 10 South Africans, shared beds with strangers and even survived a night in a Greek youth hostel that was bug central. I stayed in a gorgeous room in the Intercontinental in Singapore and drank martinis in the exquisite cocktail bar with hiking boots on. I got upgraded to business class coming out of the Amazonian jungle and sat in the lounge covered in DEET and sunscreen with clothes (and a body) that hadn’t been washed in four days. I fell down a mountain in Borneo and had to walk 10km down the Headhunter’s Trail covered in bruises before I could get a soft bed.
I had food poisoning on an Egyptian train with a broken toilet and “Bali belly” in the Indian desert with only a hole in the ground and one roll of toilet paper.
I got marched off a train in Macedonia with a semi-automatic in my face and nearly didn’t make it through a mountainous Montenegrin checkpoint at midnight in the middle of winter, snowing.
I negotiated a hair cut in Kosovo and a shower in a pension in Morocco with sign language and somehow got both. I got lost in a medina and took the wrong tram in Bratislava and both times got shown kindness and consideration and random acts of generosity from total strangers.
I saw the sun set over Santorini, gazed at the beauty of Cappadocia and sailed through the geological and biological wonder that is the extraordinary Galapagos.
But most of all, I stood shivering on a ship to the end of the world. I saw the majestic wonder of the pristine seventh continent. I moved silently and respectfully through giant tabular icebergs and floated past seals and penguins surviving in the most remote parts of Earth.
And as I came back into Ushuaia I almost cried at the sheer beauty of everything.
This is love.
I love this world.
Love, February.