'Could this be Love?' and The Brute Chorus

I can be lazy...sometimes waiting  for things to find me.  The spring and  of 2010, I could keep to no time. I was lost, stuck in a state of sleep waking. I was looking for my son, looking for answers to a  puzzle that wasn't quite ready to be solved. I remember losing my phone, forgetting where I was to see people, barely remembering my name. I was between worlds.

In June, we were going away on a trip, driving to the Czech Republic. I was finishing up laundry and making coffee at the same time. I turned and knocked the filter off the carafe and boiling water and coffee grounds sluiced down my hip and thigh. I squeaked, desperately to get my pajama bottoms and t-shirt off...they were already starting to stick and tug at the skin.  

The burns were't bad enough to need grafting (those worries would come 5 years later over someone else's body) but the blisters that came up over the next few hours were excruciating.  I fell asleep on the ferry and one burst and that was not good. The burn got infected and we spent three days of our week at the Canadian Medical Centre in Prague (which is actually in a lovely part of the city and truly, it was hardly a hardship, I mean...it's Prague).  S died on the Sunday after we arrived. I asked my then-husband 'Should we go back?'

When I got back to London, I was given an appointment to meet with a burn specialist, just to weigh out the damage.  'I don't think you'll scar but you were very, very lucky. Do you realise that?'

I couldn't hear him over the sound of a baby crying in the distance but I smiled and nodded. I thanked him, apologised for being such a klutz, for wasting his time.

I thought about what I would do if there were a scar. I wandered around Brick Lane with my friend R, flipped through records at Rough Trade until I found a 45 that had a catfish and reeds and it seemed to be everything I needed to see together. I bought the album and I kept in an a blue and green flowered box for 10 years until last summer when I played it for my dead son his first album: the Brute Chorus' 'Can This be Love?'

This year - on his Jahrzeit, I stood out in the full moon of a Suffolk night and played 'This is Love,' by Mary Chapin Carpenter. I wanted him to hear that like 'All that ever was and will be.' I wanted to know myself that I am coming through this last round of the fight, still standing though I'm bleeding from the shoulder. But I'm ready to move the front lines. I'm tired and putting my armour on every day has grown heavy.