Blogging

Almost four years have passed since the last time I wrote a blog post.

It was July 2017.

Shortly after, I extinguished my little blog. It was called ‘Lantern Post.’

The other day, while combing through some old records, trying to gather strands of life gone by, I came upon a couple of Lantern’s mementoes. Amongst them, a photograph one reader had sent me and my last blog post. 

I have decided to reprint it here, in honour of those times, May 2012 to July 2017, while hopes were as high as frothy clouds sailing across summer skies and dreams as vibrant as a child’s smile. Thirteen months later, death knocked on my door and took all I ever had. My only child. 

Today, 946 days later, when I read the words I wrote in Lantern’s last post, I could not help but see the signs of foreboding. Too late. 

Five Years

About two months ago, in mid-May, WordPress sent me an automated note to congratulate me on becoming a blogger five years ago. 

I found my first blog post and read the date it was published – 20 May 2012. 

It was my first solitary winter in Wellington. 

I have written a few more posts since. 

Some were arguably better than the others, but all written to pierce small holes in silence left behind after my daughter left home. Which, in our case, simply meant living in the same house.

Where I could come into her room in the morning and inhale the scent of my sleeping child. 

In five years, I have not learned how not to long for it. 

I fear I never will. 

As I haven’t learned in more than forty years how not to long for a shabby little house with an old-fashion wood burner in the kitchen corner and frost flowers on the window panes in winters. 

I am a slow learner. 

It took me a long time to learn how to string a few words together. By which to remember. 

And by remembering, hope to understand. 

What happened to me. 

All of which makes me somewhat of a writer, but none of a blogger. 

It is for that reason that the light of the lantern is dimming. 

On some nights, when winds are merciless, I stroke its old-fashioned, fragile glass gently and lower the feeble flame close to oblivion.  

In the everlasting darkness, we are both at peace. 

Still, mornings arrive.

Some are bouncy with the urgency of getting to work, and 

Some are those of Sundays.

A friend comes for a coffee bringing biscuits and pineapple in case I am sick, or we go for long drives along deserted winter beaches where even seagulls are too frightened to loiter while we eat greasy fish and chips in the overheated car balancing scalding parcels on our laps. 

A few days later, in a small café above the city’s only library where I am usually joined by the fine assortment of homeless, pensioners, students, refugees and parents with bored children, I would order a black coffee and try to recall those scenes to write them down. 

But then I would get distracted…

By the two men sitting next to me who speak French and might be lovers, (story prompt – one of them is hiding a terrible secret from the other and is looking for a way out…), and

A young woman with purple-coloured hair and clownish looking stockings while she holds her book upside-down and pretends to read (story prompt – she escaped from an institution where she has been held against her will, which dictates that she follows her calling as a street performer …) 

While I (‘somewhat of a writer’) pretend to write.  

And so it goes. 

Five years have passed in this fashion. 

No ‘grand’ novel. Or even a ‘tiny’ one. 

Only a story here and there. 

A handful of poems. 

Mostly about love and pain and loss, 

In the time-honoured female tradition. 

While a winter storm is raging outside and

I imagine a lonely cabin standing in deep southern snow. 

Signs under the lantern.