Lost Souls In June

Corrie Ellen

It was a sunny day in June. My son was away. Not with me. Away. Still, I cannot speak the words that would make sense of this for others. All I can say is 'he was away.'

They had said it would be better this way. They had said with me, he would be poor.

They had said he would be deviant. They said that he would fail.

I already had.

By failing to secure a future for him before he was conceived. By failing to secure a gold ring on my left hand before he was born. By failing to be a good mother before I even began. I had already failed, and had, therefore, 'given him up'. Well, nearly.

He was away. Surely, he was. But, on that day in June, I still had time. Maybe. He was away, but not yet, forever. This was the gestation period for the idea of his permanent away-ness. This was when he was with the temporary people. The kind people. The non - snatching people. The people whose job it was to pass him back or pass him on. And, please God, to love him meantime.

But, on that summer's day in June, the gods were still not smiling in my direction. I had no man. I had no permanent home. No money. No gold ring on that left hand. No right to birth that child. No right to rear that child. No right to keep that child. No right to have him back. All that I could offer him, they had said, was failure. No right to offer any child that.

And so, on that bright sunny day in June, my hand clicked open the gate and I started on my walk. A walk to escape the darkness in the house. A walk to worry in the fresh air. A walk to find answers where none appeared to live within.

I clicked open the gate. I can still see my hand. I can still see the latch on the gate. I can see the sun. I can feel the sun's heat. And then I went somewhere else.

In that still, cold land. I saw only black and white and grey. In that still, cold land, I heard no noise. In that cold land, I saw no colour. All I saw were blackened, thin and crooked shapes reaching up against the pale white mist of sky. These wizened things reminded me of charcoaled trees I had seen somewhere before; somewhere in my mind's eye after war or holocaust. Bereft of life.

In that curious stillness, beings started to peer out from these black and deadened sticks still reaching to the sky but now seeming soaked and frozen in stark, petrified grief. These slow moving figures were both human and yet not. They seemed curious, yet had no life left within. They had dark and empty sockets where our eyes usually are.

And they seemed to carry a silent, terrifying, beautiful, lifeless warning. Not a sound came forth, and yet they had not come from nowhere on that day in order to say nothing. They were saying, simply by being there, they were telling me who they were and who I would become. They truly were lost souls, lost souls living in a land where only lost souls live. And, somehow, I had visited them. And somehow they had visited me.

The gate clicked. It was that same sunny June day. There was my hand. There was the latch on that gate. There was the sun. I had come back.

I will never know quite what happened that strange June summer's day or where I really went. All I know is that I left for a walk in the knowledge that I had no right to keep my child. I arrived back from that walk, and life and love and warmth and colour flooded into me as I cuddled my absent baby, allowed myself to smell him again, to swaddle myself in his baby-ness, to laugh and hear him gurgle, to lift the phone and say 'I want my son.'