SUMMER

If I could speak this is what I would tell you. It was her light that both entered and consumed me. I was stilled and in total rapture. My girl placed her hand lovingly upon my arm, but I was lost in reverie; looking back instead of forward. You see, I used to be a painter long ago in another life but now my arms fall uselessly at my side; the stroke has taken care of that. ‘They’ call it my Cerebrovascular Accident; such an elaboration of words which mean nothing to me, simply that I have been ‘struck down’. Yet, I could hear everyone’s words, but they could not hear me.

My girl coaxes me back across the years. There is nothing wrong with my mind, but plenty wrong with this useless body which ensnares and holds me tight within its grip. I am desperate to create, to be what I was. I used to paint in plein air like Turner, free to interpret the elements that raged around me. I used to stand in the rain for hours. But that was then.

Summer used to laugh at me. That’s her name, my girl, and she so lived up to it. I hold her back now and I know she feels as if she is suffocating, going under water, like in the death of Ophelia. She was my muse who happened to stroll by on an evening which summed itself up in her name and I fell. A gap of thirty years and I just fell straight into it with no thought for the future. She was everything I was not, life and light and laughter; her hair filled with fire, as definitive as any Pre-Raphaelite beauty.

Then darkness struck on what should just have been an ordinary Sunday when I awoke from a dream where I was swimming in syrup to find myself trapped in dense flesh and bone as if inside an iron lung which had silently woven itself inside me as I slept. That was last year.

Sad.

Today I felt my fingers twitch as if connected to an electric charge, just for a moment. I sat in my chair all day and communed with rainbows. I drew pictures in my mind as I felt the rain, once more, upon my face. And I would have laughed, if I could. But instead I held it all inside and sketched the day and mixed the colours and made so many special paintings inside myself. An unusual contentment began to fill me and as the day began to close and I began to let go.

‘Summer’s end,’ I said it quite clearly then and my girl understood as she held me to her.
As the light captured and entered me and life became completely still.

Angela Huskisson