#749

Blindness

(for Cilla)

They say love is blind to truth
so tell me the truth:
what is it you see?
Let me hold the words.
I need to touch them to know them.

Help me.

I'm finding my way in the dark –
it's like coming home,
whatever "home" really means,
a real word, one that
you can feel and live and lose.

Like "love."


10 October 1994
 
 

I’ve not been home in a long time, almost twenty years. Of course I call where I live now, where I’ve lived for some fifteen years, “home” and I think of it as home and it feels homely but it’ll never be “home.” Carrie’s the same. She’ll talk about going home by which she means America but when she’d there talking to people she refers to Scotland as home. It’s very confusing. Love’s the same. It takes on a personal shape that goes beyond mere definition. 

You don’t know what you have until it’s gone. It’s an interesting expression and we all think we know what it means or we’ve all decided what it means to us. Of course once something’s gone you can simply go and look for it and it’ll probably be behind the sofa. That’s the first place you should check anyway. My hometown is exactly where I left it. I was looking at some photos online yesterday—I know a guy who’s taken it upon himself to collate historical snaps and to photograph what’s still there for posterity or maybe just to give himself something to do weekends—and I was struck by how empty the place was. Of course most of the photographers have waited until people are out of the way to get the best shot but there’s definitely a side-effect: it looks like a ghost town.