EXPANSION OF EXISTENCE
I am everyone.
Omnipotent.
I move backwards through time, forgetting as I remember.
All the possibility that we have become since the first moment of existence.
We cannot measure the journey our light has taken
It is more than we can comprehend, yet somehow all we have ever known.
You and I were nothing more than expanding matter.
Connected not by blood or DNA but by all that is still contained within us.
We succumbed to the lure of gravity; atoms into gas clouds, stars into galaxies, condensed over a time we elements had no concept of.
Slowly becoming.
Endlessly connected.
An explosion of possibilities, igniting what would one day become our neurons.
An imprint of what has passed and what is to come.
Once hearts beat and blood flows, there is no stopping the expansion of existence.
Roots take hold and spread like mycelium.
Unseen, interconnected.
Waterways joined at source.
Tides that ebb and flow.
The complexities of the rhizosphere and the unspoken language of all living things.
We are not sudden, but we are many.
One hundred women.
One hundred points in time and space.
Linked co-ordinates like a dot to dot map of shared history.
You laid a path beneath my feet, offered your shoulders for me to stand on to give me a better view.
Your stories line my cells; my lungs breathe your spent breath, and I will know you through my own reflection
I will learn your sadness and your pain, your battles and your victories and I will celebrate your achievements through my own eyes.
I will share your frustrations. I will share your silence.
No voice, no vote.
I will fight your injustices alongside you because time is not linear.
So, I am there, next to you, at those railings in Muswell Hill.
From the poor houses to the bedlams, the bridewells and asylums.
Oulton Workhouse.
The Barking Smack.
Marvel Street, Drypool.
Kirkpatrick Street on the Mile Cross estate.
High Street, South Milford.
Custer County, Nebraska.
The Breydon Home for Girls; The babies born nameless with only half a story.
From Steeton Hall to the lunatic asylum
The SS Carmenia to Milville Cemetary, New York
You will not be like them. You will not fall.
I chose this path, made my peace and my fate.
I will not be my brother.
I am not my brother.
We are the spinners and weavers, the mill hands, and the house maids
The ‘dressmakers’ and ‘seamstresses’ who lived in secrecy, buddied up in boarding houses and living an administrational lie.
Our choices are free will, but we are subject to the choices of those around us.
A scuppet, a teapot, the rat poison in the back bedroom.
Bundled sheets in a ditch with no one to dry your tears.
The violence.
The violence.
The violence.
You are newspaper articles, coroners’ reports, street corner gossip.
But you are home.
This is a solar system. A tube map. A telephone exchange.
The edited highlights of lives uncovered but not lived.
Generational wisdom planted like a kiss at birth, breathed in hushed whispers:
“Don’t tell, don’t tell…you’ve been here before”
The fading of the last star will take with it all our secrets and we will move backwards through time.
Forgetting as we remember.
Omnipotent.
I am everyone.
