by Moira Burke
At the cemetery the swirl is tighter, it whips away the words from the mouth of the priest and flings the handful of earth onto the coffin in the rectangular hole dug fresh, it makes your mother cough, it makes her really little, it makes your sisters far away, holding themselves, separate, it makes the flowers disappear into the ground. The colours of the swirl all mix together nothing is bright any more, nothing has edges, the ground splits and shifts in front of you then comes back together again, you feel a falling feeling inside you, but it’s the swirl that catches you, holds you in, safe.
The wind is rattling the venetians it’s making everything blow about outside, the bones of the house are creaking, the walls are leaking sorrow. The mirror that’s rusty on the edges from behind mottles and clears, mottles and clears with the blinking of your eyes. You look at yourself and see your dad’s face in there quickly, then gone. You look at your hands they’re the same colours as your dad’s used to be pinky brown freckles blue veins, little hairs shining you’ve got the same colours you’ve got the same skin. You’ve got his voice, his ringing booming voice waving around inside, you’ve got his big laugh, you’ve got his stories you’ve got the country that he came from in you and the movement of the ship over the long stretch of water that brought him here. You look at your eyes he’s looking out of them you see the house they worked for, the house of him, the house you live in where he died. You see your mum in you the way she smiles or doesn’t, you see the way she loves you and you know that she is you as well, her skin her face her country and the children she had who are you and not you. You see yourself in your sisters’ faces their smiles the shapes of their teeth, where their ears go and how their hands move in time to their voices, the rhythm of their voices is the rhythm you speak in too, up and down and whispering green and white and roaring gold and living, and the wildness of the wind that brought your mother and your father here is the wildness of your hair, the strength in your legs as you run the pumping of your lungs, your heart. And you know all this, you know it true and deep, you know you are all together, but still, you keep on just being you. You keep on still being alone. And it’s all right to be alone like this. Through the eyes of your father looking out at you in the mirror you see yourself strong, and growing, and you know how much you matter, how much you’ve always mattered, and that to be alone like this means you’re a part of everything. A new shape is in you now, a shape you’ve never felt before stretching and pulling from the centre to the edges bringing all these things together, and behind you is your mum, real and warm in the bathroom, hugging you, letting you cry.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First, I’d like to acknowledge the Wurundjeri people, on whose land this story was written.
Thank you Jo Higgins, Nadia Coreno, Dr Karen Charman, Lisa Walker, Sally Sant, Dorey Hazewinkel, Sarah Sanders, Margaret Mann, Wendy Priddle, Simone Luscombe, John Broderick, Christina Burke Broderick, Daniel Burke Broderick, Georgia Broderick-Crawley, Jane Pearson, Lucy Ballantyne and all at Text, and Sandy Cull.
textpublishing.com.au
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Copyright © Moira Burke 1998
The moral right of Moira Burke to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
First published by Addison-Wesley Longman, 1998.
This edition published by the Text Publishing Company, 2017.
Cover design by Sandy Cull, gogoGingko.
Cover photograph by Giulia Muraglia.
Page design by Jessica Horrocks.
Typeset by Midland Typesetting.
National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication
Creator: Burke, Moira, author.
Title: Losing it / by Moira Burke.
ISBN: 9781925498363 (paperback)
ISBN: 9781925410648 (ebook)
