Holding Space

Tonight the sky is exploding.

Trails of fizzy light erupting in spectacular bouquets of pink and green and blinding white. There's so much smoke, we can’t see the stars anymore. Below our balcony, heavy grey ghost-clouds are just yawning their way through the city, like ancient spectres roused from slumber, and already bored.

I love fireworks, but not for the usual reasons. Celebrations like these are always monstrously expensive, and often just bring out the worst in us. Thousands of humans massing themselves on the foreshore and shouting drunken patriotic slogans at each other all night. I don’t care about that at all. But tonight, I'm only seeing the lightshow in reflections: glimpses in the bathroom glass, the kitchen chrome, the bedside lamps over Rach’s shoulder, and the tiny starfalls in her moon-earrings.

She is watching the sky, and I am watching her. She has her little black book out, words spilling softly onto the page in swirls and eddies. She’s telling me stories of festivals back in her hometown, back in New Zealand. Her face lights up with every firecracker, and in her eyes are sparks of experience, little explosions of whimsy in the deep pools of her memories.

When we met, I didn’t know where Rach was from. I didn’t know her stories and she didn’t know mine. We knew nothing more than the sparks in our souls that demanded we be together.

“The archetypes are true,” I would say to her. “Love, like in the movies, does exist.” And she would laugh, and then write in her little journal.

She is always writing, catching mid-flight memories and landing them gently in her ivory pages. We are both new to this, really. It has only been eight months since she took a one-way flight to Perth, with just a suitcase and a great dress. Eight months and a day since I turned the key in this tiny studio apartment, to begin a new life, a new little world where we could both heal.

I never met Evie in person. Rach said she was the most magical little human. For two and half years, they were a team, they grew each other, she said. But the medical costs bankrupted the family, bankrupted her marriage. They tried everything. The doctors would say “Your daughter is incompatible with life,” and Rach would reply “Well, how is it that she is still alive?” They would say “Your daughter will never speak”, and Rach would say “But she just made a sound, and I know exactly what that sound means. Shall I teach you?” Friends would ask “How can we help fix her?” and Rach would reply “Just enjoy her.”

It was hard for them, Rach told me. They couldn’t see what she could see.

“And what is it, that you see?” I remember asking her once. We were video-calling from different countries, she was in a blanket, three in the morning, I was drinking wine, my own kids finally to bed, ten at night.

“Eternity.” She answered simply. “Evie is holding a space between now and forever.” A month later Evie died. Rach scattered her ashes in the turquoise waters at the base of Mount Aoraki, and packed her bag. I met her at the airport and we fell into each other like star-crossed teenagers, all blubbery faces and desperate kisses.

And that’s how we started our new lives in this little apartment of healing. We would laugh in the mornings, and in the nights, we would cry, two frail naked things on the floor of the bathroom. When the power went out we danced in the living room, slow twirls in whispered moonlight. We sold our piano for rent, and played board games with the kids, and took photographs of clouds.

It was Rach’s idea to write a book.

“She’s still holding the space, Nath.” She told me one morning. “Evie is right here with us on the edge.” She wrote the word 'normal' in her notebook, scattering the letters so that they filled a whole page. “People need to see how wide ’normal’ really is. How can we stretch it out? Celebrate a person’s humanity, not just their performance in life?”

And that was that. We found the families with kids who were on the outermost rim of ‘normal'. Lonely satellites of society, who loved each other so deeply, and worked so hard to advocate for their children. We photographed them all. We listened to their stories and shared our own. We borrowed money to pay for the printing, and made a crowdfunding site in case anyone else resonated with us. We had no way of paying that money back, but this Evie-book needed to be made. Our hearts needed it written, and our heads would just have to catch up.

Two days before printing, something happened on the crowdfunding site. A notification, over email. A spike in donations.

“A spike? Some last-minute donations?” Rach asked, rubbing sleep from her eyes. Our crowdfund goal was tiny - a few hundred dollars for family and friends.

“A spike,” I replied. “Just one more gift.”

“How much?”

“Twenty thousand dollars.”

Gasps.

Laughter.

We jumped on the bed so much we woke the neighbours.

It was enough to pay back our debt, and to launch the book properly. I looked up the payment on the crowdfund site, and there was just a name, a doctor-somebody. I read it out to Rach, and she slowly shook her head, emerald eyes astonished, glossy.

“He’s the doctor. The one who said Evie wasn’t really alive.” And she reached for her notebook.

—

The sky-fire is crescendoing now. Rach’s eyes go even wider, her lips make a little “ooh” shape.

It reminds me of the first time I brought Sebastian to a firework show.

He was barely two years old, and he sat in my lap and laughed at the sky. His tiny hands reached out, grabbing at the fireflies, his face awash with delight and glory.

This is why I like fireworks. It’s the soft splashes of wonder on all the faces.

The droplets of eternity on our lashes.