STRAY

Thoth spoke through me, he told me of longing, of love and of loss, he told me these things as spring was breaking early and before you became ill and died, but he had also whispered the same story to me decades before but I had forgotten. He told me to remember for next time.

My fur stood up that morning as you came into view. You were not of this tribe.

Your father’s disappearance had caused you to run and you’d come to take shelter here.

The blood in my body shifted. Meanwhile the heat had been rising from an earth set on fire.

No one was sure how long we had left.

It was of little significance to me.

Mostly born of instinct all I knew was I wanted you.

My master was never far away. Herculean and omnipotent, he saw my agitation, the whites of my eyes as I pulled against my leash.

He came and rested his hand upon me. His touch worked in a way only a beloved can; I felt the comfort of his grace and I lay my head in his lap.

My eyes remained fixed and steady on your beauty.

I had been fettered to a large bronze girdle for some time now and it had become home. They say you can adapt to anything except a noose around your neck.

Manifest in this form this time around, only my mind knew how to fly.

I was stray for so long it no longer mattered to me. I belonged everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Maybe that was what we saw in each other.

There were moments when future or past lives visited me. In those liminal states I might feel out a majestic pair of horns or move through water with the speed and accuracy of a missile. Once I was airborne for days at a time, I spun upside down and all around, with a horizon that moved between gradients of light and dark.

The sensations of earth, water or air were how I came to recognise the nature of these other incarnations. Each of their particular charms remained steady in their eternal delivery.

Things moved so fast, and then so slow.

And now here I was. Restrained, but equally not wishing to roam particularly far. I slept in the trees, never fully alone, the moon moved between its cycles, time rolled, things died, rotted and became manifest again.

As such my world had become one of intimate study, of seasons up close, marvelling at the many tones of green that May presented or how the smoke of tired rubbish burnt low and wide and became heady with sweet incense in the warm air, how the craws of the crows were carried to me in ether. I’d come to forgive man’s mark on nature.

You came and went over the next few days not paying me much attention. You had become to me something curious that I wanted to understand.

One morning I noticed how you stopped and studied a trail of ants as they marched up a fruit tree seeking out sweetness. Your eyes followed them until they disappeared out of sight into the jungle canopy.

You had this ability of remaining very very still and very very concentrated. And I fell in with you. Your eyes dropped to where their jubilant little procession had been and your fingers traced their lines; there was always some order to be had somewhere, I knew then that you needed that, a system to trust. That is why you belonged with us.

The humidity carried a honeyed scent to fill our shared air, you were blossoming, and I breathed you in and held you deep inside.

At that point you knew. Your black eyes met mine. You plucked a nectarine and brought it to me with such confidence I blushed. You smiled as if it was nothing and handed it to me. A gift.

So far observing you had been a distant pleasure. Now I was part of our scene.

You removed your knickers and sat in my lap, you lent into me, your soft warm flesh against my pale fur and told me in detail the nature of your desire.

You asked me to bite into the fruit, you wanted to see my canines up close. I bared my teeth to you, an act of submission or dominance for my kind, of which I wasn’t sure yet.

You were inconsistent in your visits. The days you were absent were long, but I enjoyed imagining where you might be.

One day you showed me the work of Angus Fairhurst and told me of his fate.

You cried and you did not stop.

You reflected on how consciousness allows for a recognition of the abject nature of our own existence, where we might observe our own fragility and in that very moment there is a suspension in our ability to look away so what we see looking back is something we can’t quite comprehend.

You told me this is what art can do. It can make sense where no sense might prevail otherwise. Then I realised where else you went during those days.

You told me of your urge to resist direct representation in your own studio practice and lean more towards a mood or a feeling. It was this affect of feeling you wanted to share, not the rawness of an emotion tied to a particular story.

You struggled with language both in relationships and in your work. When we were together you loved how we were silent. Some days you’d place your finger on your lips to decree ‘no words’ you wanted the energy to stay within the body.

Your body would then play with materials, wood, paper, clay, fabric, you communicated what really needed to be said this way, but often became frustrated at how long it might take to say it.

You also wrote as some things however needed to be said directly in order to move on from them, so you would write and in between those texts you’d move between textural and material relations, defer narrative, commission what languages you could not command yourself and complicate temporalities.

In this process your own history of violence now felt distant and somewhat abstracted, your ghosts were soft and spectral.

You carried an air of looseness with you that reminded me of a lazy imp I had once found resting in my tree. Equally you had all the defiance, brutality and fury of Shakti if threatened. You’d been around enough times to know you needed both.

You had some rituals when you came; always at dusk and to spend the night. You brought various fruits to share. As you would read you’d grip my tail. I loved that I offered you some comfort. I held you through the night. You were at your softest under the moon.

One day I told you my secret. It was the first time you heard my voice. I mostly lived in silence. I explained that I was Thoth, the God of wisdom and of time, of order and chaos, but that you had taught me something new about feeling and that had caused time to cease. You looked at me differently then. Eyes a little wider. Mouth parted.

So far you’d been playing.