Yesterday

In response to I Was in a Hurry, a poem by Dunya Mikail

Yester. I don’t know the origins of this word. It speaks of longing, and of the bygone. It rhymes with jester. Yesterday day is a joke played upon us, a mirage, something we can see and never reach, never cup in our hands, yet we can fill the space inside us with memories and imaginations, an approximation of what was there for us, what we took or received once. Yesterday. Paul McCartney. We read “Yesterday” in school in English class, looking at it as a poem alongside John Donne’s or was it Andrew Marvell’s “They flee from me that sometime did me seek” – the latter I think. Poems. I liked poetry in school and I liked maths. At the time I felt I liked most subjects, I studied hard. The studying filled up the space in my mind so I did not have to notice how I felt. Now I know I like maths because I like the certainty, the feeling of getting it right, the moment of satisfaction, completion, reflect (meant “relief”). Now I know I like poetry because it speaks to the depths of me, for the endless unfolding and evolving, for the beauty and poignancy and raw power. Yesterday. Does this word speak to me? Looking back. I’ve spent a long time looking back and am still dragging, like toilet roll stuck to my shoe, a streamer of resentment and regret along with me. But now I am focused more on the now and the future. Particularly where I am at now. Standing on a tight-wire, taking one steady step at a time. Keep purposeful, intent. Feel my feet on the wire, on the earth. Yesterdays I never felt my feet, never had connection to them, to the earth. Unrooted, unearthed. Uprooted. A seedling weeded out. Undesirable. Now I have scattered myself and re- formed. I am here. Now. And I explore the fertile earth, down, down, into the warmth, the moist nurturing warmth; the breath of life over billions of years within the earth, infusing into my feet, energising, bringing me to the brink of life, the lip of the cup, to be raised in both hands and taken in at the lips slowly, inside, filling me up with the presence of now, of being. The liquid spirit. I am writing. Liquid. Yesterday. Memory can liquefy, run, leak, needs to be contained. In the present, we hold the past. If not in our minds, in our bones, our flesh, our longings and desires, in our ways of being. Today we embody yesterday. We are always together even when we let go. We cannot make anew our bones, our DNA. We are ancestral beings, belonging to time and place. We set our foot down and announce our existence here, now. Yesterday, today and tomorrow.

“Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away.” Yesterday can literally be the day before today, or any time in the past. My past has been full of troubles, but yesterday and in the more recent past, I’ve been more happy than I ever imagined it possible. So, what do I want to write about yesterday? What do I think you’ll want to hear? The making of red cabbage – 3 hours in the oven with onions, apple, spices, butter and vinegar? The meeting to talk about a meeting to talk about death and dying? That could be interesting. Or the past? How far into the past? I was born in my grandmother’s house in a big double bed with a lumpy feather mattress, in the front room upstairs in a terrace on a quiet street in a Leicestershire town. There must have been a fire burning in the grate, as there was no heating in the house and it was probably bitterly cold on the night of Christmas Day 1950. My mother had eaten a full Christmas dinner – her due date was 6 th January. By 9pm she was in labour. My father was listening to a classical concert on the wireless when he was instructed to fetch the midwife. He slowly pulled on his gloves and wrapped his scarf about his neck, not wanting to miss the end of the symphony. He got short shrift from Gran, who bustled him out of the door and onto his bicycle. By the time the midwife arrived, I, in my eagerness, was showing the crown of my head to the world and was born at 11.30pm. Just in time to avoid being a Boxing Day afterthought. Having a birthday on Christmas Day is bad enough, but I’ve always pitied those born the next day. Christmases were memorable at Gran’s house. Usually waking early with my sister in the double bed in the back bedroom, admiring the frosty patterns on the inside of the windows. A pillowcase of gifts – all very modest, including satsumas – lay next to the bed and we excitedly unwrapped them, teeth chattering, trying not to wake the rest of the household. Later, the cousins would arrive with their Mum and Dad and we’d play bagatelle and card games, and eat dinner in the front room. Gran had pure white hair worn in a sausage round her head, bright blue eyes and a beautiful singing voice. She’d join in with ‘Your Hundred Best Tunes’ on the wireless. Every Thursday, her friends, Auntie Elsie and Auntie Beat, would come round to play cards on the collapsible green baize table and read the tea leaves afterwards.

Monday morning, nothing new. Sunday before that, and Saturday, Friday, Thursday, 2017, 2010, 1993. Funny I should write down that year, that yesterday when I left my homeland.

Yesterday, when I partied too much, juggling forced responsibilities with wanting to be like everybody else, a teenager without a care in the world, concerned with becoming an adult. But I was not that. I worked, I studied, I helped support the family, I studied a subject I did not like, waited to move on, while I partied too much, listened to loud music, tried to rebel while being sensible – too sensible, because I had to.

Yesterday, you made me want to run away from where I came from. I didn't know it at the time, but the hate I felt towards my birthplace and its culture, was really hatred aimed at you. You were the ones who spoiled everything, you were the one I was running from: your legacy, my childhood, your rotten gift to me. I wrapped that gift and carried it around until I started looking for you again. I should have given it back, that parcel of ugliness and selfishness and low self-esteem. I should have thrown it in your face. But then what? Yesterday is yesterday, and what good is experience if we cannot learn from it? No good comes from living the same day over and over, from exploring the same negative feelings. So your gift was remolded, recycled into a positive thought, a shiny marble, a hidden pearl.

You gave me cold glances, I made them into warm embraces. I embraced your ugliness, accepted that we all come from somewhere, and that place is what makes us who we are. You must have come from the same place you tried to pass on to me. But I broke that chain. My family will not be unhappy anymore.

My yesterday was buried with you, behind a slab of marble, with a small photograph of a sad man smiling with his eyes only.