In An American Childhood, Annie Dillard writes: “Like any child, I slid into myself perfectly fitted, as a diver meets her reflection in a pool. Her fingertips enter the fingertips on the water, her wrists slide up the arms. The diver wraps herself in her reflection wholly, sealing it at the toes and wears it as she climbs rising from the pool, ever after.
Hilary wrote me an email a couple years ago about loving Yann. She described waiting for him at the top of the stairs to her apartment. He would ring the buzzer and she would buss him up She would not go down to meet him half way, but stand at the top, full of desire and anticipation.
She wrote: “the ease of it astonishes me. The wildness in me is quelled in that stairwell, but not forgone completely. I feel like a horse, stilled, but not against my will. I trust him and know he will always come up the stairs.”
These metaphors seem parallel to me. Dillards diver and Hilary’s stilled horse. Hilary has fit into love and adulthood both with an ease and a grace that I think surprised her. She has always held on tightly to youth, prized childhood for its pleasures; and has be entered and strong in herself. Love was a conceding. A claiming. A calming.
Adulthood too: Hilary has aways been wary of growing up, she’s an epicure, a peter pan, a bon vivant. I remember her worrying that growing up meant loosing touch with her senses, that it meant loosing freedom, friendship, fun.
But I think she has solved the riddle and remained the child inside the grown up, the diver in the pool; the wild horse danced through the panic and gathered safely in to love.
I think what I am trying to say here is that Hilary has lost less than the rest of us between childhood and here. The self she is, has intimate access to the self she was. Just ask her:
She can tell you the way it felt when she moved at 10 to Vientam. She can tell you about the pink pillowcase she brought with her: the steady in her world turned upside-down.
She can tell you about Thailand before that- the school uniform she wore to Thai school, the chicken koop by their house, the foods.
She can tell you about dancing and her books and if you read a letter she wrote when she was five, you’d swear you heard her voice now.
Thats the riddle solved: Hilary is consistent. Her wild horse self has always been both tame and wild; wholesome and daring, naive and wise.
I’m embarrassed to admit I cannot speak French. But I remember reading somewhere once that when you directly translate “I miss you” from English into French you say: “You, to me, are missing.” This feels a closer telling of how I feel without Hil in Winnipeg: My life, so marked by hers, has a daily Hilary shaped hole in it. But it is an active state, not a static one. There’s no solving it. There is no skirting around it and it is a wound. She is always, to me, missing.
That said: I am given so much life knowing how and where her heart has landed here. And, as I surprise my envy of everyone she spends her time with in Montreal, I am happy for them and think they are, and Yann in particular is, the most fortunate of all.
As that great prophet of our times recently gone, said:
“All the rocket ships are climbing through the sky/ The holy books are open wide/ The doctors working day and night/ But they’ll never, ever, find that cure for love.”