Ghosted: A Meteorology

Clouds live on average for about ten minutes.

 

His cooking pot is pigeon grey and sturdy with non-scald handles. It still has a glass jar of rusty ground paprika inside it, a concertina bag of basmati rice.

 

It is psychologically ruinous to see the cooking pot. I put it in the back of the pantry space, cover it with a carrier bag.

When he made chicken and chorizo, he did this absurdly clever thing with the wooden spoon - jammed it in one of the handles to avoid misplacing it when the meal was on low simmer.

 

Nobody likes to lose a spoon during intense cooking.

 

He liked to give food on the hob a really thorough clock wise stir.

 

Spooning is an act of body holding whilst in bed. It is an illogical, inaccurate term to an autistic brain as bodies simply cannot fit together like spoon handles. Heads are not concave for starters. Two bodies are not symmetrical or tapered enough to align. Spooning is a jumble of bodies, a hot foot on a chill blue one, a cock against a quiet bum.

I have never eaten from a spoon which has a cock.

 

He didn’t want back the hot pot, carpet cleaner, the left over shards of cacao. He couldn’t face me. His long johns. Cacao was our nightly ritual. Tiny mugs adorned with twee painted flowers. A milk jug he bought. Cacao was his birthday gift from me after hours of research, intended to open up the heart.

 

I live amongst shrapnel left behind. Proof there was a mutual life lived together, a lively one with purpose, domesticity, little glimmers of the mundane.

 

The mind tricks you after being ghosted into thinking that the lover after all those years never once haunted the house of your body, the attic of your mind.

 

He left me without souvenirs. No finger marks on my breasts, no parma violets on my thighs. Nothing temporary which might serve as a lighthouse.

 

I knew what was happening. My body told me, quick as a hare. Never an acknowledgement. Objects reassure me that we weren’t an imagining.

 

A large cumulous cloud could weigh as much as 200 tonnes.

 

There was this time with him: body kissing and another act I cannot speak of where the coins all stacked up in my brain like they do in those 2 pence slot machine.

 

There was that nanosecond before you release them into the bronze pit and the shock when they land all wrong. I was watching gifts that were once guaranteed recede, a twist of knowing in the belly, a fortune moving further and further away.

 

Fog is actually called Stratus Nebulosus.

 

In the nineties digital lemmings used to throw themselves off of clouds for fun.

 

In contrast, at Bempton Cliffs, we saw lazy suicide prevention signage, including noticeboards with Samaritans contact details. We were atomic, high on each other, the grass emerald city green. I flopped on the floor to cumulus gaze whilst he pursued the gannet’s black wing tips, the brilliant white plumage. Above, the sun was a lemon time stamp on a book of sky. Our beginning.

 

One cloud consists of up to 19, 000, 000 tiny droplets of water per cubic metre.

 

The Coke family in the beer garden in Scarborough made him cry in the mistiest of ways. We saw the sky set to a glaze of apricot jam, watched how their fancy clothes betrayed the scarcity of luxury. They’ll bring the drinks out, one shouted, her dizzy appreciation about basic table service a gift. There was a vulnerabilty in the big of their anticipation.

 

Sometimes people get under your skin.

 

He really got under my skin.

 

When he cried, he cried clouds. He cried Cirro (Cirrus): High, wispy, hair-like. Alto: Mid-level, high.

 

Strato (Stratus): Layered, flat, smooth.

Cumulo (Cumulus): Heaped up, puffy.

Nimbo (Nimbus): Rain-bearing.

 

The cumulonimbus cloud is the tallest cloud and was originally categorised as the 9th cloud type, hence the expression: ‘On Cloud 9.’

 

Later, after the Coke family: we were top and tailing on a sofa with margherita pizza, static on the telly and Ellen Renton’s ecological wisdom: I must be the first / Surely no one has let the cold jeg their knees / Quite happily / Lined up a ruler against the seam / Where the sky on a too-full stomach/ Tucks itself into the sea.

 

Any touching was violent, an entire sky unzipped, a too long for waiting. There were ink blue, squid blue, tetra blue marks all over us like aeroplane contrails.

 

Cumulonimbus can form alone, in clusters, or along squall lines. These clouds are capable of producing lightning and other dangerous severe weather, such as tornadoes, hazardous winds, and large hailstones.

 

We became the definitive guide to clouds.

 

We became friends, we became lovers, we became blended families, we became artists.

 

We became indefatigible.

 

The International Cloud Atlas was published by the World Meterological Organisation of the United Nations. They forgot to reference us in it!

 

In myth, clouds were the Nephelai—transparent nymphs born of Oceanus and Tethys. They gathered river water in misty pitchers, drifted into the sky, and released it as rain to feed the earth, sliding across the heavens like clouds in gushes of white robes.

 

The psychological phenomenon of seeing objects in clouds is called pareidolia.

 

Research suggests clouds are becoming thinner, more fragmented. They are referred to as ghouls, spectres, willow the wisps.

 

Essentially, they lose their ability to create rain or effectively reflect sunlight.

 

The day after the final ghosting, I am in the park with a coffee that tastes of a cremation. Slate clouds swirl above, they are whippy, ice-cream style. In the clouds, I see a man’s face with a Boreas style beard - race-car fast - and shape shifting. He makes no eye contact with me, but still, I look up and I wave - it is intrinsic, bodily, and by default, I say it’s me! - I even shout up his name.

 

He passes me without looking, I am water vapour and the sky looks like a split fish belly.