Limbo

Good morning, moon. The nights are descending faster but also lasting longer. My alarm now wakes me before dawn, so I’m doubtful whether it really is day.

I got married in September. It was a busy time. It felt good though to get married, I mean it felt right. The right person; the right circumstances; the right rolling decision that had been made two years ago, when I proposed to him on a windy shore in Orkney with no one else in sight apart from a grey seal looking on from the sea. The beach was on farmland called Limbo. I found that funny because it sounded more bleak than romantic, Beckettian, my favourite.

The week before our wedding I’d bought tickets to see Waiting For Godot at the West End. It’s my favourite play. I think the best piece of absurdist theatre and the language is sublime – it’s all about the rhythm / cadence of spoken words between two funny forlorn figures. The world is abstract and haunting while the pace is meandering with no real end to it.

You’re right, we’re inexhaustible.
It’s so we won’t think.
We have that excuse.
It’s so we won’t hear.
We have our reasons.
All the dead voices.
They make a noise like wings.
Like leaves.
Like sand.
Like leaves.

(Extract from Waiting For Godot, an exchange between Estragon and Vladimir)

And whilst watching this play at moments I surprised myself by crying at the beauty of it. Not consciously influenced by the fact that my favourite actor Ben Whishaw was playing Didi (although that probably did help) but because the play was still so good, better in fact than I remembered it. And it awakened in me a longing for the past when I’d first heard those words performed on stage after reading Samuel Beckett’s playtext for A-level English and having a similar revelation at the beauty of it.

Sensations don’t age even though we age.

The wedding and honeymoon were wonderful things. The party was the ultimate high and rightly raucous, luckily the thunderstorms held off until the next day when we set off in the car in 100% rain.

We passed the Sycamore Gap Tree “Gap” as I’m calling it because a year ago for reasons yet unknown someone cut down the famous sycamore tree. An iconic symbol of the North. And people like us still go there to take photos of the big stump – the scene of the crime – while others go there to mourn a great loss. The woman at the visitor centre told us it was going to be the anniversary of the tragic incident tomorrow. She looked weary and wanting justice, saying the criminal trial gets underway in December, so then we might find out what really happened.

I don’t know why someone would cut down a famous old tree which drew in tourists to this bleak and barren part of Northumberland. The tree also grew on the site of Hadrian’s Wall. It damaged parts of the two-thousand-year-old wall when it got felled. It was cut down in the dead of night. No CCTV in the middle of nowhere. No clear motive. A professional tree-surgeon sort of cut. This kind of mystery is shrouded in a deep folk aura for me. Was it a personal vendetta against a farmer or the National Trust? Was it a strong Wiccan spell? Who knows, I’ll be following the trial closely.

Back at work now and have been for a few weeks. Clicking my mouse about the screen and straining my eyes, not like on honeymoon when I was only looking at nice natural things in the middle-distance, like the beautiful beaches at Bamburgh. I join a Zoom call and have been logged out automatically since last time, like you do. I need to put my profile name back in and I realise that I’m now in a metaphorical type of Limbo (unlike the real place where I proposed all those years ago).

When I married, I said I’d change my surname and take my husband’s. But I haven’t yet filled in the paperwork, and being an immigrant I have a lot more paperwork to fill in to do something like change my name. It’s not just HMRC and Land Registry, I have to change an E-Visa and get issued a new BRP, my passport is issued from the Japanese Embassy and then in Japan I have to also add this new surname to my family tree (koseki). It’s a long and winding process, which I’ll start once I don’t need to fly on my passport for a while – god I have no idea when that will be.

Anyway, for now I’m not listening to the Zoom meeting because I’m wondering what my full name should be for a new crowd of people. I decide to just go by my first name followed by my pronouns in parenthesis, but I did consider for a moment going for “Rimi Limbo (she/her)” instead for the time being.