Dear Shilbottle

Dear Shilbottle, I’m writing you a love letter. 

I address it to the way your maternal cheeks sag down like velvet curtains to pool around the carpet of the church yard, where you raised me on the lyrical names of my ancestors. You learned the name of every boy I baptised in your cacophonous amphitheatre of crow’s nests. At my ‘I love you too,’ the crows would turn mad and talk in tongues, their gums fixed together too long in silent prayer. Names absent from their record of headstones were tumours they screamed at to rid. 

You were the northern wet nurse to my school friends. I dream of them sometimes now, the people from school, the kids that would wrap the chain of the swings around and around and around until no one but the dew could reach them. Those nights when we wouldn’t be home before the streetlights came on. My old school dinner lady began working in the corner shop when I turned 18. She served me in a new way with milk and honey and flour and sugar to bake biscuits for the new boyfriend who would move me away. 

You watched my plastic toy kitchen on the garden patio turn into an unburied relic. My burst paddling pool would lie like a waterlogged funeral ship, gathering green fur between its wrinkles. 

You would tell me tales of when you grew diseased with coal-black eye bags that sagged deep into your flesh, when you sacrificed your sons to the war, how you sprouted new-born farms that spit their decomposing stench into my bedroom in a protest to death. I regret not sleeping in the hollow of your collarbone ruins. On spring nights, I would creep into your hairline of trees, you would clutch me to your breast like a child protected from maturation, from the whipping hand of the wind that would sear the branches to baldness.

Sometimes a t would appear on your announcement of welcome. Your very name was burdened with the Rood, guilty of the strength with which you upheld it. ShiTbottle. And I praised you for it when stray kids would wring the foggy grey blanket of your eyelids into their thirsty mouths. I’m sorry for hiding from the rains. 

I loved you then, Shilbottle, when I knew nothing else of the world but our northern intimacy, our ice-burnt tongue familiarity, that I now can’t let rest in any other throat I shove it down. I never asked for you to return the scraps of my knee that I left on the gravel road when my bike ploughed me back home like a stumbling ox. I never resisted your grasping for my flesh.

Shilbottle, I’m writing to you now because I’ve made a new home on the top of another hill. It’s too high, too swollen and full, too mechanically blotched. The crows here are silent and they ignore me like shadows. The ghost of my childhood cat is curling around the ankles of a new family.

I wake up each morning aching for your skin against mine and your spit in my hair. And you’ll hate me for personifying you, but I love you, and I can’t love anything but the mute one who stole my tongue. 

The wild tussocks that sprouted on your pubic mound grew with my own, I mingled my aging with yours because you were so fresh when I was young that I was sure you were born with me. I grew up aching for your fox to find my childish body and begin picking parts bit by bit for her children. Rich meat from my calves, or the delicate flesh of a breast. An eye to burst upon their palate like a pickled grape, if you’re desperate for my sacrifice. Your damp finger might thank me with kisses in the creases of my nostrils and the whisper of the sea in the curls of my ears.

This is how I imagined your hills were formed: one moment of pleasure with me, neck curving and head wilting back, nipples reaching into the sky’s thirsty lips, too greedy to let them fall. Your bosom is frozen at this peak of bliss, eager to age there, holding passion between your mounds of flesh. Passion which precipitated and sank into the nectareous creek between your legs that swelled in the dark nights I met you there. It was enough to water the moss, to cool the hare’s feet, to blossom into dew, but not enough to sustain me. 

You are growing bald now, weathered, pockmarked with new builds and non-natives, but I still miss you.

And I’m still sorry.