Polar Solstice
The evening before you came into this world we endured the longest blackest night.
Winter. The hibernal solstice. Our slice of Earth turning her back to the sun, head bowed, submitting to the dark.
That night imprinted its suffocating length onto my birthing body. Within the week, wrapped in tendrils of dread
postnatally
deeply
depressed.
The shrinking of those sunlight hours had already signaled to the swifts to flee.
Sooty brown, shrieking insistence. All gone. I should have gone, too.
The waxwings arrived; suspicious eyes masked with a band of black, grey-pink regal crest seeming to mock.
It was all we could say on those terrible inky evenings, nose pressed to the window watching the sun set as children walked home from school,
when spring comes, when the days draw out, when spring comes, when the snowdrops bloom, when spring comes, when the grass is wet with dew, when spring comes—then we might be okay.
Sleepless body punctured with insomnia. Dripping sweat, desperately positioning a small milk-hungry mouth to latch, my eyes screwed tight shut through the razor pain. Enduring the indistinguishable days where for two solid weeks the sleet seeped through the eaves, and I looked into the face of a stranger in the bathroom mirror. The winter baby slept through slate grey afternoons, howled into the night.
I look at that baby now, my carbon copy, vigorously reaching for the multi-coloured owl that hangs from his pram. Sunlight is dappling his bare arms and two teeth buds shine at me from burning gums.
Breathe.
We have made it to the longest day.
Earth sits, full and satisfied, having eaten back half her year. Axis tipping in our Northern Hemisphere, the closest we will come to touching the sun.
There is a memory so raw that I can barely coax it to the surface. To think of the night where I almost gave up the fight. Where the next season was unreachable, clover-filled air and a sky so sweet and blue committed only to the past. There would be no more.
The realisation that I am standing, with you my darling boy, as summer emerges all around us, a silent fanfare of cornflower and cow parsley and chamomile. Red soldier beetles bulging on petals. Their sleek bodies suddenly here, here as if they have always been here. The realisation is almost too much to hold.
There is such relief that I have found strength with you, knowing now that we can run headfirst towards the next season in decline. Dropping leaves, bare trees, the first patching of skint knees. We can enjoy the blanket of rust and gold that will fall over everything.
Darkness will come again, and this time we will see it coming. High in the watchtower together, facing the sharp edges of the first frost we will notice dusk creep forward into the afternoon. We will come down with open arms and say welcome. With you in my arms I can let winter take us onward, breath billowing, eyes trained to the moon as we race towards the end of your first year.
-Kirsty Crawford
Kirsty Crawford studied Creative Writing, English and Journalism at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow before moving to London to study performing arts. Switching career into wildlife conservation and writing features for environmental publications, she now works in community engagement for a marine charity. Recent publications have included fiction for Writerly Magazine and poetry for Ink Sweat and Tears, Candlestick Press and The Lake.