Seán Hewitt

He had gone and I hadn’t known a thing, and had carried on as normal, all those months, hearing his voice, as if he were speaking from wherever he was, as if it were still echoing from its source, and he was still there, still someone I might return to

That day, I felt as if we were all walking headlong into some winnowing fire, and the further we walked, the less of ourselves we seemed able to carry with us

I didn’t know how to make sense of it, all this loss

Even then, I suppose, I was a poet, already in the irritating habit of turning life into metaphor, with all the added self-grandeur of a postponed adolescence.

I wasn’t chasing anything but atmosphere, the imagined picturesque I wanted to exist in.

Real life was something that people lived when they weren’t in love

I was exhausted and at peace – nothing but the summer air, no radio, just the quiet thump of the road and the fields behind us with a twinge of yellow-orange on the horizon, and the blue haze and the cloudless indigo sky

evenings in the park with friends; snow on a bright day; swimming in the lake in summertime; even just sitting here together. Wasn’t that something? It was more than I had ever thought was possible

That idea of God, of a world that, if touched rightly, might ‘give off sparks and take fire, yield drops and flow, ring and tell of him’, was something I couldn’t let go of. I would steal my God back. I would run with him through the burning streets.

Elias would list all the things each word reminded him of, all the things each one meant, or could mean, in different formulations, all the ways each one could carry a thought or a feeling and mean something subtly different.