Summer is dying and London is changing again, the colors of the city are darkening and a somber kind of autumnal feeling is on the streets: the skies are fading to magenta in the early evening and the air carries a crisp, sweet chill in it. The gutters are becoming choked with leaves, and every day the child that grows within Vanessa becomes stronger and more alive. Sometimes when we lay in bed together I place my mouth near the smooth roundness of her belly and I have whispered conversations with my child, or I play gentle music like the Cocteau Twins, My Bloody Valentine, or Nick Drake, resting a hand there gently to get a sense of her movements.
It is not just London that is changing, and it is not just the child in Vanessa’s belly that is growing. It is happening to me also. At first the process was painful, almost unbearably painful, but now that I have become accustomed to these changes they are a constant source of wonder to me. My body and my mind are experiencing sensations that had been absent for so long that they had become alien to me.
One day I suppose I will have a perspective of these weeks and months that will be radically different from what I am experiencing now. But for now life is almost unbearably vivid. The colors seem too bright at times, the longing that I feel too intense, the love and devotion that I am capable of terrifying in its implication. I am stumbling through the days like a child, wide-eyed and open, lost in the wonderment of all that surrounds me.