One day when I was nine or ten I went for a walk with my granddad on Patea Beach, and as we came around the head he saw a huge piece of cliff fall away from the cliff to stand, upright, beside it. I didn't see it but didn't doubt him; he was pale, shaken-- I had no reference point-- and there was the broken cliff.
   This morning I missed my bus and walked alone for the first time in ages, enjoying April wind on my eyes which I strained last night reading comments in the dark as my son went off to sleep. Someone explained there that we do not know our great great grandparents, nor our great great grandchildren. So there's no real reason, she said, to care what will happen in a hundred years' time. But you can look if you want to: it's your foot there on the pivot point, your limbs lost in molten air. 

dreamed last night that I was somewhere - some kind of bland resort-chalet type place, not at a beach - with school friends, but fundamentally alone. my mother called to tell me that she had decided to kill herself. what? but she wasn't asking for help, she'd already decided, and she'd just called with a certain kind of hardness, almost spite, to let me know - as in 'I thought you'd want to know'. I started to argue, shout, plead, cry - 'if you die I will never, ever be okay again' - and I'm thinking of T as I say this, that he will not be okay either. I cry and scream and protest for a long time, and then she laughs, and hangs up.