Normandy
I have been writing now for almost seven years to try and tell you what the word
Normandy means and I cannot find it. I cannot say what it was to smoke cigarettes on the
hillside and carry bread with us to the shore. I cannot find the words that mean Honfleur
when the sun was setting and the harbor became a painting of a woman looking out her
window, elbow perched on the sill like a finch, after filling the kitchen vase with lavender
and bringing in the linen. I cannot find it in me to play the piano again.
I can tell you, though, what it is to live with ghosts. I can tell you what it is to have a
heart that walks, slow as a milk cart, up the same hill and through the same woods each
morning. I can show you the path I’ve worn saying I do not love you, and the places it
does not lead.