Phillip, you can't see the rain, but when he comes I'll ring a bell.
The funeral was today. It was a small service; mostly just me and the family. Aunt Sally and Uncle Rod came down from Sydney. Chase was there, and a couple of Megan's friends from school. It was a cremation; the urn went back to Mum and Dad's place. We're going to take it down to the coast place next weekend to scatter the ashes into the sea.
It leaves me thinking about the message Megan left me in the email.
When I was 8, and Megan was about 5, we were at the coast place over Easter. There's these thick glass windows through the living room - thick like the bottoms of bottles - and out and through them you can see the shape of the Pacific Ocean like an abstract painting rendered in shifting panes of blue light.
It was afternoon, and Mum and Dad were out, I think buying groceries, and we're in the living room in the fading light of day, in that kind of twilight gloom that comes with an Australian spring. The air has had that expectant feeling that hopes for a storm, and as we're sitting on the tatty old couches the first drops of rain start falling in hesitant waves across the house roof.
We can hear it - and we can feel the change in the air rush through, as the shadow of the storm becomes the storm itself - and Megan gets up and rushes to the window and looks out at what might be the distant waves driven before the downpour.
She says to me, "I can see the rain, Phillip."
And I look, out through those same windows, but I can't see anything. It's just a blur. So I tell her she's wrong, that she's imagining it. But she says it again, "I can see the rain," and I just know that she's right, that to her the drops of rain are really visible. And I stood with her, and I just watched out through the bottle-thick glass, and knew that though we were looking through the same lens we were seeing completely different worlds.
I think that's the first time as a child that I really understood that other people see things differently to me. It was my first inkling that the way I saw reality was possibly not the only way to see it.
So now that this video has appeared on Megan's blog - I have to wonder whether what's in the urn is really all of Megan. I have to think that, just maybe, there's a bit left, still free. So just now, I did what I should have done last Thursday - I replied to the email she sent me.
I'm too late. I got this back:
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Title: No Message
On 1/29/07, Megan Kyle wrote:> Gone.
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4 comments:
Don't give up yet. If you're right, if there is still some part of Megan that's out there free, then remember this: I don't know you guys very well, but from everything I've read and heard about her, Megan sounds like a fighter.
Do you recognize the place in the video? The fountain shown is the James Cook Memorial, which sounds like it would be right up Megan's alley. It also seems like she's trying to be more specific than just "in the shadow of the tower". Was there a particular spot near, or on, the mountain that she liked?
I never went up Black Mountain with her. It was something she liked to do alone. There's only a limited number of places on the mountain with a view of the fountain like that, though, I'd wager.
Was Megan a good climber? If not, it could potentially narrow down the location even more.
There's also that section at the end of the video, with sparse trees. A spot of ground was shown with some kind of red line on it. Any ideas about that? We can't figure out what it could be.
Megan went rock climbing with me a couple of times and seemed okay, but then gave it up as a "sissy sport", which I think just meant that she was tired of Jodie hitting on her.
Not that it matters - the "mountain" part of Black Mountain is more artistic license than geographical fact. I'm pretty sure that one girl with a decent pair of hiking boots could get to any part of the mountain she wanted to without too much difficulty.
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