Dowry

DOWRY

I thought they said the title was to be LOWRY.
L. S. Lowry.
So that’s how I started these words off. All those matchstick people in…where? Up in north England somewhere, I guess. In the days when toilets were perhaps grimmer, grimier, less efficient, perhaps not even water closets by then, in fact most of them still being ‘earth closets’. Lowry was born in 1887, I just found out. Other days, other ways. The past is a foreign country, as L. P. Hartley said.

I spend most of my life in recent years peeing. Or perhaps too much knowledge is bad knowledge. But now I’ve started off with this embarrassing non-sequitur, I say it is probably because a bodily complaint causes it, and I do indeed complain about it a lot!

I pee in the night many times voluminously as well as in short spirts, with a suspect continence, I fear, and in the daytime, too, where some of the repercussions need to have a veil drawn over them. I wonder where it all comes from, as I pee far more than I drink. Peeing as if dousing the earth itself with the juice of my goodness, as I would like to call it.

And this is where the DOWRY comes in, with my hoped-for legacy being the treasure of a dowsed dowry of wetness from this planet that we call a dying Earth to a new inhabitable planet, as an inducement for the new planet to marry our planet — an endowment to outweigh the increasingly dry shrivelling of our own planet. Our reward being a fruitful galactic matrimony, if not a perfect match made in some Science Fiction Heaven!

The future diaspora’s ceremonial passing over of such a dowry from planet to planet as a flow of humanity — spirts and spirits wedded within a mass of bodily thin matchsticks — and speedily flickering with potential fires that somehow stem from the wetness that was originally mined from mine! A wetness that I shall sadly not witness working to create new and continued life. The paradox of earth, fire and water. And the past is a foreign future.