I’m standing in front of a grave. A mess of 3d polygons, a glitching model, a poorly rendered substitute, a grave. The device weighs heavily on the back of my skull, its headband constricting uncomfortably, the goggles crushing my nose. But I keep my head straight and stare ahead, because he is here.
He, dancing, living, breathing, crying, dying. All in fast forward, slow motion, torn apart and recreated by thousands of stills, captures, the painful scan after he passes out of my hands unbreathing. In the expert control of the computer he grows and shrinks, ages and returns to youth, a picture of all that could be and all that never was.
And yet, the dancing ghost of my child sometimes clips through his digital gravestone. With a ginger tug of the controls, I reposition it slightly, so as not to break the illusion. So much time spent building this garden, so little time to remember him by. I was to teach him Chaucer, when he came of age, Chaucer to ward away the Windrush conspiracies and the EDL and the blood-and-soil gangs, Chaucer to remind him that his skin (so dark, like his father’s) could still love a language that hated him. I can hear the lines in my head now:
The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne…
I whispered them to him, as he passed from my hands unbreathing.