Artist and writer currently living in Aberystwyth.
I watch as he grows older, sometimes daily. He calls it his decreptitude. Does he watch me as I age too? When he is sleeping I see him as he will look in death. Sometimes I am fascinated, others scared. My life will be upended by the loss of him. I know this. But I cannot stop it happening. There is little grace in it. And this needs to be accepted.
I’ve been reading and writing about meaninglessness. It is an uncomfortable place for me to be in, especially given what the USA has unleashed on the world. I struggle to pull myself from the bleakness it promises. Alain de Botton’s books help, a little.
The town’s cemetery is awash with prirmroses. Their delicate yellow dominates the green. And along the avenue, amid the rows of narcissi the celandines are beginning to open. Even in the rain it is an uplifting sight. Even when there is war.
I mis-timed it all and got up at the usual hour. However, I caught up with myself and am sitting at my desk at the usual o’clock. I’m tired though. It was a a restless night, probably brought on by the huge half-gibbon moon, that yesterday glowed red. The news brings word of more misery, more uncertainty and more madness. How to be in all of this, that’s the question. I don’t know, do you?
There’s to be no Saturday morning visits to the coffee shop or cafe this month or next, or possibly even the next. Deadlines loom and I become anxious about missing them. He says that I never have. And he is right but I worry nonetheless. I always have. She used to say that I was a worrier. It touched me that she’d noticed and acknowledged it. How I loved her.
I often try to read things in my dream, letters, books or signs, but it is an impossiblity. I see the marks, the graphics of the words but I cannot decipher them. I appear to accept this, though generally the note, or as in last night’s dream, the hand-written letter is given to me or arrives just before I wake. What is its import? I will never know.
Outside it rains and rains. A mist clouds all. Though according to BBC Weather, the town is due to reach 27C today. That’ll be nice.
I often dream of them. I think I read somewhere that in dreams they are meant to represent the soul. I’m am usually sharing them or moving from or to them. Nothing is ever static. Last night I was in a doorway, then I was up close, feeling and looking intensely at a wall. Stuck. Is that it? Hemmed in? Stone close to my face, like the Rilke poem?
He was scumbling along a pavement at the bottom of Bridge Street, just beyond the Trefechan Bridge. A man who was standing on the corner pointed him out to me. He was huge. A magnificent beast. And yet, there was a vulnerability to him being there, exposed, as he was, too exposed in that urban setting. A car came round the corner and he scampered across the road and into some undergrowth. As I turned to make my way home I could see his form, cast in shadow, making its way along the bridge. Just for that moment, I had forgotten the wind.
The last few days have been trying. Was it the effect of the new moon? Who knows? I’ve felt unstable and out of control. He has been patient and forbearing, while I threw tantrums. Will such whirling ease? Will it calm? All I can do is bring myself to this desk and keep writing. I dreamt of being stuck in a train station during a gas leak, with a phone that didn’t work. Dark tunnels going nowhere faced me at every turn. But I don’t remember panicking. Can I take some comfort from that?
Georges Perec claimed to have remembered every room that he ever slept in. If I put my mind to it, I could probably do the same. I ingest space deeply. Possibly in an attempt to impose some control on it. I certainly do this with hotel rooms. I both love and dislike them. The offer such possibilities and yet are so lacking in home-ness. Which they can, of course, never be. What about their wallpapers, can you remember those?