Author: Ellen Bell

The night is pitch, a few stars and a wisp of clouds. At least there was no rain. Though don’t I really mind it. With my new coat I am kept dry and the spray on my face is sensual, pleasant even. But it was good to stride out in my other coat, my legs not held in. Did I tell you that there are straps inside my new coat to Velcro around your thighs? Is it for when you are on horseback perhaps? A smidgen of Christmas decorations about town, some are left on by mistake, others light up living rooms and student bedrooms. So early. Just advent. How I love advent. I will never forget that service at the Abbey. I was so moved, so grief-stricken. Will it ever go? Perhaps that is how it is to be. So be it. I can live it. I can carry it. Work now. An early one. The lead story, she told me. Then home to work and then the phone call. I don’t do well with phones and yet they feature so strongly in my working life. I am still dark. It is the winter, it is the time of life, it is me. Who knows? Live it. Live it well. Be dark. Be darker still.

I’ve felt it these last few days. What is it about? I cannot fathom it. It takes hold. My joy, my pleasure, my lightness is over there – separate from me. I see it through glass. I must just live it. Live it through. Why don’t you take something? he asks. I could, I suppose but I am scared too. For all it’s dark at least I am feeling it. I want to come through to the other side – lighter, wiser, more knowing, steeped in the deeper knowing. I start my walk and it begins. Usually little things first. A fret about work, about my writing, about time and then it has taken over. My body bends with it. My shoulders curve, my back will not straighten. I cannot open, my breathing is constrained. And yet, I know joy. I have known joy. All is taken care of. I have enough to eat, enough to drink, clothes to wear, shelter and love. I have love. I am cherished, cared for, noticed and acknowledged. All is good. All is as it should be. Let it be. Let the darkness come, let it enfold and take me over. I will come through it. There will be lightness, soon. If only at the end.

It was a typical anxiety dream I suppose. I was on a beach, or at least near some water and talking to someone who was just in front of me. A woman, I think. And I saw its head, just the top of it with its eyes, sliding through the water. I felt the panic. It came for her first and I threw some food at it, something completely inappropriate. Was it a present someone had sent me? It was wrapped up anyway, though the crocodile seemed satisfied and slunk back into the water with it in its mouth. No one was hurt. All was well. Just a frisson of fear. Real fear. Proper, sensible fear.

The wind was strong this morning – I had to push my way through it, into it.

Students and late-night clubbers wandered about, holding onto each other.

What’s the matter? A man was asking his girlfriend. She was looking away.

Nothing.

What is the matter? He asked again.

Nothing, she said with more vehemence this time.

Down by the station two lads hover by the taxi rank. One of them is on the phone.

Hey boy, you alright? Silence as he waits for an answer.

You’re flat out?

Was he hoping for a lift?

There’s a huge marquee in St Michaels car park, you can see it from the Prom. Has the church had to shut temporarily? The wind was buffeting it.

Such blackness. No Aberdovey. And many of the street lights aren’t working. Just a few months to go. The shortest day in just under three weeks.

There’s a smell in the house. It’s always been there but it’s strongest when I’ve been away. What is it? Is it a kind of glue that has been used to fix the tiles? Is it cooking odours from the flat downstairs creeping up through our second bathroom, as they do? No, I don’t think so, it stinks of something vaguely chemical, that and a smidgen of decay. It makes me feel nauseous. And I try and often fail not to take it out on him. Have you aired it enough? Did you open the windows? Is it him? Is it a sign of his soon to be demise? Is that what distresses me so?

I’ve cleaned it today and the smell dissipates for a while. I can breathe easy.

I’ve ordered sage bundles. That should do it – if it doesn’t set off the fire alarm first. Sage is an odd smell – dry, almost salty. A purifier and cleanser. I like it.

It’ll be full of big women with bags, she said. And it was. Comforting women in the main with home-knitted hats and scarfs and bad perms. It got too much after awhile – clogged as it was with all those women. But the details were lovely. Rifling around in boxes of threads. It reminds me of something like home. x

I’m not fully grounded yet. I’m home but still floating in the ether somewhere. I need to get down to some proper work. Today. Now. But there are so many bits that I want to clear out of my head first. I chant lists as I walk. Potatoes, Post Office and email list. That was one of them. Just to remember – to commit it to memory. I need order. I want to tidy, to clean to buy a load of organising drawers, boxes and containers just to impose order. To feel better, calmer. It is in my gift. Now I need to sit and breathe and then work. Just work. All will be well. Then.

The answer was cherry. We’d got it wrong. It wasn’t discomfort but disconcert. Making the first letter of the one across c not f. And yesterday evening was not much better. It was dire, I said this morning. No, he said, not dire but we should’ve done better. I was tired and he was a little distrait. It’s my going away, it unsettles both of us, always. We both like the flow, the steadiness, me most of all I think, and I yet I always break it. I am always the one leaving. There is nothing he wants to do, and I? Well, I want to do everything, feel everything, see everything, and yet, and yet I want to stay still, be here, be safe, unchallenged and whole. I handle it by making lists and over preparing, over thinking. I want him and the house to be looked after – for everything to remain in place as if I were still here. And yet, I won’t be. And it won’t be the same. Why should it? I will be elsewhere, having a different experience. And it will be good. Once I’ve loosed the strings of my attachment to here and to him, it will be good. The adventure will be a marvellous one. And I will raise myself up to meet it, greet it and embrace it. It is just the unknown, like writing this review today. Will it come? Will I find the words?

Of course. It always comes. Always.

I wish I hadn’t said I’d go now, she told me when I called her. I know how she feels, he said. She is a home-bird, like the farmer on the podcast who’s never lived outside Lincoln. She is the same. She has no curiosity, seemingly, to know of other places, to find herself somewhere strange. Her daughter is unwell. They are both a little sickly. And yet, she walks and walks as I do. I asked if it was her church that had organised it. Oh, no, she said, it is for the over sixties of the neighbouring villages. They organise trips, she said, though I never go. I don’t like the coach journeys. And they have this Christmas lunch every year. She said the name of the place but I didn’t catch it. The food is meant to be good. A three-course meal, you order it beforehand, she continued, I’m having the melon to start, then turkey and then I’ve ordered a gluten-free Christmas pudding. I don’t normally have pudding but I thought for a change.

The clue was fruit. Six letters beginning with f. F something e then something r something. I thought about it as I walked. Nothing.

They were ahead of me as I walked home. He had an eagle tattooed on the back of his coat. She wore a tiny mini skirt, ankle socks and ankle boots. On the back of each of her thighs was tattooed a ribbon.

In my dream I was staring down at it. It was a bath, a white bath, quite small and narrow, not new but clean. I love roll-top baths, I heard myself say to someone and yet it wasn’t a roll-top but an old-fashioned, common-o-garden bath. It was sunk into the floor, very low. Why had I dreamt of this? And why did it feel so momentous? I must have stood looking at it for a long time. Is it because I am going somewhere where there are no baths (well I am assuming that is the case) and will have to make do with showers, when I love bathing so much? Perhaps. Or is it more symbolic than that? About cleaning myself, my thoughts, my life, maybe. I’ve been thinking about the empty space project a lot, where I go in and prepare a space for work. Where I clean it through and through and then paint it white. I don’t make work, for the cleaning, the preparing is the work. There is peace in it, I think. All those empty, unloved spaces, I want to see their potential and make them open, clean, white, ready.

The Christmas decorations are up along Great Darkgate Street. Are they turning them on soon? I long to see the London lights. It will be fun. It will make me ready.

There’s an inset day on Thursday, she said, zapping my apples, I might put them up then. She’s already told us about her little street scene. What with elves and snow? I asked. No, real people, she said, streets and things. She is so excited. Her eyes light up. And will you let the children help? Oh, I don’t think, so, she said, laughing.

We’re watching Brooklyn again. I lap it up. It is gorgeous. And he is enchanting, as is she, but he is especially so. He inhabits the state of being in love so beautifully. That young state. I felt such nostalgia, such joy, such exuberance. I haven’t felt such euphoria of late, for a long while even. Has it passed? Has age withered it’s possibility? I do hope not. I lay in bed thinking of him and what he represents and couldn’t sleep for the idea of him and all those who have gone before. My imaginings. Not real but so tempting. So enthralling. And now I am old. So be it. There is kindness, steadiness and peace, sometimes. It is enough, mostly.

They must’ve finished, most of the white Panavision trucks are gone. However, I did see, as I walked that part of the Prom a gorgeous old Rolls Royce, complete with wood interior strapped onto a pick-up. It was in pristine condition. And a couple of yards ahead of it, most bemusingly, was an old Ford, I think, with peeling paint and battered chassis.

Did something happen in Aberystwyth? I asked him when I went in to wake him. Are they commemorating something? I know Charles came here to study for awhile.

Oh, no, he said, they’ll just be using the Castle and the Prom.

They’d asked if I might participate but gave me so little time to respond that I missed the call. Ah, well. Next time, maybe.

It didn’t rain this morning, so no big coat. And it was mild. A few students were about. And a girl tripping along a back street in clickety-clackety heels and a white, sleeveless fringed-dress.

It changed the shape of my day. A phone-call, finally. And just when I was busy. She got married in San Francisco telling nobody. She sounded happy. Looked happy. Such a pretty girl. She makes me calm. She is steady. A rock, except for her little anxieties. What were they – spiders, flying, dirt? Are they little?  I walked up to work. It was gorgeous, I could see the whole town before me against a blood-red sunset.

I’m unsettled by my writing, why? Is it the exposure that is coming? Candid and funny, they wrote about hers. Is mine? She has so much more to lose, or does she? And then I find the competition. That’s nice. That’s something I can do to get it out there, to get it read.

Good fortune. He smiled. He was so happy. Well done. What have I done? It is fortune, good fortune. Our good fortune. And see, the sun is shining too.

So much to do. Don’t forget to breathe. Sometimes that is quite enough.

Is it change for changes sake or am I justified in wanting it? I know that it’s an inner change that is needed not an outer but can’t an outer alteration instigate an inner one too? I yearn for simplicity. Is it there already and I just can’t see it? Probably. I am blessed I know this. I have much autonomy and freedom but I don’t have the security, the safety of knowing what is coming and when. My time isn’t always my own. Wouldn’t another form of work bring a much needed certainty? Or am I pie-in-the-sky-ing again? Do I do that? Am I unrealistic? I want to work hard, I want to earn my way but I also need to do my real work. I need space to develop it, to become better. We discuss the options and I still don’t know what is for the best. And yet I long to change. To throw it out and begin again. To order, to sort out. To wipe the slate clean. It’s all the paraphernalia of working for a huge organisation. It is so shabby, so bitty. And trying to log on a moment ago, and having to change my password and forgetting my last and then having to ring up to report it. Ugh! Such a waste of time when I want to be writing. Or am I just procrastinating? Write then. Just write. Let the rest take care of themselves. I am blessed. He is so kind. So patient. I am in a no-mans land of uncertainty. Let it be so.

I saw him sleeping in the Prom shelter yesterday but not today. The wind was strong. Students still milled about, shouting, coatless.

The morning is trying to break through.

My writing was turgid yesterday, slow and clunky. Keep going, write yourself through it.

Nothing is happening. Everything has ground to a halt.

Your copy will be with you soon, she writes. Good. A fantastic issue, she writes.

Find your calm. It is there. It is always there. Stand there in it. Let the rest fall away.