Artist and writer currently living in Aberystwyth.
I’m always writing about fear because I am always fearful. Mostly of what I don’t know, and of revealing that ignorance. I must write today about what I don’t know. Or at least what I think I don’t know. Perhaps I know more than I realise and perhaps, by writing about it, I will come to know it. A little.
Be brave.
It isn’t constant. Sometimes I forget that it is is there. And yet it is. It’s there in my hips, my legs, my knees and sometimes my feet. We cannot know another’s pain, though sometimes when he is in pain, I believe that I do feel it too. I don’t know whether my pain is usual, is felt by others with bones that are rather rapidly, in my case, losing their protective cartilage. I want to manage it. To not yield to self-pity or inertia. And mostly I do. I do, honestly.
My nerves are forever on the watch. They jangle. And these days, when I walk, and make to trip, they rise up instantly and flood my body with adrenalin. Its a hard, muscle-stiffening, sensation. A flooding of hot, fluid that courses through my veins. Was it always like this? Or is everything so much nearer the surface than it used to be?
I am one here, but he made me feel it more. I’ve been trying to figure out why. And why his insistence on talking to me in Welsh when it was clear that I didn’t understand felt so aggressive. When I got home I cried. And I still don’t know why.
It lies deep. And in the morning it surfaces, there, in the forefront of my head. Today I am wracked by it. It has taken over my back, my neck and reaches down to my legs. I am rigid, sharp-edged, snappy. He understands. And I think he does. There is nothing else to do but keep going on, trying to find my way through this writing to a place of safety. Outside it pours. Duck weather, they used to say.
She told us over the phone how “the girls” were late getting her up yesterday and that she’d barely finished her breakfast before it was time for lunch. She cannot dress or wash herself unaided. Can’t even get herself to the loo. She bares it well. Or appears to. She is caught there. Complaining is useless and probably counterproductive. She must endure. As we all must, though some undoubtedly have it worse than others. I think of her often. She is impassive, unknowable. But I can feel for her, can’t I?
She told us that she doesn’t sleep. At least, not in a protracted way. She tells us that cat naps through the day, but that once long oblivion of slumber has gone. I used to sleep at home, she says. And doesn’t finish the sentence. There is no need. We understand. But not here. Not there. And not after all that losing. There’s no rest from that. Not now. Not ever.
I remember that one detail. Perhaps it was the last image of it that I had before my alarm went off. They were making my bed. Two women making my bed minutes after I’d already made it, changing the sheets and everything. I was more than a little cross, they should’ve made the other bed, not mine. And by interferring as they’d done, they’d made my bed strange to me, and the cover was the wrong side up. So what is that about?
I am an anachronism at that time in the morning. There I am in my two coats, two hats, two pairs of gloves, waterproof trousers and walking stick and there are they coatless, some in hot pants, lolling about on benches or in alleyways, lost the night before. Still in it, hot with it, giggling. I even saw two girls in matching baby pink tutus hugging their goodbyes under a lamppost. They don’t see me. And I am glad of it.
Sleepiness makes him cross, as it does me. But the sleepiness that assails him during breakfast is different. I try to keep him from falling into it. I don’t know why. Perhaps it is that image of ageing of failing of dying that I am attempting to smother. It is unkind of me. As is my irritation at him when he forgets things. I don’t like this descent. Not in him. I must be kinder.