Artist and writer currently living in Aberystwyth.
He asks her afternoon about what she had for lunch. It amuses both him and her, I think. He asks her what score she will give it. Mostly it’s nothing or, if it is cauliflower cheese, as it was yesterday, she might give it 0.5. Turkey or Lemon Sole both get 5s. Small things. Small happenings but they frame her day. I like hearing them talk together. It’s a good, good thing. A belonging thing.
I’ve been writing about it and last night I dreamt of it. It was the juxtaposition of my mother, a series of books and that. So appalling, that it woke me. I know it is all symbolic and that in dreams one’s values and behaviour doesn’t follow the same codes and strictures. I want to get to the bottom of it, but I also don’t want to think about it. A problem indeed.
It gave me a pang when I read Paul Hogarth saying that, as a young man, all he wanted to do was travel and draw. Oh, how I want that too. I don’t have his skill, at least not yet, what would ten years of doing just that do for my draughtsmanship. I miss the seeing, the escaping and that kind of fresh-eyed drawn reporting. Can I do it?
I love the sparking that reading and discussing those texts gives me. I do. Truly. But sharing my thoughts, tentative though they are, leaves me feeling skinned for hours afterwards. It’s also the online thing. Seeing my face, talking. It unnerves me. It is not what I am used to. And I cannot get the balance right – do I say too much, or say too little? Are my contributions facile or worthwhile? I cannot tell. Does it matter? It shouldn’t do. Why are my interactions with other beings so excruciating?
What is that liminal time between sleep and waking? It’s a pulling, a being prised from a shell feeling. I don’t like it. I am adrift. Proust described himself as “stupid with sleep”. I am too but also brought low. I cannot rise to the occasion of a new day, I must steel myself, present my thanks but also prepare for my engagement with the still dark and all that dread.
Is it bickering? We snap and carp, not often, but sometimes. It’s usually because one of us is tired or in pain or just irritable. He gets sleepy at breakfast and I made scratchy by fears of the work that is to come. I wish it were otherwise. It isn’t elegant. And it belies the love we feel for each other. Perhaps I just have to let it be.
He was meant to have met up with friends but didn’t turn up. When they went round to his house they found him dead. He’d died alone. A heart attack possibly. So sad. So very sad. An awkward man but one who evidently sought company. R.I.P And then there is the little girl going back to school, her face puffy with steriods. And then there is the woman standing outside the coffee shop telling me that she’s had a health scare. She’s been bleeding for four months, said her partner. Poor love. Her eyes carried her fear, her stress. What can you say?
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?