Artist and writer currently living in Aberystwyth.
I suppose it is the heat and the not be able to stand the duvet on top of me that is keeping me from sleeping. I lie awake staring at the wall, the window, and turning this way and that. I get up to pee over and over. It will pass, he says, and I am sure that he is right, but it does suck the energy out of me. Heigh ho.
I think I have it in my shoulder now, as well as my hips and left hand. Will this ghost my late sixties, then, that sometime ache, sometime pain? I must weather it, I think, as my bones and my skeleton must. We will do it together, moving as well as we can, and accepting life’s distractions as a gift.
I am sorry. I am sorry to see him go. Watching him on PM Questions yesterday, he looked relaxed, but there was a sense of bemusement as to why he was going. I wish him well. A lordship next, perhaps?
I want to write challenging rather than difficult, or at least I feel I ought to, thus rendering the experience open to a less negative take. But it was difficult. I hadn’t expected it or my response to it. Is it easier if you cry in front of people online, instead of in person? I don’t know. Either way I feel ashamed. They kept going, telling me what I needed to hear. I am made battle-weary by it today.
He says he won’t read her article about the Israeli torturing of the doctor from Gaza. And yet, I know that I should learn about it. I should, if only to acknowledge what he is going through, day-after-day. And all those others who the world, including me, have forgotten. They are not living, but are held in this nightmare of an existence, waiting to die. Lord bless them and keep them. Please.
I keep thinking about her. Nobody should have to die in such violent circumstances, and then to be left unfound for over 24 hours. We watched a snippet of her dancing at breakfast. Gloriously bad and gloriously wonderful in its badness. I am so sorry A. May you rest in peace.
It never used to be like this, though as a child, I ate to please, as much as to sate hunger. She cooked and wanted recognition for this, understandably. And I ate what she gave. When I stopped doing this she took it personally, forgetting all those tacit suggestions that control needed to be imposed. And now I cannot stop controlling it.
We left the windows open last night, and consequently the morning’s cleaning wasn’t so bad. It has to be lived through. There is so much worse to be borne, like her murder. I am so sorry, no one should have to die like that. May she now rest in peace.
Yesterday I was full of them, and the belief that I could make them happen. Today much of that burst of enthusiam has been punctured. Reality, what that is, has set it, and my shoulders are tense with disappointment in myself and my dreaming.
It made the town eerie, buildings were lost to it. The National Library was a blur. I walked in a dream.