Artist and writer currently living in Aberystwyth.
He admitted that it was the coffee. He was the same with wine. Something clicks, switching his mood from jovial to touchy. I tread carefully. I always have done. It passes quicker now. In the past it could be hours. The love is there, running like a constant seam of ore. But I am sensitive to these mood changes. I grew up with someone who was equally volatile. I was scared then. I’m not now.
There’s a scene in The Father in which his daughter’s flat is empty. The shelves are bare. She has gone. And the camera pans in to the kitchen tap, dripping. It’s that noise, that slow heartbeat of a drip, that seems to epitomise loss for me. And if not loss, abandonment, certainly. It’s a left-behind sound, a vacated one. Forgotten. My bathroom taps are dripping. I cannot tighten them enough to stop it. Water is leaking away. Wasting. It hurts me.
I cross them off. One job, one chore after another. I get no real satisfaction from doing so. For there is always another following close at their heels. I am doing this to myself, I know this. My sense of not doing enough, not being good enough, not being enough is sharper than ever. Will it ever stop? Does it take death, or at least the nearness of it, to make it stop?
My alarm clock stopped ticking yesterday. It’s happened to two now. Is it me? Is it a sign? An omen? I miss the beat, the pulse of it.
I didn’t know him personally, I just used to follow him on Instagram. I thought of him yesterday, wondering how he was and why he hadn’t posted for awhile. He’d implied that he was ill, but that he was going to hang around as long as he could. His wife wrote a message on his Insta page saying that he’d did 4 weeks ago. Poor love. Such a loving post. There but for the grace of God go I. Wrap her up in love. All of them. And J., rest in peace. E
I think about it all the time, but a lot more lately. “Even if I’ve got something,” he said, just now, “we’ve still got a few more years.” Yes. That must be so, mustn’t it? I want him to be well but more I want him to be happy. I will do what I must. And accept what I must. But walking in that sharp east wind, I feel the impending loss of him keenly.
He was evidently shocked by the news. Oh, no! he said, as he came upon his daughter’s WhatsApp message. He wasn’t a close friend, but he’d known him since school. And he didn’t know that he was ill. The same age too. It’s shaken him. Or it did last night. Death becomes commonplace in your seventies, even sixties. R.I.P.
It was a phrase that was being said in my dream just before I woke. I repeated it as I rose, pondering on its meaning. Can words spoken in a dream translate into our living reality? I am not sure. I don’t think it meant political right but more a moral rightness, but I cannot be certain, or indeed, who was saying it. They promised sun for today but now it is to be cloud. Heigh ho.
He’s losing weight. Not dramatically, but probably about a pound or so a week. He says he isn’t too concerned. Sometimes I think he is and other times I think he isn’t. He says he wants to keep on living. I am glad. Is that enough, that will to do so? I think of his death daily. How can I not? The void that is coming is impossible to contemplate.
The moon was visible tonight. As it still is, even now, though brighter yet. a yellow-white behind a trace of cloud.