Author: Ellen Bell

I woke from a dream in which I’d lost him. We’d been walking through a built-up urban area and he’d suddenly vanished. I looked down a side road to see if I could see him, but nothing. Vanished. I started calling out his name. Over and over, in a kind of wail. People stared at me. One woman said she’d go and look for him, soon. I woke then. Looking at my clock, I thought it said, 1.00 am but it was 12.00. I’d put on my lights by then and so left them on and dozed. I dreamt I was without him again. Another road but a rural one this time. I was crawling along it, before I realised that I could actually walk it instead. I saw a pile of herringbone coats like his, in the road. And a woman in the distance, teetering in heels, carrying a take-away coffee. I wasn’t distressed. The air was springlike and a milky sun shone. I just kept walking forward, to what I know not.

I used to think it was a passive option. Now, I’m not so sure. There does seem a power in it. It’s a choice after all. An act of autonomy. This is how it is and I accept it, whether I like it or not. I choose to accept this. I will live with it, as it is. Like these Christmas time blues. I want to run from them, fight them, smother them. How about if I just sit with them, look at them, cry with them, and about them, and then just let them pass? Might that work? Boxing Day and I’m almost over it. My back is less tight. And, though the dark outside persists, I am ready to open, and to work.

It cannot be anything else, no matter how I fantasise to the contrary. They are gone. She is gone. She is gone and with her the hope of Christmases that can never be. Today I am ready to accept this fact, though my body still aches with the grief of it. Take it slow today. Do little and let the mind do its wondering….

I miss you most on Christmas Eve. I miss you so much that it hurs my heart. You made everything so beautiful. As a child I marvelled at it all – the tree, the table, the lights, the decorations, the smell, the sounds and the care. It stressed you but you did it year in year out without demur. Except at the end when everything that you’d loved and hoped for began to unravel. Thank you for those Christmasses and the life you have given me. R.I.P. x

They are such bringers of joy to me. And now to him. Simple things. Tiny buttons of light that pierce through the blackness of this now midwinter time. I shall be loathe to let them go come New Year.

I’ve an appointment in town. A break from my desk and this computer. I will lie down on a raised couch and be attended to. I will sleep and probably snore. It will be restful. And I shall enter into, albeit for a short time, another person’s life. That, for me at least, is restful. I listen to stories of another family’s Christmas, the food that will be cooked, the decorations put out, the presents bought. And I will picture it as I listen. All of it. In detail. And I will celebrate it. Another’s pleasure, that isn’t mine and yet is.

I didn’t get it. I missed the irony. I felt stupid. Humour can be so specific. I need to be comfortable, safe to laugh or to get it when a leg is being pulled. He didn’t want my attempt at softness, at empathy, and batted it away. The joke about the sardines went over my head. He let it go. I care for him, more now since I’ve been drawing in his house. I kiss his cheek. But we don’t gel. Not really. And it doesn’t matter. Does it?

Being winter their window hasn’t been open. Last night it was. They live in a flat in the opposite block to ours. Nevertheless, it seems close, particularly in the carrying of sounds. Before they arrived the couple that were there used to hold dinner parties. She had a very high, raucous laugh. It would penitrate into our flat. He couldn’t stand it. With this family its their little girl. Well, not so little, eight, nine or even ten perhaps. She has a temper. A real temper. She screeches, screams, yells, argues and shouts. For hours. She woke me at just before ten pm. I saw a man’s arm, presumably her father’s, reaching out to pull the window to. I still heard her from behind the glass. I rarely hear her parents’ remonstrations. Do they leave her to it, hoping that she will wear herself out and sleep? It rattles me, her distress becomes mine and finding sleep again is hard. Is she unhappy or is it just temper, encouraged when she was young or at least not tempered? Bless her, bless them and me. I am soggy as a result.

I never found it for myself, and I suspect I never will. A home, that is. A space that reflects who I want to be. Is that a home? Probably not. I see the cheapness, the cut corners and the old dirt that I cannot dispel. But there is space, and light, and for the time being it is ours. I think of other peoples’ homes (and lives) and they seem nearer perfect. Though I know that this is never the case. I have made other choices. I have been freer than most. Free to create. And I am loved. So loved. It is enough. Just somtimes, the notion of beauty sings her siren song……

One of the users of Instagram posted a comment about the fact that, as he wrote, art schools haven’t “trained” students for over 40 years. He does qualify this a little by saying that to do so they’d have to had a notion what that training might be. I know what he means. We don’t have the technical skill of our artistic forbears, but we have other forms of expression that are surely just as valid. I wish I’d been trained, though I suspect that if I had I would be made rigid by it. I don’t have natural skill. I make do. Make shift with both drawing and writing. That’s all. It hurts sometimes, because I know it should be better, all of it. But I strive and that is the result. Art is bigger now, more democratic. I think I like it that way.