Category: Writings

I wake with voices in my head. Conversations. An unknown dialogue, often with which I have no involvement. What is it I am hearing? They are not distressing to me. Mostly, at the least the ones that I remember, they are inconsequential. A nothing.

I wake already worrying. Oh, about all and nothing. I want to be safe while knowing that life, the universe, cannot offer that and that all I can do is live this moment, this step, this breath. That is the key, just that, that small act of acceptance of my own vulnerability. And know it, own it, hold it, close.

It comes like a hard thing. It takes over my breath, my joy and my hope. I know that it is not real. And that any harm it threatens is illusory. And yet. And yet it assails me. As it did this morning. In those wee small hours.

I’ve always fretted. And my whole body feels it. Mostly it is about not being good enough, of falling short. And yet, as I try to remind myself daily, if not hourly, death will take me soon, so take James Taylor and ‘just enjoy the ride’. After all, you’ve nothing to lose.

There is no real escape. This is what I have chosen, my life, my work and the set of circumstances with which I must live. I can pretend that getting in a car and driving somewhere away from my domestic circumstances will make it all different. It doesn’t. And then there is the return, that slow picking-up where I left it all. That’s the worst of it.

It has been going awry for some days now, ever since I couldn’t log in to LBU’s site and the technician got me to change the browser. I don’t like it. It is unfamiliar and keeps sending me to places and uploading stuff I do not want. I know that, in the whole scheme of things and the horrors that are going on in the skies, it is nothing, but it unsettles me when I need not to be so. And today is a supervision.

So many of my dreams involve walking. Not surprising really, considering how much I do of it in my waking hours. Mostly the environments are urban, sometimes at night, sometimes in the day. Last night, I had to go back. Firstly because I had left my handbag behind. I was stressed. But returning to what I think was a restaurant, it had been found and put in a cupboard. I watched as she got it out for me, out of a cupboard that was chockfull of stuff. Then I was going back again, back to a house where there was washing machine full of clothes that I had no time to wash. All so banal, but at the time it was significant. The going back certainly is, was. Where was I going back to, and what was I trying to refind? Will the next few dreams begin to make sense of this for me? Shall I ask them?

He died in hospital after they’d turned off his life-support machine. No one mourned him, his crime too heinous for words, for thoughts beyond those for those two young lives he took. I am sorry for all the pain that was caused by his action, all that loss, but I am also sorry that his life ended that way. A life that must have been a living hell. Is there redemption, can there ever be any in prison? So much, too much grief.

We often do it and usually at breakfast time. He says where shall we go and the fantasy escapes begin. This morning it was London. A week’s stay at the Warldorf or the Savoy or being more sensible, the Rembrandt with a balcony overlooking the V&A. We both enter into the spirit of it. And are lifted.

I walk under it and am lifted. Such an ethereal light. Unreal, surreal. Could we do without it? asks Alan Davies. No. For without it the dark would be complete.