Category: Writings

I am one here, but he made me feel it more. I’ve been trying to figure out why. And why his insistence on talking to me in Welsh when it was clear that I didn’t understand felt so aggressive. When I got home I cried. And I still don’t know why.

It lies deep. And in the morning it surfaces, there, in the forefront of my head. Today I am wracked by it. It has taken over my back, my neck and reaches down to my legs. I am rigid, sharp-edged, snappy. He understands. And I think he does. There is nothing else to do but keep going on, trying to find my way through this writing to a place of safety. Outside it pours. Duck weather, they used to say.

She told us over the phone how “the girls” were late getting her up yesterday and that she’d barely finished her breakfast before it was time for lunch. She cannot dress or wash herself unaided. Can’t even get herself to the loo. She bares it well. Or appears to. She is caught there. Complaining is useless and probably counterproductive. She must endure. As we all must, though some undoubtedly have it worse than others. I think of her often. She is impassive, unknowable. But I can feel for her, can’t I?

She told us that she doesn’t sleep. At least, not in a protracted way. She tells us that cat naps through the day, but that once long oblivion of slumber has gone. I used to sleep at home, she says. And doesn’t finish the sentence. There is no need. We understand. But not here. Not there. And not after all that losing. There’s no rest from that. Not now. Not ever.

I remember that one detail. Perhaps it was the last image of it that I had before my alarm went off. They were making my bed. Two women making my bed minutes after I’d already made it, changing the sheets and everything. I was more than a little cross, they should’ve made the other bed, not mine. And by interferring as they’d done, they’d made my bed strange to me, and the cover was the wrong side up. So what is that about?

I am an anachronism at that time in the morning. There I am in my two coats, two hats, two pairs of gloves, waterproof trousers and walking stick and there are they coatless, some in hot pants, lolling about on benches or in alleyways, lost the night before. Still in it, hot with it, giggling. I even saw two girls in matching baby pink tutus hugging their goodbyes under a lamppost. They don’t see me. And I am glad of it.

Sleepiness makes him cross, as it does me. But the sleepiness that assails him during breakfast is different. I try to keep him from falling into it. I don’t know why. Perhaps it is that image of ageing of failing of dying that I am attempting to smother. It is unkind of me. As is my irritation at him when he forgets things. I don’t like this descent. Not in him. I must be kinder.

It was in recognition of Winnie-the-Pooh day and she told us that she was going to go. She wanted to support the other resident who was hosting it. She calls her Jan, and often talks about how she waters some of the plants in the garden, including hers. I think she has a soft spot for her. Nevetheless, it is unusual for her to be sociable. She said that she was going to take her Eeyore along but not her Winnie-the-Pooh, as he was too Disneyfied. She said it went OK, that there were about a dozen people there. And that, though they were offered refreshments, surprisingly there was no tea.

It affects his mood. Sometimes it lifts him, but mostly it makes him snappy and quick to anger, or at least irritation. Was coffee responsible for his lowering of lightness this morning? Possibly. He says tea does the same for me. And he is probably right, though in my case it, according to him, makes me over ebullient. I’d have that any day.

They were tiny, too tiny for the child that they belonged to. I was holding them in my own hands when the alarm went off. I remember the frailty of them and the light shining through the skin. The child, who could’ve been L., was have a tantrum. Holding her hands quietened her. It was a complicated, new moon inspired, dream. I was trying to get somewhere and had failed to find it, twice. Then I found a piece of paper with an address on it. And then there was a photograph. I know that place I said to him (for he was there too), I’ve been there.

It’s funny how reading and writing are virtually impossible to do in dreamland.