They help. I don’t know why. The schmaltz of them, that razzmataz, I am a sucker for it. They don’t take any of the agitation, the sadness away but they do counter the bleakness. A little bit. So thank you.
Sometimes it is all too much. She has had to have a lumbar puncture. It is too much. How do you explain such pain, such fear to one so young? I weep for her, for her parents, and for those other children losing their grandfather by inches.
A young life. A flower. An old fashioned-name. A shining child, now sick. It is heartbreaking. His brother sounds sanguine, when he is not. It’s the curable one, he says. I hope so. Oh, but the anguish they must be feeling. Poor, poor ones.
He had it when we were here, looking out through this window on the sunlit roofs of this sharp-lighted, little seaside town. He was visiting her when it happened. He has pneumonia now. He may have already gone.
It’s been a week since I saw her. Seven days. I wonder how long it will be before I see her again. That look on her face after she’d opened the door cut through me. It still does.
I see it too sharply. It’s the detail of it, it arrests my eyes, always. Yesterday it was the torn net curtains in Flat no: 1. The windows had been opened and the wind was blowing them inwards. It was a bleak scene, regardless of the sunshine.
Someone has moved in. We’d been hearing noises from down there all day and the day before her chest of drawers had been removed from outside the front door. It’s a family, with two young children. The father is in the army and has been quartered here. He told him he isn’t happy with it. I don’t blame him, its a bleak, unkempt space. I thought of them last night, unable to feel at home in her once-much-loved home.
Mostly it isn’t. Life that is. Or at least it isn’t from our perspective, which, by all accounts is a narrow one. My heart aches for them. They weren’t the aggressor and yet it seems that they are the ones that must concede. Must it be so? Cannot someone intervene? I hold my breath, waiting, as I am sure they are for some better outcome….
I understand why she did it. She was in distress, and the end of her tether. I feel for her, even then, in all my hurt at what was essentially a rejection, I felt for her. She had to do it. To shut me and all that I came with, out. So she did. But she did ask him to call me, to explain, as best he could. It was something. Some thing.
Travelling doesn’t agree with me. My head loves the adventure, the escaping, but my body struggles to maintain its much-needed equilibrium. And I don’t sleep, at least not enough. Home now, and the pieces must be picked up and work resumed. But slowly, for today.