It takes him over. He cannot contain it. It must out. And it did. Yesterday. He told her that as a result he was in the dog house. He wasn’t. I understood. Totally. It’s harder when his rage is directed at me. Then the forgiving takes longer. Not yesterday. I saw it clearly. And it’s ok.
It’s a contentious subject for some. I became too strident. She took offence. I didn’t mean her to. I apologised, and I think she understood. But her talk had unsettled me. I’ve never known the right course of action. Perhaps there is no such thing. It’s an emotional thing, our relationship with food and eating. Well, it certainly is for me. I want to understand, my relationship in particular and to do better by my body. For, all too often, it doesn’t seem to like the decisions I make on its behalf. Do better, Ellen. Do better.
It’s coming. I feel it in the flat more than outside. A beginning of the nipping, sometimes biting of my toes, and the ends of my fingers feeling cold and often numb. He reads out the sunrise times up until the end of December when it is nearly 8.30 am. Shall we survive it? It’s a closing in. And I don’t want to go out into it. That dark. That full dark.
It skins me. I am stripped bare by these public engagements. They are small things but, as far I am concerned, loaded with judgement. I know that I don’t see clearly, that my response is a long ago one, remembered and forever saved as a default position. Nevertheless, it is excruciating.
I judge myself harshly. I try not to do the same with others. I know I do though. I hear it inside my head. Endeavouring always to attempt to see the world from their point of view, such judgement is, in time, ameloriated. We do we do it? Is it a form of self-bolstering? I don’t know. It’s a learnt behaviour certainly. Just be kind. That’s all. Just kind. Be kind to your own kind. Which, by the way, is everyone. Humankind be kind. That’s all.
I wept for them yesterday. Though all the time knowing that I was also weeping for myself and the grief I feel at having to live in a world were such suffering is experienced by so many. And not knowing what to do about it. She wrote of a man who’d lost all his family and how he just kept walking around the rubble in circles. Around and around, circling the ground. I cannot watch such scenes, reading about them is bad enough. And yet, we must know. We cannot hide from it. Ever.
He writes of our need to ‘fix’ the space – to control it, to impose order on it, to find a safe place within it. He is right. It takes me back. And I miss it.
A good word. A solid word. A kind one, mostly. The take hold, to have hold of, to hold, to hold fast, to hold still, to hold tight. May it hold. That peace, that shaky peace. May it hold fast, tight, still and endure.
It’s been a nasty affair, the brokering of it. But it will mean peace, at least for a time until the belligerent organisers of it once me decide to take up their arms. Let us be satisfied that the lost will be returned, though more dead than alive, and the hungry will be fed. Thank you.
They’ve hurt these last few days. I feel the rawness of the bone. There is no cushion, just hardness against hardness. I want to manage. To keep what is mine, that is, what has been given me (including the pain) and live as well as I can with it. But it’s the sometimes catching, that throws me. That unexpectedness of pain. Give me strength.
And may the peace deal brokered today hold. Let there be a cease from the fighting, the killing, the maiming, the stealing, the hunger, the pain, the fear and loss. Please.