Category: Writings

Can I demand it? Can I insist that he takes them away? I want quiet. Peace. Those machines are demanding, my heart beats faster when they are on. Shall I trip their switches? I feel like it. Can I insist that he takes them away?

I have to believe in it. No, I do. I do believe whether I feel compelled to or not. I trust in it, even when all is bleak, as it so often is. Like now. Goodness will come through and the good will survive and shine all that they have on the rest of us. Tyrants will not be rewarded. It cannot be so in a just world. Peace will come. Let it be fair, kind and lasting.

It was the tiniest hole, made by the rubbing of a water pipe from the back of the washing machine against the chipboard circle it feeds through. Is it anyone’s fault? Possibly. So much damage, not just in this flat but several below. I am sorry for us and for them. The machines blast away trying to dry it all out. They stole my sleep and my equanimity. I need to be steady now. Calm down, work and get my body out of its flight mode. All will be well. One day I will see it as a gift.

It’s been remiss of late. A tawdry showing. Sometimes it has come out in the late afternoon but always as a milky, half-hearted attempt. I know it is nothing. In the whole scheme of horrors that are currently being perpetrated, it is nothing. But I am lifted by sunshine. Can it come, soon?

I found out yesterday that I have to return nineteen books to the library. Nineteen, of the, what have become precious, tomes that currently fill my bookshelves. It threw me completely. But there is nothing for it but to return them and hope, possibly beyond hope, that they will let me renew them and carry them all the way (200 miles or so) home.

We were in a coffee shop. He’d gone off to collect his coffee from the counter and on his return to the table he was scowling. He’s just farted, he said, inclining his head towards the man who was sitting behind him, a really loud one, I just heard it. He also told me how the same man had stared at him really aggressively, and how he’d stared back. Perhaps he may not be well, I said, remembering how the man’s wife had, on leaving to go to the toilet, told him what she was going to do in a slow, laboured way. Yes, maybe you are right, he said. Perhaps he has dementia. We both watched him then, when he and his wife rose to leave. He looked far away, unresponsive, lost. Poor love.

It was only a dream. We were on a bus, he and I and I lost him. He must’ve got off somewhere, I remember thinking. I wasn’t concerned. Perhaps I should’ve been. Then a man telephoned me. I don’t remember answering my phone, just hearing his voice. He’s had a stroke, he said, and there can’t be any rules any more. The rules have to stop. He sounded angry with me, as if he held me responsible for his condition. Was I? He put him on the phone. I had fun on the bus, he said.

It haunts me. And it is the same whenever I am to begin writing something new, something that is yet inchoate. And now that fear is increased by the spectre of a new, additional supervisor. He looms over me as I try to begin. I must get over this. Push all of it aside and just begin, write what is mine, what is in me, find my voice and all those other platinudinous things…blah, blah. Just write, Ellen. That’s all, Just write.

I am hurting again. My back has been pulled. Overdoing it, he says. The hurt makes it stiff, rigid, umoving. And I am sorry for it. Things were improving. So be it. I shall sit and work, hot water bottles on my back and tummy and wait till it passes. I am blessed, regardless, now and always.

Just liquids. No solids. I’m to give a try. It might work or it might not. I have a choice, others don’t. So far the hunger is at bay. Perhaps it won’t come. Outside it rains and rains.