Sometimes I know them, others are strangers to look at but I know them by a voice, or a gesture. They promise tenderness, sometimes it is given, other times I wake before it can be. The memory of them lingers till long into the morning.
I think about living abroad when I am older, and he has gone. I think I might. It would be an adventure. A new kind of learning….
It was a messy start. I couldn’t seem to get a grip on time. All those pesky little jobs to do, that seem to eat it up. I had a quick walk and made two attempts at drawing. Uck. No one was about except me and a Hovis lorry driver. The bird song came later.
She was in hospital when he called. I’ve got shingles, she said. I think about how destabilising it must be for, who ostensibly lives in one room, to be rushed into hospital away from the accustomed safety, though narrow, of her now confined life. She is at the mercy of others, totally. I feel for her. She is back in the home now. That not-home but home it must be, until…
Am I alone in not getting excited about the Artemis trip around earth? It leaves me cold. Of course, their achievement and bravery is monumentual, but why, why do it? All that money and those resources used up, and for what? I am a luddite, a stuck-in-the-mud, I know. But surely there is much to put right, to understand and pay attention to here on this planet first. Shouldn’et we try to solve our problems here (most of which are of our making) before trying to discover if we can live elsewhere? I don’t know. I don’t, I know….
The flat smelt of it. We don’t buy or cook bread anymore. It must have been from the flat underneath. I like the smell. It smells of home.
A woman from the health board called yesterday, asking if I’d like an appointment with a private eye hospital to have my cataracts operated on. I accepted the offer but with trepidation. He says its an easy procedure. I will have to yield, for the mist increases. But I am scared.
They come to us as statistics. The people who are killed and the families that are left bereft and impoverished are unknown to us – their names, their faces, their lives never told. And it isn’t OK, even in the name of war. Any life taken is a crime, an abomination. Let us know this, and feel this. And stop.
Will it hold? Who knows? It’s all a madness. ‘Cry havoc, and let loose the dogs of war’, at least I think that was the Shakespeare quote. Havoc has been cried. What now? Why, oh why, can’t we live in peace?
Apparently it is impossible, they say that the part of the brain that reads and writes isn’t active during sleep. And yet the last two nights I have done just that – read and written. The first time it was in Norwegian, last night in English. I’m always writing by hand, with an ink pen and, as with these last two dreams in red. Last night the word was LIKE. There is a kind of brain control being exercised, certainly. And it fascinates me.
We do this sometimes, usually at breakfast, where he looks up deals as I wash up. He’d rather we took a villa, whereas I want a hotel. And to do absolutely nothing. It probably won’t happen. I will talk us of out due to the expense and the effort involved. But the dreaming, nonetheless, is pleasant.
They found him. I prayed that they would. And I am glad. It is something. A life saved in all this mayhem and mindlessness. Let Easter shine its light and hope today. Let there be peace. Please.