There is no real escape. This is what I have chosen, my life, my work and the set of circumstances with which I must live. I can pretend that getting in a car and driving somewhere away from my domestic circumstances will make it all different. It doesn’t. And then there is the return, that slow picking-up where I left it all. That’s the worst of it.
It has been going awry for some days now, ever since I couldn’t log in to LBU’s site and the technician got me to change the browser. I don’t like it. It is unfamiliar and keeps sending me to places and uploading stuff I do not want. I know that, in the whole scheme of things and the horrors that are going on in the skies, it is nothing, but it unsettles me when I need not to be so. And today is a supervision.
So many of my dreams involve walking. Not surprising really, considering how much I do of it in my waking hours. Mostly the environments are urban, sometimes at night, sometimes in the day. Last night, I had to go back. Firstly because I had left my handbag behind. I was stressed. But returning to what I think was a restaurant, it had been found and put in a cupboard. I watched as she got it out for me, out of a cupboard that was chockfull of stuff. Then I was going back again, back to a house where there was washing machine full of clothes that I had no time to wash. All so banal, but at the time it was significant. The going back certainly is, was. Where was I going back to, and what was I trying to refind? Will the next few dreams begin to make sense of this for me? Shall I ask them?
He died in hospital after they’d turned off his life-support machine. No one mourned him, his crime too heinous for words, for thoughts beyond those for those two young lives he took. I am sorry for all the pain that was caused by his action, all that loss, but I am also sorry that his life ended that way. A life that must have been a living hell. Is there redemption, can there ever be any in prison? So much, too much grief.
We often do it and usually at breakfast time. He says where shall we go and the fantasy escapes begin. This morning it was London. A week’s stay at the Warldorf or the Savoy or being more sensible, the Rembrandt with a balcony overlooking the V&A. We both enter into the spirit of it. And are lifted.
I walk under it and am lifted. Such an ethereal light. Unreal, surreal. Could we do without it? asks Alan Davies. No. For without it the dark would be complete.
It’s a small, modest ambition. I used to have larger ones. Not now. Not now. I work to distract myself from the inevitable, and yet I am not scared of it. In fact I welcome it, whole-heartedly. It’s the living that I struggle with. What to do with all that which I can have no effect on, that I cannot change. That is the struggle. I am trying to learn how to yield, to accept what it is. That is my real life’s work. But how long do I have?
His friend is eighty today, and they are to have lunch together. He told me yesterday that he’s known him sixty years, that’s almost as long as I have been alive. They used to make each other laugh, though less so now. Perhaps that is down to the lack of proximity or age, or both. I am glad that they are still connected though. So much of that has fallen away. Though I shall miss him today.
My dreams do intrigue me, and, on waking, I try to capture their essence before they fade. The last few mornings I’ve been making journeys. Usually in the daylight, though recently, at night too. The landscapes are mostly urban, as it was this morning. I heard music coming from the buildings I passed. I was going to meet DP and yet I was there at his house with P. at the same time as I was journeying there. Time is never linear, everything melds together. I wanted to tell him about the music I’d heard. And now its gone. Gone.
She got them to send me a batch of paper samples. It was a nice thing to do. I felt special. Of course, I cannot decide upon which one without her guidance, but the opportunity to feel them, to test the weight of them and think about how this book is to be constructed is a pleasure. It’s an unknown world to me but I am open to learning. Always.