ellen bell

Another dream. More travelling. I wasn’t alone, there was at least one woman with me. We were pulling our suitcases along a very long and winding path towards an airport. It was light and sunny, and the path was dry and sandy. But there was no airport to be found. We had to turn back, though the path had got narrower and narrower. I wasn’t distressed. There didn’t appear to be any hurry. Later, inside the departure lounge, though in a dream this is debatable, the same woman told me or was it us that she’d sold the contents of her suitcase but intended to buy them back. Was this so that she could travel without it? I don’t know.

He writes in his note that I make him feel safe. I am glad. Though I find it hard to see how this could be so when I am so profoundly unsafe. He says its about the fact that there is no artifice to me, that I am true. I understand that. I would say dependable. I try to be. The rest? I just don’t know. He calms me. Trying to talk me out of this perpetual unravelling. Stop it, he says. Just stop it.

I’ve come a long way with my drawing. I never thought I could do it, was always scared of it. I still am but I do do it. And now I write about doing it. There is pleasure, or at least satisfaction in being in the writing of it, though it is hard. Is it nearly mine? I don’t know. There is some way to go yet.

Woke from another unsettling draam. He’d bought me some fish. It was due to come through the post. I’d felt bad about this. I didn’t want to eat it, after all I was a vegan, but something made me want or was it need it. I was eating some white fish as I woke. I was horrible, it tasted metallic, unhappy, dead.

I walk in the night in search of shadows to draw. I like the closing-in-ness of the dark. Much of the detail is lost. I want lines, simple lines. But, as Berger says, all drawings, and possibly intentions, fail.

Sometimes I catch him midway through a dream. This morning he was both in and out of one. It was something to do with a washing machine cycle and how he had wanted to time his sleeping with it. It was clear and yet it wasn’t. It’s a liminal space, that just-after-dreaming-land. Sometimes I never want to leave it.

If I die before you, I said to him last night, will you make sure that it is in my bed so that I can listen to birds outside? He promised.

I’m not sure. I prevaricate, as always. Should we go or not? I want an escape. To just put my body somewhere else, if only to look back on where it usually is. And this hotel will do. It isn’t far. It’s comfortable, not plush or elegant, but comfortable. Not much will be asked of me. It will do. And I should and will embrace it. Soon.

I know why I dreamt of them. I’ve been reading about them during the day. The dream featured corridors, windy ones. I was with a group of people. I think H. was one of them. We were in a hotel that seemed to improve in decor and plushness the more corners we turned. And the more corners we turned the more chairs there were. Chairs grouped in pairs. Occasional chairs that nobody would ever use. I picked one up and began to carry it with me, presumably to put in my hotel bedroom. You won’t need that, said a member of the hotel staff, who had just appeared and took it off me. I woke then.

Can there be a positive take on such a word? What can endurance bring – hope? No, not that, but perhaps a sense of self-reliance, of a strength that was unrecognised. Is that enough to sustain? Possibly. It’s this seeking of happiness, even contentment and safety, that’s the bugger. Can such aspirations be let go of? Can just living do? The endurance of it?