What is that liminal time between sleep and waking? It’s a pulling, a being prised from a shell feeling. I don’t like it. I am adrift. Proust described himself as “stupid with sleep”. I am too but also brought low. I cannot rise to the occasion of a new day, I must steel myself, present my thanks but also prepare for my engagement with the still dark and all that dread.
Is it bickering? We snap and carp, not often, but sometimes. It’s usually because one of us is tired or in pain or just irritable. He gets sleepy at breakfast and I made scratchy by fears of the work that is to come. I wish it were otherwise. It isn’t elegant. And it belies the love we feel for each other. Perhaps I just have to let it be.
He was meant to have met up with friends but didn’t turn up. When they went round to his house they found him dead. He’d died alone. A heart attack possibly. So sad. So very sad. An awkward man but one who evidently sought company. R.I.P And then there is the little girl going back to school, her face puffy with steriods. And then there is the woman standing outside the coffee shop telling me that she’s had a health scare. She’s been bleeding for four months, said her partner. Poor love. Her eyes carried her fear, her stress. What can you say?
I’m always writing about fear because I am always fearful. Mostly of what I don’t know, and of revealing that ignorance. I must write today about what I don’t know. Or at least what I think I don’t know. Perhaps I know more than I realise and perhaps, by writing about it, I will come to know it. A little.
Be brave.
It isn’t constant. Sometimes I forget that it is is there. And yet it is. It’s there in my hips, my legs, my knees and sometimes my feet. We cannot know another’s pain, though sometimes when he is in pain, I believe that I do feel it too. I don’t know whether my pain is usual, is felt by others with bones that are rather rapidly, in my case, losing their protective cartilage. I want to manage it. To not yield to self-pity or inertia. And mostly I do. I do, honestly.
My nerves are forever on the watch. They jangle. And these days, when I walk, and make to trip, they rise up instantly and flood my body with adrenalin. Its a hard, muscle-stiffening, sensation. A flooding of hot, fluid that courses through my veins. Was it always like this? Or is everything so much nearer the surface than it used to be?
I am one here, but he made me feel it more. I’ve been trying to figure out why. And why his insistence on talking to me in Welsh when it was clear that I didn’t understand felt so aggressive. When I got home I cried. And I still don’t know why.
It lies deep. And in the morning it surfaces, there, in the forefront of my head. Today I am wracked by it. It has taken over my back, my neck and reaches down to my legs. I am rigid, sharp-edged, snappy. He understands. And I think he does. There is nothing else to do but keep going on, trying to find my way through this writing to a place of safety. Outside it pours. Duck weather, they used to say.
She told us over the phone how “the girls” were late getting her up yesterday and that she’d barely finished her breakfast before it was time for lunch. She cannot dress or wash herself unaided. Can’t even get herself to the loo. She bares it well. Or appears to. She is caught there. Complaining is useless and probably counterproductive. She must endure. As we all must, though some undoubtedly have it worse than others. I think of her often. She is impassive, unknowable. But I can feel for her, can’t I?
She told us that she doesn’t sleep. At least, not in a protracted way. She tells us that cat naps through the day, but that once long oblivion of slumber has gone. I used to sleep at home, she says. And doesn’t finish the sentence. There is no need. We understand. But not here. Not there. And not after all that losing. There’s no rest from that. Not now. Not ever.