ellen bell

He weighs himself before his shower and then comes upstairs to the kitchen to tell me the latest ‘score’. It is slowing but it is still less than it was last time. There’s a part of me that wishes he wouldn’t keep doing it and keep telling me. That’s selfish. He needs reassurance. And all I can say is that you are looking well. Which is true. He says he’s lost his arse, which is also true. Am I losing him? Of course. As he is losing me. Though possibly he will go first. Today is all we have. No other promises can be made.

I thought of her much over the weekend. I remember her crying down the phone. Incoherent sobbing. No words, just tears. It wrenched at my heart. I’m coming, I’d said. I’m coming soon. She went before I got there. Minutes before. I would not have forsaken you, I wanted to say. Never. I would’ve cared for you. Taken you home. I would.

It was a small thing. A text sent to him to be read out to me. I don’t know her well. We are not intimate. She is hard to know, a closed-off being, gentle but difficult to read. But she wrote it. Acknowledged my claim to be a part of the day. She remembered. And wrote it. I am touched.

I cannot conceive of its impact on the people it has taken and the buildings it has destroyed. I want to. I want to feel with them and for them, but it is too much. Let there be succour, aid, food and care soon for all who need it. And let those precious homes that have been lost be rebuilt.

He is still losing weight. Not a lot, but some. He asks if I think it is alright that he is doing so. Yes, I say. It’s the new drug, he says. Yes, I say.

It is nothing compared to what some have to endure. I know this, even as I am enduring mine. My pain. I want to know it. To take it on. Not, I might add, in a war-like, combatitive manner, but to embrace it all. To know its ins and outs, mostly so that I might know when it is passing. I am made crochety by it. And I am sorry for it. I must try harder.

I know that others have worse, far worse. But this is your pain, he says at breakfast. Yes, it is. And I walk every step with it, knowing it and yet trying to detach myself from it, as it did when I gave birth to her. I listen to birdsong as I walk and am temporarily distracted from the sharp, rigidness of the aching. And then I remember and cannot believe that I forgot.

I’ve hurt my lower back. I am not sure how. It could be from lying for two weeks on a far too soft mattress. I’d hoped that it would heal the moment I returned home. It hasn’t. I think of Frida Kahlo and her constant pain. I must be patient. Wait. And try not to be be snappy.

It’s only been two weeks but feels like an age. I am adrift, askew. I have forgotten all the drill. What bowl do I use for breakfast? What goes where? I slept badly. Woke with a head after a dream about my mother. Uncomfortable. It takes time, this returning. Always. Let it be. Accept each stage, however clumsy, with grace. See what is to be learnt.

I’m not good at them. Even for just one night. I am dislodged by them. My centre is here, my core, my ballast, eventhough here is far from perfect and certainly not my dream. It is what I know. What I share with him. And leaving it is hard. Even for the promise of rest. Funny that.