Stream

It is the most beautiful afternoon, and I am home, having left work at a time when the sun was still in the sky and the blue was almost blinding. It is windy this afternoon, whipping around and the sun and the blue and the wind are seeping under my skin and making me cheerful.

Bingley brought the Possum to work today to have lunch and we ran around in the sun and the wind and watched the helicopter take off and ate chips. And the Possum babbled away in earnest sentences that make no sense and dodged and weaved and launched himself at my chest for fierce cuddles, and for the first time in some time I laughed. Properly laughed. Down to the bottom of my toes laughed.

I did not realise until Monday, when I trudged to work after having worked all weekend (over 12 hours each day), how tired I was. It didn't hit me until Monday night when the Possum was sick and I held him in my arms just how much I needed to stop. Inhale. Breathe. Eat. I have developed, as Ave rightly pointed out in the last post, a flirtation with an eating disorder that has mostly left me alone since I was a teenager. I am both bemused and frightened by its reappearance. I have not sent it packing just yet, but I am aware of it, like an annoying guest that you're tolerating until such time as you turf them out of doors. I am somewhat fascinated by it, in a detached way, as one would be by a particularly ugly sculpture perhaps. It does not own me. But I acknowledge that it is not good for me either.

Bingley and I had a tearful discussion last night. About all and everything. And I realised a few things that I hadn't realised before. And I remembered some things I hadn't thought of for a lot of years. Happy things. Things that you forget when you're tired and miserable. And we talked of things that we wanted, and how sometimes we can't have what we want, no matter how hard we try. And I'm still not sure what I want, or what will happen, or if I will survive it, but sitting out here, with the wind on my face and my eyes closed I don't care.

When I have been lost or frightened in the past I have always reached a point of anxiety where I have been terrified to move, paralysed and unable to make decisions. So I have stopped trying. I'm laying down in the stream and letting it take me where it will and having faith that wherever I wash up, no matter what shore I find myself on I will make the best of it. That I will be happy there.