31

In blackness I woke from the dream terrified, and stiffened as I felt your arms around me. Your strong hard arms that enfold me the way only you can. They tightened a little, gathering me back against the heat of your chest and you mumbled into my hair, your voice seeping through the follicles, slowing the pounding in my ears and I drifted back towards sleep. I felt the impression of your thighs on mine and the subtle grind of your hips as I relaxed into you, comforting but also male as the cool night air caressed my cheek and my eyelashes tickled your forearm as they fluttered closed.

I woke this morning and didn't see your eyes looking sleepily back at me from the pillow. It disoriented me a little, though stranger still it would have been to see you there. Tangled in white sheets and the thin film of sweat that heralds scorching days. I tried to get up but realised my head was swimming and nausea had clenched the middle in a vice. In my early fog of waking and the delirium of illness I wondered if you were in the kitchen and tripped out of bed, wearing my sheets as a toga to find you before remembering, hazily, that you would not be there. That no one would be there. That I was alone.

I curled up on my side and wept a little, giving myself to the fantasy for the first time in a long time, before the last hiccough was gone and I was spent. Still ill, still hot, but cleansed of the ghosts that visit me in the middle of the night, in dreams when I cannot defend myself.

I am 31 today. As I was yesterday, from 10:20 am. It is only a number. A prime number and yet it has filled me with none of the anticipation and excitement that 30 brought. The last prime was 29 and that year was hideous. The one before that at 23 not much better. I wonder if it just suits me to be melancholy, or if it's the temperature racing over my skin. My birthday was spent flying away from the ones I love to this loneliness here and it hurts more today than it has in a long time.

The dream of you just the icing on a cake that I never actually had, the burn of your skin on my skin unable to be scrubbed off in the shower, but lingering, trying to comfort as I pushed it away.

Sponge Worthy

*ahem*

She says as she watches the tumbleweed roll lazily across the screen, scattering dust that billows in the late sunset and windchimes tinkle mournfully on the saloon verandah...

So, I've been away. You may have noticed, and you may have not. I certainly did, being as writing here has been my therapy for years. But then, suddenly it wasn't.

Now just like the first time I tangoed with depression at the awkward age of 11, it happened all of a sudden and nothing happened. No one took me behind the bus shelter and roughed me up. No one broke up with me, or called me a slag, or crossed my name off of their ruler. In fact in bloggy terms, I was actually on the up with page-views again.

But suddenly, one morning, I woke up, and I did not want to talk to anyone. Every time I tried to talk, it felt like bits of my guts were heaving out of my mouth and splattering viscera all over the pavement. And I don't like that feeling. That feeling, and really, that imagery, makes me nauseous. I tried to keep it in, and I think, in the main I succeeded, but I wanted to all the time. I wanted to talk and talk and talk about stupid things and my thoughts were always racing.

This wasn't just online, this was in real life as well. My entropy fizzed and buzzed in the enclosed space that was me and nothing lined up. Chaos reigned. I still got up and went to work every day. Most days I worked more than 12 hours, because at least at work I had goals for every second of the day, and when I came home a bit tired, the chaos was at least a little bit dampened through the inability to move.

I didn't eat, because I didn't need to and I didn't want to. I bought a lot of new things, because the joy in buying something, and then sometime later receiving it in the mail brought little fizz pops of joy that I could focus on for a few minutes, sometimes hours.

Bingley loved and hated it. I was suddenly wildly affectionate and desperate for affection at the same time. I wanted touch - more, more, more! But I was irritable too. And which of the two states I felt were sometimes inseparable.

Part of it was driven by the hunger. I started losing weight this year and got addicted to it. I'm an addictive person in general and losing weight is a fun one. You get so much positive reinforcement that you don't even think it's an issue, until you literally stare at food and start daring yourself not to eat it. And if new hollows appeared under my eyes (but happily sculpting out a small amount of cheekbone) then it was probably worth it to have people commenting favourably on my appearance every single day. I don't exaggerate that, literally not a day went past without someone commenting or congratulating me.

Now considering I started at a healthy weight, this should probably count as some kind of moral message, but in truth I am too tired to pontificate except to say that even though I knew it was slightly fucked, I liked it. And I still do tbh. I like buying clothes from the UK in a size smaller than I wore a year ago in US sizes and know that it will fit. And look kind of ok really. I still think I look pretty much exactly the same, except tired. But I'm not the best judge of this. And I've gradually been allowing myself to eat again. Occasionally.

One of the things that tipped me off was when my Mum started voicing her worries. Now to many of you, having a concerned Mum mentioning your weight is nothing new. But my Mum never does. Never ever. She didn't mention it when I got to 85kg after I had the Elfling and she said nothign when I lost the weight with hyperemesis. She knows painfully well how much noting weight instead of person plays with the mind, and she had the experience of me as a teenager and disordered eating so she said nothing. Until a few months ago when she started in a phone call to mention my weight. And ask if I was eating. Or sleeping. And for my Mum, for her to say something, that meant something.

But after all that, the weight was not a disease, but a symptom, just like those earnest high school health sciences messages said, of wanting control. I am not someone that needs to have rigid order. I'm not obsessive about things and have never been an A type personality. I don't freak out about changes and generally my philosophy on life is expressed by the ideal of a shimmering river cutting through the country or the wind that blows where it will. I like to feel unsure of destinations and to enjoy the journey to get there.

I cope with things. That could be my epitaph. I'm often asked how I do things, how I manage and my answer is usually (because I don't know how else to say) I just do.

Sometimes though, you don't just have your own life bobbing around in that beautiful shimmering river wending through life. Sometimes you have other people, some that can't swim, and you have to hold onto them and help them float too. And if you are lucky, maybe you have things in your life that belong to you, or matter to you or that have attached themselves to you, and if you want to stay in that river, you've got to keep them all afloat as well, or else you're all going to sink.

And I combined all of that, with certain ports that I wanted to stop off at for a while. Little towns along the river that I wanted to visit and explore and suddenly I was tethered to all these things that were trying to drown me AND stop me from exploring at the same time. I would wake up gasping sometimes, from the weight on my chest and the fear. The Fear. That grips at the tangled outer margins of the ego and whispers all sorts of things that are clearly insane, but you can't get out of your head. All those foibles that you worry all add up to overtake the sum of who you are. And I worried, constantly, about all the things and people tied to me and that I was drowning them too. Me with all my Not Good Enough.

Funnily enough, that Jenn doesn't feel up to chatting much. She might post pretty pictures, because in a slightly hysterical tense way they can patch up the truth for a while. Hey look at all this evidence that actually I'm doing brilliantly! Isnt' it wonderful just how normal and well adjusted and coping I am! Drowning? Not me! I'm just waving my arms above my head in JOY.

Ok, so maybe not that dramatic. I'm not very good at that. I can't do accents either. But there was a little bit of hysteria there.

But one thing I was sure of was that I am good at my job. I am very good at that. I always have been. People tell me that regularly. Unbidden. And while I think peopel are just trying to be nice about many things, I knew it was true about that one. Until one day when something happened at work to make me wonder if maybe I didn't know. Maybe they were just being nice. And that last little certainty in my life slipped out of my hands too and I freefell into space. Into a vacuum where I fell but in all directions at once.

So the only way I have known how to keep going is to break things down into infinitesimal pieces and to take it one step at a time. I write lists. I rigidly lay things out in my mind with neat little check boxes next to them, and when I get to it, complete a task and put it neatly on a shelf, another box is ticked and I get the joy of both progressing and having finished something. And all this rigidity feels foreign and slightly itchy, but I have started noticing things again.

Like how big the sky is and how it tastes on a cool, clear night. Of how much simple joy it gives me to find Orion and Scorpius and Alpha Centauri. To trace pictures in the sky that have been copied and studied and revered since the first man looked up into the heavens. Of how blue the sky can be in midwinter and the way that white light off a sandy beach makes everyone who plays on it seem to be lit from within. Of the feel of sand under toes and the way that light plays on the ripples of the water.

Of how beautiful my children are and how much I love them. How much it makes me smile in the middle of the night to be woken again by the tickle of auburn curls wedged under my nose and my little Monkey girl snuggled into me with her arm across my chest. Of how funny the Possum is and how brave and fearless he can be. Of his giggle and his cuddles and the earnest expression in his big blue eyes before they crinkle into mine when he smiles. Of my Elfling and her honeyed hair and her desperate fear that she is somehow missing out on something. Of her long limbed cuddles and her temper and her dramatics. Of the way she practices ballet without even noticing while watching TV in her pyjamas on a Sunday morning.

And even though sometimes I just want to give in and drown, to just not have to swim any more with all these things attached to me, mostly I just want to lay back and watch the sky overhead. And for a long time there I blamed all those things attached to me, made it all their fault. Forgetting of course that I was the one that attached them in the first place and only I could decide which things I wanted to stay where they were. And I stopped feeling panic when I loosed the ties and let them drift on their own... watched them for a moment and then lay on my back and stared up at the stars. Letting the current drift me along.

source unknown, please contact me if you wish to have credit for this image

Day 15, silhouette

The moon is so bright tonight it is hiding the stars, the sky covered in a pearlescent sheen. It was looking at that cold bright sky tonight, with my eyes blinded by tears that I decided I will never be a surgeon. I could not treat someone as an organ to be sliced and managed, and then passed on when there is nothing left to cut.

I had to make a call tonight, to a girl who is still young enough to be at school and ask her to come to the hospital. I explained as carefully and as gently as I could that her mother had started to deteriorate and that she needed to come to the hospital. I listened to the frank fear in her voice as she understood immediately the implications of the calm words coming out of my mouth in my gentle voice. And it was the hitch in her voice that had my own vision swimming and swallowing hard. That trembled my gentlest voice and made me angry at myself for still not being able to do this without staying professional. To be calm for her.

I had had the same chat with her Dad and her brother, explaining to them that their world, already grey and miserable had started to hail down around them. Raised my voice to be heard over the massive thundering blows that were rocking them where they sat. And as I wrapped up that horrible meeting, with tears in my own eyes and started on the paperwork that goes with something like that, the surgeon that operated on her walked onto the ward. Glancing at the paperwork I was filling out he intoned how sad it was, before turning his attention to another scan, another tumour, another operation. Next.

I felt so disillusioned sitting there, my neat handwriting filling a sheet of progress notes to document what I'd said and what the Palliative Care team had said. When I had never cut her, had not poked around inside her body, had done nothing but care for the shell that was left after the cancer had been scooped out like a hellish icecream. I was not the one who admitted her to hospital, had not explained to her family what was going on. And yet I was the harbringer of death.

I looked at the clock then and realised I was late for the meeting for the Monkey's school orientation session and I swallowed hard, blinked and signed my name under the notes. Other doctors working with me whisking paperwork out of my hands and shooing me out the door knowing that I had needed to be somewhere else while I stubbornly insisted on seeing it through. Knowing that I could be late to the meeting, but that this, this was something that needed to be done properly. Not as an afterthought, not a careless "oh that's sad" but properly. She will only die once, and I don't want it to be thoughtlessly.

And as I looked at the silvery moon, and the almost oily sky, and couldn't see my star, I trembled a little and vowed that I would never be like that. That I would never ever be that person that does not want to be involved at that time. I've been told variously that I would make a brilliant surgeon and that I never could be one. My hand eye coordination is excellent. I am meticulous and driven and pedantic. I am organised and methodical and I have an understanding that means that I would make a great surgeon. Those are not my words, they are transcripts from references that I have in my possession.

But all of that means nothing to me if how I am defined is in the scars that I leave on my patients and their families. I can't have that as the silhouette that chases me on a moonlit night as I leave in the cold and dark, my breath fogging around my face as I cry.

Schrodinger's Kitty

Are all beautiful things painful? The emotion that runs so deep has the power to soothe as well as slice, and I wonder how much chance there is in that... if it's God playing with his yahtzee dice, while we rattle around in the cup.

I cannot escape rainbows lately, they follow me around like some sort of technicolor omen, and it makes me laugh and wince in equal measure. They both mock and encourage me. My life some sort of weird farcical dichotomy of being. There was one over me as I drove home in hail today, some ridiculous metaphor of being. While others race for shelter I am out being battered, chasing rainbows.

This time last year I lived like I was on a tightrope, where the net shimmered beautifully below while I balanced serenely dressed in spangles. I have never felt so emotional in my life as I did a year ago, so reckless and wild, a raging storm of it. I have grown enormously in the last year - I have never been so beautiful as I am now. And all the lines and the new angles at my jaw contribute. Age is shaping me, moulding me against my will. I still don't remember how to breathe.

Sometimes in hiding from the emotion I have closed myself from looking for beautiful things, of seeing the beauty in everything, in pursuing the Gleam. But in honour of nothing, but being tired and anxious, and wanting to focus on something else, here are a few random things from my blog inspiration folder. I'm sure you all have one, and here's a glimpse of mine...

I have to know - did you dream this of me?

 Of wanting to lie with them, touch them, wake with them

My mirror friend

The hardest part? …there’s a fear that doubt will creep in, you will awaken one day and think “what the hell was I thinking?

I know it’ll get better. I wonder if it’ll ever be as good.

Reminded today of what I'm counting from

my mind is where the ghosted afterthoughts of you linger

you are still the brightest light to have shone in my sky

It's the shortest day of the year today. 
 
From tomorrow, every day will have more sunshine in it than the day before

As with other times before, Time had dissolved

I just closed my eyes for a second and disappared from reality. It was tough coming back

You're unlike anyone I've ever met, yet I feel like I've known you my entire life & beyond.

DFA

i will be frank, because i feel the need: i will take you in whatever form you are happy to share yourself with me, but i will always have, at the back of my heart, a little bit of wistfulness for more

the next day I didn't care & just held your hand for a moment

I was breathing so slowly & deeply that I may have appeared to be not breathing at all

i want words. 
 
and a tree

There was something about the beauty of the location, the company and the surrealism of having not slept and having no idea which day it was or which time. Some sort of suspended bubble that eeked itself out on the space time continuum. A beautiful lucid dream. I remember feeling my palms after all the digging in the sand, and how exfoliated and excoriated they were and the soft pain of that making me double take and realise that *this* was actually reality

Nope, in the end I cbf arguing so just went and did them.
 
QED
 
Then walked into a wall

well if one is going to be antisocial and self destructive one may as well do it antiseptically

now, when I sharpen a pencil, I enjoy the sharpness for a few seconds before deliberately softening the top so that it slides more easily on the paper

I'm perpetually glad that you appreciate the things that mean so much to me

When you're watching someone's face and they've yet to see you. The second that their eyes come into focus on your face and the connection is established: ephemeral; visceral; tangible. The way that you don't actually need to acknowledge it because it is so palpable that you can't help but know that the other knows it too

I understand gravity. Understand how it is that something so invisible can be felt so acutely. The pull towards. I never think about the fact that as I walk my feet touch the ground. It doesn't require concentration, it doesn't really require thinking. By virtue of the attraction of both bodies, the pull and force brings them together. Unintentionally. Inexplicably.

GTFOOMH

it must be strange shooting up your own vein. i look at my veins and think how easy they'd be to stick a needle in, but the idea gives me a shudder straight up the spine

i see it as a tangible edge, wispy and black but interestingly i see it against light