Antares

The airconditioning is humming tonight, the first in a while that we've needed it to suck the humidity. It's cool enough, just wet and the Possum doesn't sleep well under water. I don't like shutting all the windows for it, I can't hear the night and the wind sulks and won't play but the stillness and the rumbling of the vents make me sleep like the dead.

I have been dreaming a lot lately. Big, colourful, nonsensical dreams. I dreamed of a platypus the other night. Snakes another. Freud would have fun with the snakes, but I'm not sure how he'd react to platypi. The internet is not helpful. One site suggested it represented shyness, depression and negativity while another made innuendo regarding playfulness "downunder". I don't feel shy. Or negative. Or depressed. So I don't know what to make of it, though I remember being both surprised and completely at ease when accosted by a platypus.

I feel, if anything, wistful right now. Thinking of sweet things that tease the edges of memory and make me smile. Little snippets of a life well lived and a vague sense of... something.

There had been, in the centre of my chest, for some 3 years a beautiful bright kite that danced in the wind with streamers behind it against a bright and beautiful blue sky. And after flying high and battling the gusts it would occasionally crash to the ground with a sickening thud, and I would survey the damage, sometimes dispassionately, sometimes heartbroken, before running with the string behind me until the kite flew again. Veering drunkenly sometimes, but still fluttering with its beautiful tail. Then the last few times it fell, pieces were torn from it that can't be patched back, and then a little while ago, I stopped trying to see it flying and instead wrapped it up carefully and placed it away in a cupboard in my chest, leaving the remnants as intact as possible, not wanting to see any more torn off.

For some time, after I placed it in storage, I would have a memory of the bright colours and I would get a burning pain, right in the middle of my chest and I would fight the desperate urge to push it into the sky again, to prove that it could still fly. And maybe it can, but I refuse to tear any further strips off while trying to create something that has passed, I like the memories better.

The sky is very close tonight, and thick, tactile. I think the night gets lonely sometimes in Winter and longs for the endless Summer days when the sounds and the scents and the voices echo through her. Summer is still partying, but it is winding up, slowly. The music is playing but there are fewer dancers on the floor and the cool grey of Winter dawn is creeping around her edges.

I long for cooler days. I love the yellow dawns that wake me with brightness and heat and getting out in the rich sultry air before anyone else wakes and the way the wet humid Earth smells as I cross it, but I want even more the sensation of cool air slapping me awake and the thin cool greyness that slides over bare limbs and strokes it alive. I love the silver of the Winter night and the pure white glow of the stars and the moon. I love my Antares, twinkling away with her ruby glow in the heart of the scorpion dangerous and beautiful.

On a night long ago, I remember being disorientated as I got off a bus near midnight and had to stumble home through darkened streets that passed a cemetery. Being an imaginative 16 year old the sounds of night terrified me and I wished more than ever to be safe at home, not stumbling over the streets of suburban Geneva. But through the clouds that covered the sky for most of the time I was there, the moon came out, and just above the horizon the familiar whip tail of the Scorpion was visible and I was not afraid any more.

Some decade later, climbing off a bus onto a busy side road of another city far from home, the frigid wind curled around my exposed wrists and neck and made me shiver in spite of myself. I felt lost, and discombobulated and not sure which direction I should head, struggling with my internal compass as I crossed the overpass over the steady traffic, avoiding the pool of urine against concrete. As I looked up the sky was clear and in spite of the light pollution that faded the night towards the margins like a streaky watercolour, I still found her in the sky, my red star, following my heart.

I don't need a platypus in a dream to tell me that I feel lost again and in need of guidance, and somehow it feels as if the Winter will provide me that. I feel some sort of hope in my chest and assurance that great things are in store for this year, if I am patient and work hard and am humble. I do not know if I will fly again so high as I used, or if my colours will be so bright, but there is something new in me now, a strength that I never before knew I possessed, and a determination. A thread of something shining, and never broken that keeps on looking forward. And I know, somehow, that that will be rewarded this year, and my star will lead me home.

So you think you can study.

It's 9:30 pm and my new glasses are on to try and stop the fatigue that bombards my eyeballs as I write out yet another 300 word essay exam answer. I have written 30 so far, with a further 8 fully coloured illustrations and I am tired. I don't care any more, but there are 170 to go. So the glasses stay, a placebo to convince me that my apathy and headaches have more to do with my sight than the fact that I can think of a million things I'd rather be doing. I am hunched slightly in my chair, because the chair is too high and my back too long and the stretch in the lower thoracic muscles is starting to burn. I will do yoga tonight to compensate while my body whines.

Pegged to the wire directly above my screen is a pencil drawing of Pont Alexandre with its beautiful lamp posts and La Tour in the background and I feel a million miles away from ever being there again. The cool wet air and the smudgy clouds over the chalk white barely tangible. To the right of the picture, strung over the same wire is a pair of red footprints, smudged ever so slightly at the biggest toe that belong to the Elfling when she was a baby. I didn't date the picture, and I had a moment of not being sure if it was actually Elfling or Monkey when I hung it, but it doesn't matter. It's a symbol, more than anything.

Underneath the Parisian scene and the footprints are innumerable kindy pictures brought home crumpled in bags to admire that are bright swirls of primary colours and smudged soft pastilles. A bright red kite with a trailing blue string and a Welsh coal miner's lamp to the left.

Above the bottom string is another one, strung with lanterns and Christmas craft which is hidden by pen and ink drawings of the medial orbital wall, posterior orbit (globe removed), medial nasal cavity, cross section of the spinal cord and the cerebellum all there to remind me. I think they're decorative in their own right - or would be if my apathy were not so pronounced.

Behind them all is my gilded map of the world with the ability to scratch off the paint of everywhere I have visited. There are great swathes of golden paint left on my map and I cannot wait until I can scrape more of it under my fingernails.

Next to my computer, to the left is my lamp with its warm white glow through the fluted shade. Plain matte silver stand that does all that is supposed to and nothing it is not. Propped up against it, the Santa photo from 2010 in its red leather frame. Anterior to both, becoming superheated by the vent from my notebook is Gray's Anatomy, leather bound, 15th edition with silver pages. The ribbon place holder within the axilla. Under the book is my tablet, closed and unloved at present as I instead stick to pen and paper.

To the right, posteriorly are two galvanised buckets filled with flotsam - pens, pencils, staplers, my glasses case. At least 4 erasers still in their wrappings, a sharpener. Receipts. Anterior to these is my mouse pad and tiny mouse, my pen and my phone which buzzes occasionally with facebook notifications that I've yet to turn off or reminders for things that I've long since forgotten. Then anterior again is my workbook, filled with exam answers that I hope are acceptable, because I have so little guidance about what they should actually be. I will be showing it to friends who have passed to see if there's anything I'm doing wrong at some point.

To the left and right of the desk are my new white bookcases. Gradually being filled from the piles around the house that previously had no home, and storing up my collection of study notes and journals. My big travel book closest to me on the left, for those times when I need to sit with a Matilda-esque behemoth on my lap and ruin my neck by craning through its pages of beautiful pictures. One day soon I hope to add an atlas.

Behind me is the new piano, bought for the girls' lessons, but also for me to sit at quietly when they are in bed and flex my fingers over so that I can enjoy the sound. I am desperate to learn how to play, in a way I never once appreciated at 11 when it was offered, and so I am gradually, and poorly, teaching myself while under the guise of supervising the Elfling's practise sessions.

Behind and to my left is the little Ikea table and chairs where the babies eat their dinner when it is too cold or wet to eat outside at the dinner table. It is permanently sticky and the paint is coming off in places, but it makes me happy. They all 3 of them sit there, telling stories, or jokes that make no sense and giggling together, and even when they are all tucked up safely in bed it is still happy and giggly there.

And in the middle of it all is me. Wearing all black so that with my hair out I look like a cat burglar in bare feet. Everything stretchy because I hate anything digging into me when I'm studying. Toenails half painted and fingernails ragged from too much biting while I'm studying. Procrastinating with 13 tabs open in my browser and only 4 of them related to study. My fitness pal chiding me because I've not eaten enough calories today but not being hungry, and slightly addicted to the feature that tells me how little I'll weigh in 5 weeks if I keep it up. Recognising that not eating will make it harder to study but liking that my hips protrude again too much to let it go. Recognising that that in itself is not particularly healthy but not caring.